That seems to be more of a choice of electricians deciding whether or not to go into a niche market (ethernet and other unusual-for-residential wiring). Also, twenty year old Category 5 ethernet cables may not be future proof for higher speeds in the future.
Because there were so few competitors, these ânicheâ electricians were too busy doing this type of installations to bother with regular electrical work (which they could certainly also do but they didnât need to). Regular electricans at that time only knew how to wire electrical cables and coaxial cables. Future proofing involves not just cat 5 cables but also conduits to easily pull other cables when they become necessary.
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When we built our house 2 decades ago, the electrician used by the builder did not install any structured wiring. Owner was in his 60s and had no interest in learning any new technologies at that point. The kid in his 20s doing most of the work was very interested in new tech because he was in it for the long haul. But he couldnât convince his boss to do it.
Security company installed structured wiring. But even the sales person didnât really get it. At one point he noted to another contractor who was in our house in later stages of the build something to the effect of âCan you believe this guy wants 20 phone jacks in his house?â I told him they were not phone jacks (though when we moved in, all the cat 5e lines were terminated as phone jacksâthere was limited home networking tech at the time) but data points. He never got it. We have since repurposed most of the lines for network cables. Wireless tech makes a lot of the wired tech moot at this point but the wired connections are still more stable.
Friends who built more recently included fiber in their systems.
In terms of conduit, I asked the electrician to run conduit from attic to basement. It was 1/2 inch aluminum conduit. I asked him how many wires would fit in it and he asked what type of wire I was talking about. I told him the point was I didnât know. He was bewildered. Called the vacuum company who put in whole house vac and they added 2" PVC conduit. Havenât used either at this point.
That was going to be my question on a previous post. I wonder if people doing this 20 years ago fell into an early adopter trap. I get that sometimes a wired connection is better, but for home use I feel that the convenience of Wifi wins out. Fiber could make a difference, but so far I cannot see that I need the bandwidth.
I have both. Its not like by having wired you cannot also have wireless. Wires are already in the walls with outlets where they make sense (behind TVs, in home office, etc). So fixed use items are connected via wire. TVs are hung on the wall or on stands. Donât need to be able to pick them up and walk around the house with them. Work laptop sits in docking station with a wired connection when I am working at my desk. If I want to sit on the couch or elsewhere in the house and work, I can pop the laptop out of the docking station and it connects to wifi. Desktop PC also connected via wire as is networked printer. Other laptops, phones and tablets are connected via wifi. I view it as the best of both worlds.
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âElite or bustâ is a contradiction. The purpose of college is to gain marketable skills so you can be a gainfully employed functional adult. If âbustâ is found anywhere in your career path, study something elseâŠor at least do a double major. Thereâs plenty of time to pursue a bigger dream, but college isnât really the time for that. This way, you donât go âbustâ if the bigger dream doesnât become a reality.
Well, some people may see that as the purpose. Itâs certainly not the traditional purpose. Many trades are still marketable but often people choose college instead if they can get admitted and can afford it. And to be clear, anyone who wants to be a plumber or electrician should go for it. As far as I know, those skills are still in demand and you can make a decent living.
If you donât dream when youâre young, you probably wonât get back to it when youâre older. I have no regret at all over pursuing a PhD in computer science instead of going straight into industry, though I would probably have made more money over my entire career just having a 6 or more year start on investment.
I pursued my interests, which just luckily did happen to be marketable. But if that had been my goal I doubt I would be looking back on my life now with anything but a sense of lost opportunity.
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Since most bachelorâs degrees in the US are conferred in overtly pre-professional majors (and some liberal arts majors are chosen for pre-professional reasons), it is likely that the purpose of gaining marketable skills is an important one in most studentsâ decisions to attend college (and which college, which major, etc.), even if it may not be the only purpose. How many people would go to college if it did not result in increased job and career marketability? Probably very few outside of the scions of upper class families.
âBustâ can be found on any career path, but the chance of a âbustâ varies. Not all âbustâ risks are controllable by the student. For example, an economic or industry downturn that occurs when one graduates college can result in a âbustâ even though the student did well in learning what they intended to learn in college.
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Depends on the dream.
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I have nothing against people going for marketable skills when theyâre young. I think universities are a very circuitous and inefficient delivery mechanism though.
Going back in my own experience, when I started college, I had already taught myself to program and write fairly complex applications directly in Z80 assembly language. I (erroneously) thought I was hot stuff and only needed the degree because people said I did. In fact, I learned algorithmic theory in college that I would have been unlikely to teach myself, picked up a physics minor that was quite enlightening though of very little use in my career, and had the usual âbreadthâ courses like US History, Mythology (taught as comparative lit), and an Intro to Film course, all of which I still think about and which broadened my perspective as a thinking person.
Seriously, though, if it was just a matter of writing code, I am pretty sure I could have leveraged my self-taught experience into production quality software merely by going straight into a software development position (if one had been available to someone with only a high school degree).
People get business degrees as well, and presumably few of them are thinking of themselves as future professors in a business administration department.
In short, if we are treating universities as trade schools for the âprofessionsâ then maybe we should be more honest about it, and maybe we could deliver those skills a lot more efficiently. What exactly are we trying to do with universities? I am not sure that universities themselves have a clear idea.
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That did not increase your career marketability?
And most folks take business classes in order to perform better in the business world, not to become business professors. Most business classes also donât have the objective of training business professors.
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I donât know. What if I had just been writing software in a commercial environment? I would have had to pick up new programming languages, operating systems, and development tools, just like I do now. A big part of the task would be coordinating with product to get requirements right.
Very rarely, I have used a little bit of algorithmic theory and this has helped but mainly because I gravitate towards jobs where it helps. I can think of very little I do most of the time that could not be accomplished by someone self-taught or with a bootcamp style course and years of industry experience.
Now I might be more âmarketableâ having the degree on my resume, but that is very different from saying that my university education delivered marketable skills. I believe it delivered something of value, but very little in the way of the skills I use on a daily basis.
An understanding of algorithmic theory is helpful when designing a program that could handle a potentially large data set. Understanding how operating systems work is helpful because every program interacts with the operating system (or is part of the operating system).
Self-education definitely is possible in computing â but most people would learn the needed foundational concepts, practice, and skills more easily and effectively with the assistance of instructors and a structured curriculum. This can be true in many other areas of expertise â some people can self-educate whatever is needed, but most will learn more effectively with instructors and a structured curriculum.
If it helps to make my position clear, I have nothing against anyone with a high school education seeking marketable skills. In fact, they should. We all need to provide for ourselves and most people arenât born rich. I also do not dismiss the value of a university education. I have postgraduate degrees and do not regret the time and effort I invested my education.
But if the primary goal of a university was to provide marketable skills, then itâs being done in a strange way. Most majors have breadth requirements that wonât be useful at your job at all. Technical majors often require more calculus than youâll use in the major (though you may in physics or electrical engineering for instance). Even when the course material is focused on a specialization, it is more theoretical than needed. In the unlikely event that I canât call a library for some algorithmic task, I can probably look up a solution. I donât have to prove anything about the running time or memory space used by that solution if I trust my source. But to get a computer science degree, I will need to learn these things.
Universities are in fact an archaic way to deliver skills. Itâs as if those suffering from TB were directed to a mountain sanatorium like the one novelist Thomas Mann wrote about, rather than put on a regimen of antibiotics that will accomplish the task both more effectively and more economically.
That doesnât mean universities canât be âmagic mountainsâ as they are for many young people. If your point is to deliver marketable skills, though, it is a circuitous and inefficient delivery mechanism. Hence, I conclude that if itâs not all just a big hoax to keep academics employed, there must be some other significant purpose to it, because the delivery of job skills is done so poorly.
Having a university degree on a resume provides a kind of quality check for industry to reduce its hiring pool, and maybe thatâs the point. If you could get into a university (the more prestigious the better) and maintain a certain GPA, it shows you have aptitude and are willing to do the work. Even there, most people with computer science degrees (for instance) do not leave the university with readily transferrable work skills. Or if they do, they probably built them up in internships, not classes.
I agree that âmarketabilityâ may be a big part of the equation here, but it is not the development of actual marketable skills as much as the presentation of a âmarketableâ identity by meeting standard milestones determined as much by societal expectations as actual competence.
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I majored in Classics and work in corporate HR and I think my college education was superb âtrainingâ for my entire corporate career. I learned to write, analyze, think, persuade. Nobody needs another (bad) translation of a passage of Plato, and nobody needs to read another 20 page paper comparison of the Greek tragedies and Shakespeare/why can you draw a direct line from Antigone to Camus, etc. So there is zero practical âvalueâ in the mental gymnastics required to do the work- but an enormous payoff in being an educated person who can bang out a cogent and well argued piece of writing in record time. Enormous payoff in knowing that the obvious answer (why did the Roman Empire fall) isnât always the right answer. Enormous payoff in looking at a broken piece of statuary and being able to analyze where it comes from, what it tells us about the artist and culture that created it, and why itâs important.
There didnât seem to be anyone on the faculty at my college who cared about marketable skills-- even in the so-called practical departments like Econ. They cared about creating and disseminating knowledge, in preserving and analyzing the past, in creating models to help interpret the future. And as a mission for a university in the 1970âs- that seemed to be enough. The fact that graduates went on to actual careers seems to have validated the institutional raison dâetre. I took an econ class on energy- this during the energy crisis-- which seemed really practical, except that by the third lecture we were off and running examining the theoretical constructs of energy policy around the world (USSR vs. China, Brazil vs. India) which was really interesting but only of âpracticalâ value if you were planning on moving to Moscow to advise the government on how to exploit Siberian oil fields which none of us were planning to do. But getting an education teaches you how to take something arcane and really specific (Siberian oil fields) and translate it into lots of different fields (how to examine any capital intensive industry which relies on the illusion of scarcity for its pricing model and valuation).
I think itâs great that there are HS kids who know they want to be vets, or dentists, or work in social media marketing, or become a forensic accountant, and itâs great that there are institutions who will help them do that (plus get into the right grad program if thatâs whatâs needed.) But itâs also great that thereâs still room for HS kids who know they donât want to deal with blood, guts, gore or spreadsheetsâ and they can still find satisfying work down the roadâŠ
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