Yeah, people still go to college as high school students who don’t know much and come out as almost-engineers, so degrees definitely still have value. And I don’t see a lot of difference in skill between the generations after accounting for experience.
I’m not in CS, so maybe it’s different, but I don’t know how we can expect to get skilled biologists, mechanical engineers, psychologists, etc without something that’s very similar to the 4-year degree.
Yeah I never get what these other comments are talking about with college not being useful. I basically learned my profession in college and now hire people who have done the same thing.
My wife is a bench scientist. The perspective I get from her is that automation is typically much slower than doing it by hand, especially since there are tools like multi-channel pipettes that give you a lot of the benefits of automation without needing to do any coding. The general task of sucking up liquids is also tough to calibrate due to differences in viscosity. An automation engineer will need to spend a lot of time calibrating while someone who has a lot of experience can go by feel.
I see adds for these companies all the time on Muni buses. It’s very frustrating, and I wish the city would be more choosy about who they let advertise.
I really like browsing the non-fiction stacks of libraries for books like this. There’s a lot good stuff though it depends on a library; you need one that’s willing to keep things on the shelf for a few decades to get a really interesting selection.