I read this as advice that you should half-ass school since the only goal is to collect credentials. You don’t specify the field, but I think this advice is counter-productive for people getting computer science degrees.
My CS program had a lot of classes that prepared me for the wrong careers (network technician in 1990, AI researcher in 1980, person who writes philosophy papers about databases, etc.), but the majority of the CS-track classes were directly applicable to my job right after school. This was largely just the long, slow process of learning how to program at all, how to interface with the external world and other people’s code, and the long list of performance data that you need to memorize if you want to be competant. Even some classes that I thought were useless, like linear algebra (“I don’t plan to write game engines!”) ended up being useful.
Within the useful classes, doing more than the bare minimum on projects made a very big difference, and the people who obsessively improved their trivial programming projects became the same people who found it easy to get an internship, and then eventually the people who skipped the “Junior Engineer” job title and jumped directly into “real programmer jobs”.
I suspect CS degrees are overly padded and could probably be packed into two years or less with a better focus on the careers people actually want or can get. Despite that, I think your advice to half-ass your way through school and not try to over-achieve is bad advice, at least in the context of CS. Most of the classes are useful, and it’s extremely obvious which ones aren’t. Half-ass the IT classes if you don’t plan to go into IT, but don’t half-ass the relevant learning-to-program classes.
Your comment adds substance and nuance, so thank you for writing it.
I do think your first paragraph is reductive, and the point of this post was to create concepts to allow us to get beyond the reductionist dualism of “half-assing vs whole-assing.” In particular:
When you have the rare opportunity to do scaffolding or practical learning, take it. Spend your slack figuring out even better deals on your credentials and making life as sustainable for yourself as possible.
I believe thought-patterns like these are common among students:
“I’m only taking this course for my graduation requirements; I’m gonna half-ass it”
“I’m never gonna use 90% of what I’m learning in this class, but it’s still relevant to my future career, so I need to whole-ass it.”
I’d like to see shifts to thought-patterns like these:
“This course is pure credentialism; I’m going to focus on the fun parts and otherwise do the minimum required to get an A.”
“This biology course is almost entirely for credentialism and familiarity, but I really need to focus on the part about viruses. That’ll be a combination of scaffolding and even some practical learning, because I want to make a career in pandemic prevention.”
The point is to cultivate discernment about the personal relevance of the course content, and drop the moralistic self-judgment.
That’s the distinction I’m trying to draw. I think that CS is unusual in that it has characteristics of academia and a trade. So is math, because AFAIK the undergraduate course content is directly applicable to many fields. Of course, some people who hate CS and will never use it are still forced to take classes in it. For them, it’s almost all credentialism and a bit of familiarity; no genuine scaffolding or practical learning.
By contrast, many other disciplines are inherently “survey courses” to some extent, even if not labeled as such. You’ll only use a tiny subset of the content as you specialize, and you’ll forget the rest. Others are just not very useful for an actual job: nurses taking o-chem for example.
Figure out ways to do the tedious busywork as quickly as possible while still getting an acceptable result (and acceptable might still mean straight As).
I’m suspicious of the direction of causality in what you described:
Within the useful classes, doing more than the bare minimum on projects made a very big difference, and the people who obsessively improved their trivial programming projects became the same people who found it easy to get an internship, and then eventually the people who skipped the “Junior Engineer” job title and jumped directly into “real programmer jobs”.
Some people enjoy programming independent of schooling. It’s meme-level widespread (i.e. common) knowledge among programmers; so much so that the resentment by (professional) programmers that don’t enjoy hobby programming is also meme-level widespread.
I don’t think advice to ‘do more than the bare minimum on projects’ or ‘obsessively improve your trivial projects’ is any good really. The people that seem to benefit from the advised behavior don’t need any additional motivation to do it and everyone else isn’t going to benefit from doing what is, to them, just more “tedious busywork” (and without any short-term payoff).
I read this as advice that you should half-ass school since the only goal is to collect credentials. You don’t specify the field, but I think this advice is counter-productive for people getting computer science degrees.
My CS program had a lot of classes that prepared me for the wrong careers (network technician in 1990, AI researcher in 1980, person who writes philosophy papers about databases, etc.), but the majority of the CS-track classes were directly applicable to my job right after school. This was largely just the long, slow process of learning how to program at all, how to interface with the external world and other people’s code, and the long list of performance data that you need to memorize if you want to be competant. Even some classes that I thought were useless, like linear algebra (“I don’t plan to write game engines!”) ended up being useful.
Within the useful classes, doing more than the bare minimum on projects made a very big difference, and the people who obsessively improved their trivial programming projects became the same people who found it easy to get an internship, and then eventually the people who skipped the “Junior Engineer” job title and jumped directly into “real programmer jobs”.
I suspect CS degrees are overly padded and could probably be packed into two years or less with a better focus on the careers people actually want or can get. Despite that, I think your advice to half-ass your way through school and not try to over-achieve is bad advice, at least in the context of CS. Most of the classes are useful, and it’s extremely obvious which ones aren’t. Half-ass the IT classes if you don’t plan to go into IT, but don’t half-ass the relevant learning-to-program classes.
Your comment adds substance and nuance, so thank you for writing it.
I do think your first paragraph is reductive, and the point of this post was to create concepts to allow us to get beyond the reductionist dualism of “half-assing vs whole-assing.” In particular:
I believe thought-patterns like these are common among students:
I’d like to see shifts to thought-patterns like these:
The point is to cultivate discernment about the personal relevance of the course content, and drop the moralistic self-judgment.
Perhaps half-ass what you need to do to get a good grade, and whole-ass what you need to do to actually learn the material.
That’s the distinction I’m trying to draw. I think that CS is unusual in that it has characteristics of academia and a trade. So is math, because AFAIK the undergraduate course content is directly applicable to many fields. Of course, some people who hate CS and will never use it are still forced to take classes in it. For them, it’s almost all credentialism and a bit of familiarity; no genuine scaffolding or practical learning.
By contrast, many other disciplines are inherently “survey courses” to some extent, even if not labeled as such. You’ll only use a tiny subset of the content as you specialize, and you’ll forget the rest. Others are just not very useful for an actual job: nurses taking o-chem for example.
From the post:
I’m suspicious of the direction of causality in what you described:
Some people enjoy programming independent of schooling. It’s meme-level widespread (i.e. common) knowledge among programmers; so much so that the resentment by (professional) programmers that don’t enjoy hobby programming is also meme-level widespread.
I don’t think advice to ‘do more than the bare minimum on projects’ or ‘obsessively improve your trivial projects’ is any good really. The people that seem to benefit from the advised behavior don’t need any additional motivation to do it and everyone else isn’t going to benefit from doing what is, to them, just more “tedious busywork” (and without any short-term payoff).