this book?

open source FPGA workflow. ASICs is more tough

I am not familiar with this phrase, what does it refer to? Or are you referring to my current favorite programming language and the need for it to go mainstream? ;-)

You can also have another perspective on this: with the lack of investments in moonshots and every less actual work to do, we are now entering the "entertainment industry" phase of our society.

You could argue that Netflix creates the on-demand-video equivalent of long form writing, youtube spans from that to shlock novels and comic books...so with vine gone (it's still gone right?), maybe snapchat or instagram will fill the video equivalent of tabloids spanning to facebook posts.

Rust never sleeps: the idea that nothing is ever "not needing maintenance." In webdev, this means that even if Netflix is "perfect," it may not remain so if, for example, the Chrome, Firefox, and Microsoft teams all find critical exploits in their browser code that forces a push to up to date and legacy versions of their browsers that breaks the netflix video viewer, or whatever.

No matter how well you paint a bridge, the rust will find a way in.

we also never sleep ;-)

thanks for the explanation...it will be interesting how netflix will handle it. The "reasonable thing" to do would be to either a) plonk all of those "superfluous" engineers into creative fun mode ala xerox park or b) set them onto formally verifying the stack and then sack them slowly/stop hiring, at least as far as can guess from the outside of the entertainment industry? Though handling 3D/VR+developing teldedildonics (does netflix do adult content?) might give the techies continued legitimacy

First is a "Ausbildungsbewilligung" from the canton your company resides in. This is basically a cert that verifies that your company is able to provide an apprentice with the proper environment.

Depending on the canton this can mean that your company needs to be of a certain age (e.g. two years) and that the work that you are doing actually qualifies your company to provide the apprentice with relevant skills (so a restaurant can't train engineers).

The second requirement is a person that has completed the "Berufsbildner" course. I haven't done it myself, but from what I hear it's a one-two weeks course that teaches you the basics of the apprenticeship system (your rights and duties).

After that you hire a 15-16 year old you think would be a good fit.

The first two years the kid will be in school for up to three days a week and you will probably pay a salary of around 500 - 1000 CHF (you would usually increase the amount each year).

The second two years (assuming you are training a software engineer) you might pay a bit more, but by then you might be lucky and the teenager is a young adult that can do good work for cheap.

Of course 16-20 is a time where lots of things change, so you might not be so lucky. From my experience you can't predict this either. I've seen kids that started great and dropped out later and troubled kids that found their calling in year three.

To find out more you want to search the web for "Ausbildungsbewilligung", "Lehrbetrieb werden" and "Berufsbildner". From what I've seen all information is in German/French however. I didn't find any good sites in English.

eh? of course they are overloaded. most schools have still nearly no school at the noon. school in germany is from ca. ~8-~13 on two days you also have 2 days at noon. sometimes even 3 days, but not that many hours, you NEVER actually have something like 8 hours. of course sticking more and more (the humanity learned more over the years and history is growing) into a max of 25 hours per week is challenging.

also I know the "need more workers" problem. my company needs more people, but it's hard to find one. especially trained ones. yeah we can raise one, however even after the "ausbildung" our trainee will not be as productive as he could be. a lot of that comes from the schools you maybe get said that you need to do things, but kids these days don't care, their school life is so extremly peaceful (and a lot of them don't like it, anyway). I was a "rebel", in these years, too. but I learned my lessons that if I raise my ass that I can make more money and be happier at the end and that I don't want to be a work puppy. but a lot of people here don't realise that in school and they never will, cause our system is extremly flawed. even in sports, we don't get prepared for the real life. we get prepared for the tests in our school life.

As I've argued in a differnet post, the problem isn't too little theoretical knowledge, it's that uni is just seen as "the highest" and people who just want practical knowledge go to a place which is supposed to give you deep insight into the theories and research in your field because it gives the status qualification.

>Another problem we have is that motivations are flawed for our Professors. Many Professors want to conduct research and don't care about teaching the material, on the other hand you have some Professors that don't want to research and would just enjoy teaching the material, yet everyone is incentivized to conduct research because its the only way to progress. I think this is fundamentally wrong. Its bad for the students and bad for the professors. If a professor just wants to teach he/she should be allowed to focus on that area and be judged by how well his students can actually apply the learning they acquired in the course. If a professor wants to research he should be judged by his research.

This follows from my point above. We mix "I just want a job students" with "give me moar theory" students and the profs who (anecdotally) love dealing with the second type (explaining things to interested newbs is stimulating for insight) have to dumb down things enough so the job hunters can get their employer mandated checkmark

>There are so many other problem areas as well, for instance, I think we should allow much more mobility between disciplines than is currently the case. I've studied computer science and although I'm quite familiar with computational finance I would probably not be allowed to get a Phd in Finance since I've never taken business/economics courses. Although if you tested me on any number of financial subjects I wouldn't have a problem describing how to model/analyze/forecast the data. So there are a lot of arbitrary hoops that keep people down and force you to not to change you field of study.

That I actually have to disagree with...I know loads of CS and EE majors in economics, the reverse less but also. Especially at the PhD level, as long as you did something relevant, you can get in.

> Its also very difficult for older people mid career to get a degree and increase their personal capital that way. These again are just some problems that we need to address but "flawed in the extreme" - I tend to disagree on that one.

This is indeed a problem, but for example my alma mater has started offering part time degrees, with 25% of the workload required per semester and twice the allowed maxmimum study time. So there is change

People who went to a school not matching their needs and desires have no right to blame their bad choice on the school or on "the system", when better matching schools where perfectly available. If someone takes a course they hate for "status" the problem is entirely in their head, because that's where perceptions of status reside. And besides, switching is possible and does happen (even on the pre-academic age level, but it is much more difficult and rare there)

> but for example my alma mater has started offering part time degrees, with 25% of the workload required per semester and twice the allowed maxmimum study time.

This is a great idea (even if the "25%,twice" ratio puzzles me a bit), it basically formalizes what "perpetual students" had been doing for decades, if not for generations, before the "rush the kids to a degree" reforms. People who only take a small number of courses and even less exams each year won't have consumed more university resources when they get their degree at some unforeseeable time in the future than people who rush through.

Very liberal, but everybody I know who went through that system recognizes as familiar the occasional nightmares about university administration suddenly asking for some minor certificate one chose to indefinitely put off years ago. It's part of who I am, I would totally do it again.

University education should not be or promise jobs, it should be about understanding certain fields on the deep level and being confronted with the bleeding edge of knowledge. Right now we are conflating the two, meaning we have a large number of students wasting their time in classrooms when for their goal they should either be getting deeper, tougher confrontation with the subject (if they want to do research/understand deeply) or practical "on the job" education (if they want to get a job). BWL is the worst culprit of this as far as my friends who studied it describe it.

I agree with what you wrote but the OP is not about Dualstudium. The "dual educational" the article refers to, is about non-univerity tertiary education (Duale Ausbildung). The dual part is the fact that this happens in a company and a (usually state run) school. [1]

As an example: If you want to work as a plumber in Germany you have to get a certificate. The only way to get the certificate is to participate in the dual educational system.

For a plumber that means to find an employer that is willing to give them a three and half year apprenticeship contract. The apprentice will work only three or four days, the other days they have to attend school. The exact details depend on the trade, some have a three work week, one school week schedule, but the general idea is that work and school education happen at the same time.

Not all trades follow this model but if they do it's mandatory. Also the newly certified plumber is only allowed to do plumbing jobs. To be allowed to install a heating system for example they have to make a run trough the dual system again, now with the HVAC guild. Just to install a new heating system you need at least a HVAC company, a plumber, an electrician and a mason. The HVAC guy won't touch any pipes, cables or bricks because he is not allowed to by law and discouraged by his guild. Same for the plumber, electrician and mason.

What the article misses to mention is that the system makes every task that falls in a regulated area very expensive. As a consequence of this it also leads to a lot of illicit work.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_education_system

But on the other hand, I don't quite get what the Universities have to do with the dual education System?!? I mean, as far as I know, Universities are specialized in higher education.

A cursory search on Google shows that in America, if you want to be an HVAC tech or a plumber, you basically have to take the same steps: get a high school diploma, then find a formal apprenticeship or a vocational program, then get licensed and get a certificate. The whole process takes years too. It's basically the same.

And as an American consumer it's not like you get a random handyman from the street to do the work, is it? You almost always go with one of these certified guys. And similar to the OP, there is a bunch of "illicit" work here too. Like my mechanic once insisted on coming to my home after hours to fix my car (easy fix), presumably so he can avoid paying shop fees.

Having worked with both, the difference is noticeable. The FH guys are actually usually much better engineers in "standard" problems, cleaner code etc, but if you have to drop down abstraction levels and make your own techniques, the university guys tend to fare better(already filtering out incompetent people). It's a different education, with different goals. One is more general and aims to deepen your general understanding, Hoping you'll be able to derive the techniques. The other focuses more on practical application that will get you a job now and hope you'll learn the deep understanding with time. But there is not as much connection between what is taught as one might think. Likewise, ask any professional trader what they think of academic finance.

My tl,dr is that I think university or something should have the explicit goal of teaching "useless" knowledge with the aim of giving deep understanding. Then everyone who just wants a job can avoid that, and we don't have to water down the curriculum

If you'd ask me which knowledge I found useless as a student and which I find useless now, after several years of work experience, the answers would be pretty different. Not only because I changed but because the world changed. I think "useless" or useful knowledge is not the problem we should worry most - I think teaching education is where the distinction should be made.

In my opinion there should be research universities which teach knowledge from the cutting-edge of research (maybe at the expense of didactic quality). On the other hand there should be something (akin to the fictional FH you described) which focuses on training on the job with professors that are not only qualified in their field of expertise but also good teachers. I don't see the FH, or "University of Applied Sciences" like they tend to call themselves nowadays, to fulfill that role in any way, because the professors there are neither researchers nor teachers. (I have a degree from a FH and one from a regular German university, so I know both systems)

Innovation derives from working from basic principles and logical reasoning about a problem. Understanding the math is seen as important than just using it. You don't have to pursue pure math e.g. proofs but you should understand the usefulness and limitations of the mathematical tools you work with.

Those tools have utility in solving problems as we progress as a society. Otherwise you are in some sense operating blindly.

So education should be obtaining these intellectual tools to reason and think critically about things concerning humanity. Moreover one should seek a diversity of tools and ways of thinking. I feel like this is a huge driver of creativity.

For finance, the number one hedge fund was founded and run by a mathematician. Black-scholes, game theory... Signal processing... it's unfair to not get this exposure!

Edit: I'm from the UK which is probably closer to the US system than the German one.