OT: Degrees as barriers to entry [was Re: - E04 - Leadership! Google, Guido van Rossum, PSF]

[Anton Vredegoor]

DaveM wrote:

> On 3 Jan 2006 20:09:34 -0800, aahz at pythoncraft.com (Aahz) wrote:
>
> >Unfortunately, this isn't quite true.  Medicine and law both require the
> >passing of an apprenticeship, so there's still some room for favoritism
> >and blackballing.
>
> In the UK, in Medicine, House Officer jobs pretty much match the
> qualification numbers. Sure, which HO post you get can give your career a
> head start, but that advantage is evanescent if you can't cut the mustard.
>
> Fouling your career by upsetting the wrong people is, OTOH, easy to do.

Maybe not many people realize that it's also possible that *having* a
degree or having the *wrong* degree can also be a barrier. Or maybe
that's just the case in highly bureaucratic societies like the
Netherlands.

I finished a study in the social sciences, but since I refused draft I
had to do some social service work as a replacement. This was
explicitly meant to be *careerbreaking*, because if it were otherwise
it would be an advantage over other people who voluntarily went into
the preparing to kill people business. However, women, and people who
got out on a medical indication or because of surplus draftee numbers
did not have to do this. Also, during draft a lot of people got free
drivers licenses (for all vehicles). Having done draft is generally
seen as some positive contribution to society.

My social service work consisted of working as a programmer for a mad
computer scientist who just threw me out after I had doubts about
machine intelligence being feasible in less than a decade or so (and he
badly needed a publication). This completely (for science) useless and
overpayed guy (doctor at a public university) could practically do
anything he liked with me because I just had to break my career anyway
according to my social service contact person.

Before I had my degree as a social scientist I had spend many years in
the same kind of situation but then serving as an intermediary person
between a computer running statistical programs and an elderly
professor who was almost retiring but wanted to make one big
publication before he vanished into oblivion. Of course this guy was
very reluctant to let me finish my thesis because he would be without a
computer programmer then, and he was already to old to learn it
himself, while I seem to have a natural talent for handling computers,
even among people who are of my age.

Going back a little further in time, I remember a period as an intern
where I was not allowed to publish my seperate analysis of the data
*before* the same data was exhaustively studied and published by the
guy who had ordered the survey to take place (payed by government money
of course). Since this guy *never* seemed to be ready to publish
anything (personal problems, divorce and such things) my complete
internship was wasted in terms of getting anything I wrote out of this,
officially.

Now returning to being thrown out by the mad professor, I had the
choice between labeling books for the rest of my time doing social
service or finding some other careerbreaker. Luckily I had made some
friends while playing go (the oriental boardgame) and they introduced
me to their mathematics professor who subsequently let me do some
programming work there.

What struck me most was that the abyss between the social sciences and
mathematics was nearly absolute. While social scientists use
mathematics in a statistical way, their main aim is always to assert
that they are actually measuring what is supposed to be measured. This
can get quite sophisticated, for example if you give a person two
possible choices, will the data be comparable to data acquired with the
person having five possible answers? On the other hand, mathematicians
want to cut loose from the data acquiring stage as soon as possible and
just work with their formulas without making any assumptions about
reality. Lines have no thickness, scales are neat continuous variables,
correlations can be nicely separated in orthogonal factors, and so on.

After my social service was over I tried to find jobs at universities
or public institutions. I did find a research job at the headquarter of
the institution that gives money to unemployed or sick people. I soon
noticed that even before I had begun to work there it was decided that
there could be no way for me to publish anything based on data from
that site, because that data was hoarded by other people in much the
same way as the research data was guarded by the guy from my
internship.

The trick was to let me handle anonimizing and security, and being the
only person officially able to link data to persons, of course I was
not allowed to publish anything.

However, in this capacity I met a lot of people from smaller executive
departements from all over the country and I noticed that they too were
guarding their data as if their jobs depended on them, which was
probably not completely a strange assumption, from their perspective.

What they did was to send only "roughed up" data and selective parts of
the data they collected to the headquarters so that their complete
dataset never could be reconstructed and that way they always would
have that little negotiating edge to keep their jobs secure.

When I started a process to centralize the data and proposed to try and
avoid data corruption by intermediaries I found myself without a job,
really very soon.

I tried to find other jobs. I got an offer from a university, but again
there was no way to do my own research, even hinting at the possibility
of doing research made it impossible to even get the assisting job. It
was very hard to find jobs at universities with my background because
by now I was some kind of a strange amalgament of psychology, computer
science, mathematics and medical statistics person with some government
background.

There are (or at least there were at that time) huge gaps between the
different departments in the Netherlands' universities, programming was
grouped with the exact sciences and no psychologist could enter there.
Also psychologists would not let anyone enter who was 'infected' with
mathematics or computer science, except in some highly restricted
sub-departments of psychology of which there weren't very many.

After a few years I realized that trying to find a job this way was
hopeless, universities select not only by degree but also -and more
importantly- on the basis of personal contacts. Contacts which had been
broken on purpose by my government during my social service. Since I
borrowed a lot of money in order to be able to study for the title, the
idea of this being a theft of my money by the government comes to my
mind. My old professor was already retired and hadn't had many contacts
anyway, which made my situation even worse.

Now the nightmare really started. One would think that if higher
positions were not available then I would surely be eligible for
something lower in the ranks, maybe even way low down because money was
becoming very scarce.

No way. Everywhere I applied they required my complete job history and
after studing this thoroughly it was decided that I was just not the
right kind of person because the work would not be "interesting" enough
for me. They expected me to stay only a few weeks and then quit anyway
so why bother hiring me, even for the lowest of jobs. Somehow I suspect
some of these people to have been feeling threatened for their own
position if some person with higher education would work under them.

This went on for a few years, which I spent programming for myself,
discovering *Python*, doing some freelance work (but a few weeks work
in a year doesn't pay enough), and walking a lot and making photographs
along the way.

In the meantime, agencies were complaining about the large 'holes' in
my resume and, seeing that I had been unemployed for some time, my
chances of getting hired grew even slimmer. Work as a practicing
psychologist at a cliniq was impossible too because the eyes of the HRP
would become glazy immediately upon seeing my computer 'infected'
resume.

Work in a public function was impossible too, because job interviews
always seemed to gravitate towards my theory that mixing different
cultural groups (as was the theme of my thesis) was beneficial for
society as a whole *and* for the individual subculture, while official
policy at the time was demanding to give each group their own space and
language. Of course, that way a lot more government personel would be
secure of their jobs because everything had to be done seperately for
every subculture.

Next I came into the hands of special government agencies who were
handling the hard cases of unemployment. Let's get these unwilling lazy
bastards a job and stop them from parasitizing on our government money.
I was forced to comply with stupid courses which didn't help at all
(certainly not with finding me a job) and finally when nothing worked I
was forced to apply to nonsense jobs day after day just for the hell of
it, because if I still hadn't found a job I must have been a very
antisocial tough case who had to be handled the hard way.

I developed an allergy against sending resumes. I just couldn't stand
talking to human resource people about the so called 'holes' in my
resume anymore, pointing out that these holes where not holes at all
but that I had made very significant progress during that time, not the
least among these advancements was having become a very experienced
programmer.

Nothing would change the mind of future employers or employment
agencies however, most of the time one is not talking to people who
have a clue about programming anyway. So the only thing that counted on
a resume was *working* experience, and not just working experience
plain, but also it had to be exactly the right kind of working
experience, which with my diverse background would be too thin in any
specific way.

My allergy to resumes, not getting accepted because my education being
to high, my experience being to low for anything specific, brought me
me into further major trouble with the social security office. It was
just not allowed to experience traumatic consequences because of their
treatment, because what they did was just the law, and what could be
wrong with that, even if it meant forcing me day in day out to apply
for jobs till I snapped.

I decided to prevent that and rather be without any money from my
government than be continously tortured and degraded. Since then I
haven't heard anything from them anymore, I lost my social contacts one
by one because poverty doesn't make one popular, and I broke with my
family because for some reason they seem to think what the government
did was "good for me" when it nearly drove me to suicide.

Maybe this further clarifies my objections against elitist selection
procedures, based on degrees. Even if I have a degree, it always was
the wrong one.

The degree system itself is also funny. There have been many reforms in
the Netherlands and each time those working at universities have
automatically upgraded their degrees to the highest level while such
upgrading is not possible for those without a job. The system works
like this:

We have ranks a,b,c were a is lowest and c is highest.

People start at 'a' progress to 'b' and finally want to do 'c'.

However, just before reaching 'c', a new 'c' is created and the
previous categories 'a' and 'b' are taken together and put in a new
category 'a'. (I am planning to write a nice Python script showing this
algorithm sometime). This has happened a few times now in the
Netherlands and one wonders about the ingenuity with which people
having fixed positions at universities have come up with new
requirements, distinctions and titles to secure their jobs and justify
their never changing authority on all matters scientific. We have
computer science professors who cannot operate a mouse, mathematical
professors who only visit congresses or 'guide' students.

Never mind that most of the times the student does all the work and
receives almost no payment, and the professors know next to nothing
about the subject (except from times long gone) and enjoy luxurious
quarters and working conditions, foreign travel arrangements and a big
secure salary check each month.

Anton

'excuse me if I sound a bit bitter and as if suffering from a sense of
untitlement'