Subject: Re: CLL statistics for 2002 (was: Looking for Lisp compiler) From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no> Date: 04 Jan 2003 01:15:18 +0000 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3250631718586444@naggum.no> * Oleg <oleg_inconnu@myrealbox.com> | Suppose you live in a land where one does not need to be licensed | or hold a degree to practice medicine. Given no other information, | would you pick a physician who holds a degree from a respectable | university, or would you pick one who only claims to have as much | experience? But suppose you live in the real world, how would you argue then? If you have a degree, the experience did not teach you the three things that I believe any employer value most highly in graduates -- discipline, humility, and delayed gratification -- all of these make them suitable as part of something greater than themselves. If you hire people, you want them to do what you tell them and to help you reach /your/ goals, not theirs. They will not work for you unless they can reach some of their goals, too, of course, so the balancing act that this entails needs some tuning. Someone who has gone through a serious amount of effort in order to complete an education on somebody else's terms, has demonstrated that he is not only able to subjugate his personal desires to the demands from his superiors, he has been able to obtain good results while doing it. If you took time out of your life to read what I wrote before you succumbed to the urge to respond, you would see that I ended the paragraph you did not understand with the following words, which you deleted, probably thinking you had already understood the point and did not need the punch line: If you /pay/ for following orders and for being judged harshly and placed among increasingly smart people until you are no longer smart enough to keep moving upwards, imagine what the person hiring you will be /relieved/ of! Do you grasp what this means, "Oleg"? Do you think that perhaps the point was to demonstrate the /values/ of a degree to those hiring degree-holders? Perhaps you have now demonstrated that your degree, if any, is completely worthless to any employer because you failed to get the /real/ message? You do not have a degree, if you have one, because of what you know. That is immaterial. You got your degree, if any, because you could follow a scheme much larger than yourself and still fit in. /This/ is valuable to an employer; you will get on-the-job training for your real work, anyway. There are other ways to acquire these basic skills and character traits, but nothing really beats having an institution with a solid track record for weeding out the mistakes approve it. It appears that you think what I wrote was a slight towards those who hold degrees. Now, why the fuck would I do that? Perhaps you are just a wee bit too sensitive on this topic and have shown the whole world that you get your exercise from jumping to conclusions? | The whole issue is so commonsense that I feel ridiculous writing | about it. Good, I feel ridiculous reading your stupid retorts to arguments I have never made, but are you sure you know why you feel ridiculous? The argument you make is so trivial as to be laughable, but it is quite suspicious that you have to invent an imaginary land devoid of relevance to the real world in order to make such a commonplace observation. Clearly, it is not easy for you to demonstrate its validity in the real world, or you would have done that, right? That you manage to believe that somebody disagrees with your point speaks volumes about you, but says absolutely nothing about either the argument that nobody has made or the people you try to make it appear as though have made an argument you fight so hard to counter for your very own personal reasons. When you feel ridiculous countering some obviously wrong claim, perhaps it is time for you to dismount your high horse and try to read what people /actually/ write instead of being laughed off it because you failed to get the point. You do not want to be a high- horse dropout, do you? -- Erik Naggum, Oslo, Norway Act from reason, and failure makes you rethink and study harder. Act from faith, and failure makes you blame someone and push harder.