The “rise of remote work” is a greatly misunderstood phenomenon. At the high end, the most talented slice of software engineers will be able to define the terms and location of their employment to an extent never seen before. On a much larger scale, corporate drones like those seen in “The Office” will lose their jobs to people in Argentina or the Philippines. We are just not going to move to a world where a substantial part of the workforce is living in Wyoming with a view is Grand Teton pulling down $600k a year.
The rise of remote work is 100% misunderstood. Good software engineers can work anymore but I haven't met many engineers that can mentor well remotely.
If you're Netflix or Google and can afford to only hire senior engineers it's fine to let everyone work from home. Most organizations need to organically level up talent via mentorship and in house training.
Basically, work is going to get more flexible but the idea that nobody ever needs to interact with humans in real life again is insanity. People may spend fewer days in the office but in the end, most of us will be back in offices at least a few times a week.
I worked at home for a small startup that was saving money on an office. It worked out so well that we kept doing it for many years later after we became successful. We would find a spot to spend the day together once every two weeks. I started as a junior programmer and felt I was mentored effectively. One of my favorite programming memories occured when my mentor, a senior, introduced me to exceptions, which he had implemented in assembly language. I learned a lot from him, and never felt that not being in an office everyday, all day, with him was a detriment to my learning.
> Basically, work is going to get more flexible but the idea that nobody ever needs to interact with humans in real life again is insanity.
I still find this assumption baked in to a lot of the criticisms of remote work. I'll give the benefit of the doubt here that you don't thing remote = never talking to people, so the assumption would seem then to be that video conferencing and text chat is not "interacting" with people.
It very much is, and a lot of people have made it work in a lot of different contexts for a long time. Most of the drawbacks that still exist in certain situations are things that, given time, we'll solve.
Already in the past year, we've seen at least one report showing WFH productivity increasing 46% relative to the productivity in offices.[0] I can't think of any reason why this trend wouldn't continue--we're still at a stage where there's a _lot_ of low hanging fruit.
IDK maybe I've never had good mentors, but I honestly can't think of much that I've learned to "level up my talent" from the people I work with. I do learn from reading code and from books by experts in whatever areas I'm involved in.
Sure I learn where the bathroom is, what the specific local dev workflow is, etc. but in terms of fundamentally improving my skills as a developer that has always been to a very large degree due to my own efforts at seeking out knowledge.
Agreed. The mentoring I benefitted from was never from other programmers. Most of my colleagues have been antagonists. Elders to learn from were few. I started a book club just to have some peeps to geek with.
Maybe it's a cohort thing. I've definitely coached, mentored a lot of other people.
I agree. I don't know that skill growth can be provided by "mentorship". At most, I think mentorship can provide (or is perhaps conflated with providing) direction & guidance.
I've never been in the situation where someone can magically grow my skills for me, or download information into my brain for me.
Sure, there's exposure to ideas regarding programming frameworks, ways of doing things, system design ideas to receive from colleagues & supervisors. And communication & leadership knowledge & experience gained as well.
I agree. I'd say the vast majority of any mentoring I've gotten hasn't been technical. It's been more along the lines of "this how to manage your work in Jira." Or softer skills like learning how to prioritize tasks given the org goals.
But covid hit when I was maybe 6 months into my tech career, and I honestly don't feel like it had any negative impact. All of these things were transmitted just as effectively in a zoom call as they were in person.
I haven't met many engineers who can mentor well, period. My guess is your perception is biased. I know SDEs who prefer conversations remotely. An extreme example would be that there's no chance of physical harassment on Zoom. Another would be the "raise a hand" button seems to be more acceptable to use than actually raising a hand in a meeting, with the result that voices are heard that would otherwise not be.
And just fundamentally, think of the site you're on. How unimaginative. How big is your data set? Why can't your sample mentor well remotely? Are there bigger data sets or published analyses? What can you do to improve your model?
Or is it just that you prefer to work in an office, or you don't trust your employees?
Your argument is the "Think of the children^H^H^H interns" argument from the Cathy Merrill's Washingtonian op ed. [1] It doesn't hold water with anyone seriously trying to improve the productivity and happiness of a diverse workforce comprised of people who have different preferences for home or office; in person or zoom.
> The rise of remote work is 100% misunderstood. Good software engineers can work anymore but I haven't met many engineers that can mentor well remotely.
Absolutely this. I love working remotely and will probably not go back to an office until at least the kids are out of school. But both being new and training new people are skills that are just _different_ from being in the office.
Open offices were not a good fit for me, but one valuable thing from a past job was sitting close to both my manager and their manager. That was a way to learn "Oh, that's how you talk to <client A, department B, etc>" without having to be told "this is how you talk to these people." Training a remote new person requires so much more intentionality that most people are not accustomed to.
FWIW, Google hires a lot of bright graduates straight from universities, who cannot yet work as senior engineers, even after 2-3 years of being interns before that. Mentoring plays a huge part here.
Good mentors are rare, but I don't think being remote is much of a hindrance. IME, the world-class tooling for frictionless remote pair-programming built into VSCode is actually an improvement over peering over someone's shoulder in a shared office. And most mentoring is naturally more async than that.
As a consultant, I have to say that this is true of our industry as well. Our company has always been full remote due to the "on site" nature of our work. Given that, it has always been a pain point to spend time mentoring and training. many hours of zoom calls for training just doesn't foment the kind of quick Q&A than in person does. For us, the net effect has been that the people who do well tend to be autodidactic to at least some degree.
>I haven't met many engineers that can mentor well remotely
Aren't there engineers who grow and evolve through the sort of "mentoring" (ad-hoc or otherwise) they get through remote open source contributions? To the extent that a github presence is increasingly a prerequisite for certain engineering jobs I wonder if this shift isn't already under way.
I'm not saying it's a direct or even desirable replacement for IRL mentoring, but it does seem like there is at least a rough framework in place for helping people grow as engineers outside of a workplace. It's a little more self directed and rough and tumble, but then work in general seems to be going in that direction over the last few decades.
I don't understand how mentoring via slack and zoom is any different than mentoring leaning over tha back of an aeron. Actually I do: I think the slack/zoom way is significantly better.
> On a much larger scale, corporate drones like those seen in “The Office” will lose their jobs to people in Argentina or the Philippines.
It's not going to be so dramatic. What will happen for sure is that groups will start hiring in lower cost countries and hire less in the US. That offshoring trend has been going on for 2 decades+.
The big issues with offshoring are culture and timezone, and the first can be rectified to some measure, but the 2nd can only be mitigated (could be a benefit for support centers, etc).
That Wyoming posting will be for folks who have decided that maybe pulling $2-300k instead of $600k may be an acceptable loss for an ongoing lifestyle.
> That Wyoming posting will be for folks who have decided that maybe pulling $2-300k instead of $600k may be an acceptable loss for an ongoing lifestyle.
Which in itself will affect the market and how much those positions pay in general. You can't have a large chunk of a workforce decide that they're willing to take a 20%-50% pay reduction for other benefits and expect it not to affect the entire workforce.
I don't think that means people in and around SF will have to work at the same pay rate as those working remotely necessarily, but I do think it might result in lowering the high-end of the scale, and spreading the distribution quite a bit.
As a developer from a Poland - yes, both on national and international level the salaries in IT will equalize. It's already happening and it's not a slow process. I'm on the growing side so far but it's a matter of time. Already my company outsources to Ukraine.
I expect trade unions and calls for mandatory certification in next decade.
> I expect trade unions and calls for mandatory certification in next decade.
That makes sense. Certification, or more specifically licensing, is ever the go to tool for people protecting their industries from what they see as encroachment by others.
Planet Money had an interesting episode on this long ago, which used Hair Salons as an example.[1]
I think it will have an impact but not as much as you're implying.
Where companies can offshore, they may already have. If a massive saving could have been made offshoring, there was nothing to stop them before. Maybe those companies that were reluctant because of the worries about remote workforces may be influenced by the success of the WFH experiment so I concede that point. I think this will have an impact but I predict it won't be massive.
The other constraining factor on this is that offshoring often doesn't work that well whenever I've seen it applied to software at least. Maybe it's just my own experience but in certain professions it seems it's good to have a majority of the workforce being fluent or near-fluent in the company's main language and relatively integrated into the culture. This can be achieved with people in different countries but its not just a straight forward question of replacing people.
I think it's a mistake to assume that 'offshoring' as understood for the last few decades and 'wfh' as currently understood are fundamentally the same thing.
I'm not sure what will happen, but it's quite plausible that the dynamic has changed.
If US developers saw the level of talent interviewing from South and Latin America, they would start campaigning against remote work immediately.
I’m sure there’s selection bias at play, but I did a huge interviewing stint recently and US engineers were on average bad and entitled, LATAM were amazing and eager. Guess who interviews better?
Outsourcing is not new. Many companies have tried it. Not just in CS, but extensively in CS.
Not only are US CS skills higher, but communication is the most important skill in the industry. Good communicators add more value and do it faster than people with whom you struggle to communicate. People that don't understand that now will understand it after a few years of working with a company in a different time zone without a native grasp on English.
Another problem you'll face is that outsourcing means that another company (since you usually just contract with a foreign company) is gaining expertise in your product, domain, and tech stack. That knowledge gained doesn't stick with your company. If you're unhappy with that company or they fail to perform in the future, you have to train a new team from scratch.
A common pattern I've seen is that companies will outsource as a fledgling startup then move to insourcing after the MVP is up because it's easier to work with an internal, local team, and the initial team falls short once you get to the hard stuff.
I do suspect there's selection bias. Most US devs are employed and well paid already. It's hard to get the good ones to apply for new jobs because tech hiring is a pain in the ass. Imagine having a full time job, family, life, and taking a day off for interviews (while working! what, we're supposed to take PTO?), or spending your weekend on a coding challenge? Most of the remaining applicants are probably the lower end of the talent pool - younger or bad. Your individual sample size is also likely too small to make broad judgments about entire nations.
There are a lot of jobs and companies where they don't want to go through the additional effort of hiring an individual from another country that has different tax laws, worker protection, insurance requirements, infrastructure availability... along with the implications of the company having a presence in that country.
There are sufficiently many companies in the US that don't even like doing this across state lines - much less international boundaries.
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I won't argue with the "bad and entitled" aspect. I've seen that when doing interviews myself. There's a bit of "if you've got 1000 applications for three different positions, 900 of them are the same across those positions that are having difficulty getting hired". From https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/09/06/finding-great-deve...
> Astute readers, I expect, will point out that I’m leaving out the largest group yet, the solid, competent people. They’re on the market more than the great people, but less than the incompetent, and all in all they will show up in small numbers in your 1000 resume pile, but for the most part, almost every hiring manager in Palo Alto right now with 1000 resumes on their desk has the same exact set of 970 resumes from the same minority of 970 incompetent people that are applying for every job in Palo Alto, and probably will be for life, and only 30 resumes even worth considering, of which maybe, rarely, one is a great programmer. OK, maybe not even one. And figuring out how to find those needles in a haystack, we shall see, is possible but not easy.
There's an entire thread to head off on for the why this is the case.
I will claim that for places where the salary isn't tech company stratospheric, the average entitlement goes down a bit.
I believe the typical solution for the paperwork problem is hiring people as freelancers/contractors. From the company’s perspective they’re a vendor that sends an invoice, from the worker’s perspective they’re a business handling their own taxes and whatnot.
This works extremely well and everyone is happy. Even a low US salary is often huge by local standards and more than makes up for the overhead of running yourself as a business.
Some countries even incentivize this. In Slovenia for example (where I started my career with this exact model), your effective income tax is 5% if you’re a solo business making under $100k/year. Typical local engineering salaries are $30k by comparison.
I asssume (I'm very much not an expert) that there have to be security considerations too, particularly if you're hoping to hire from the sorts of countries where Google or Adobe wouldn't consider opening an office and hiring developers for in-person work. And in the kind of places where Google or SAP or whoever is hiring for local work, presumably you'll have to compete with those locally-based opportunities.
There's certainly bias. If for no other reason, because an entry level salary on some FAANG is often larger than most senior developers can dream on receiving in Latin America.
I see a further class divide between people who work from home and those that need to work at a place, either blue collar or service jobs or white collar jobs that require some public interaction (banks, teaching, etc.). This isn't a reason not to shift to remote work, it's just a problem we need to be aware will occur. Workplaces will divide along "office" and "home" lines (they already are, in my observation, with a fair amount of resentment tied in on both sides), and service jobs will shift to where people are living.
> living in Wyoming with a view is Grand Teton pulling down $600k a year.
The number increases again. Every time I see someone quote a hypothetical salary on HN it's bigger than anyone has ever said before. It used to "six figures". Then people started to be more specific, 120k. Then 200k started to be the norm. Now it's over half a million. 600k! What's next, "seven figures"?
> On a much larger scale, corporate drones like those seen in “The Office” will lose their jobs to people in Argentina or the Philippines.
Not really. Too many companies have been badly burned by IT outsourcing clusterfucks, additionally as soon as customer data is handled stuff like GDPR and whatever the US plans to follow suit (and they will have to, in order for a successor to the Privacy Shield deal to pass the EU court system) come into play which makes outsourcing "drones" ... not really worth the time.
I think the presence of international standards like the one potentially being established by GDPR makes outsourcing easier, not harder.
It would make little sense for an Argentine developer to learn the intricacies of Slovenian data protection regulations. It makes a lot more sense for her to learn the intricacies of GDPR (and whatever the US comes up with).
Even if there are international treaties (which is not going to come soon, given the state of global diplomacy) one day, the core principle of GDPR is to minimize data holding and transfer.
Saving a couple dollars on wages for corp drones? I highly doubt this reason is going to fly well under that principle.
yeah but the real question is how is remote work reshaping where people work. And by that I mean on a more granular level: How many of those jobs in big cities will go elsewhere and where to exactly? And that's why I like the idea of this article in that it does make sense that people who study for 3-x years in a city and learn to love it want to stay there after their studies. Remote work makes this easier. Also, what I'm interested in is how much of remote work will be outsourced within one country and how much will be outsourced to different countries. I suspect that many typical roles that go "100% remote ok" will first say "but please in this country" before they say "yeah, another country is fine as well" but maybe the latter will happen more often soon. There have been studies for Europe (from Ernst&Young etc.) that say something along the lines of "you have to offshore 50% of your workforce [developers] to stay competitive" (well, that is for Germany and other high-labor-cost-countries.) although I'm a little suspect about these studies but well.. that's what management of some international companies is listening to...
Surprised not to read anything about offering classes to people who choose to live in these remote-work communities. That's the only reason it would appeal to me personally. I think a lot of people would like to take some graduate classes while working, maybe even get a degree out of it.
Our education system for things like computer science seem to be out of sync with the way that people actually learn. Not because they are too theoretical, but because there are some things, like computer science, where it's really impossible to internalize the practical lessons of learning about different kinds of software systems if you don't have some experience building software systems yourself. And this kind of experience takes years of working to develop.
Weightlifting isn't football. But if you get huge enough, your size from weightlifting predicts success in football.
Even if CS doesn't directly translate, if you can jump through the mental hoops, it likely predicts success in software engineering. You will likely do well in S/W Engineering if you have a high IQ and you have attention to detail. Since it is illegal to filter people by IQ in the USA, you have to jump through an expensive hoop to prove you have a high IQ, which also happens to vet for attention to detail and ability to focus on tasks. There is no reason that s/w engineering couldn't be taught using an apprenticeship model after doing an IQ test, but the later is illegal.
> Weightlifting isn't football. But if you get huge enough, your size from weightlifting predicts success in football.
Yes, but I imagine most people that got (some theoretical) degree in weight lifting or physical science wouldn't lament that it didn't teach them all the things they expected it to about being a good football player, but that's exactly what we get with Computer Science and Software Engineering.
A good foundation helps with some aspects of good software engineering, or helps steer some decisions, but by no means does it necessarily teach good software engineering (some programs might have some classes). I doubt that keeps the students from complaining about how they aren't actually being taught specifically to program, just like they did when I was in a CS program a couple decades ago.
I wonder if the training colleges that teach programming actually focus more on good software engineering practices? If so, they might actually come out of those institutions better prepared for the low end of the market than CS grads. For the middle of the market, a CS degree might give a leg up. For the high end, I imagine personal drive to learn and aptitude has long surpassed whatever advantage a CS degree gave. From what I've seen, the most knowledgeable and respected and accomplished people don't seem all that heavily weighted towards having a CS degree over another one.
My first undergrad degree was in another engineering major that wasn't CS -- you can guess which from my name. Wall Street was heavily recruiting from my major, despite us being taught absolutely nothing about finance or even business and only having the basics of CS teaching. The reason they were doing this is because we were smart and knew how to decompose really hard problems. We basically knew nothing about financial tech, but they wanted us because if you can do X, then you can probably do Y.
Even in my other engineering major, the complaints were the same. Everybody complained that You Aint Gonna Need It (YAGNI) for many classes and that _real_ industry wouldn't use it. However, if you can learn and use these really hard concepts, you can probably learn and use these _other_ really hard concepts in industry.
Off-topic, but I've known a few people that went pro, and in all cases, the causality definitely went in the opposite direction. They all hardly ever touched weights until they were told they'd have to for the combine. And then they got very good at it, but I'm not sure it made them any better. We also had a guy that set a youth world record in the deadlift. He was pretty good, but no pro. The agility tests are supposed to be better, but I've never seen an instance of anybody getting a whole lot better at them through training. The basketball combine is even harder to analyze. One thing that stood out as predictive was the slope of the unweighting curve prior to motion. Good luck training that. They lift weights mostly for injury prevention.
At rest the player exerts force (weight) on the ground. When the player begins to jump or pivot, they have to pull their feet upward to either move them, or lower their center of gravity. This can be measured as a decrease in weight (force) exerted on the ground.
This is almost universally true in hockey. Promising prospect makes the NHL, disappoints in his first season, hits the gym and packs on 20lbs, comes back and lights it up.
I know very little about what actually happens post-draft, but I’ll admit that many superstar players seem to add supraphysiological muscle mass over their careers.
> There is no reason that s/w engineering couldn't be taught using an apprenticeship model after doing an IQ test, but the later is illegal.
This is literally how Software Engineering is taught. The IQ test is the brain teaser questions that you get from the interviewers, and the apprenticeship is the 2-3 years of work that you do for the company before you bounce to the next place for the pay raise.
> … in Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971) [1], … the Supreme Court ruled that intelligence tests, because they were not shown to be directly related to job performance, could not be used in hiring since blacks scored lower on them, and it did not matter whether there was any intent to discriminate.
For some reason, there are a few parallel IQ tests that are allowed to continue, despite the Supreme Court ruling against IQ tests. The NFL still uses the Wonderlic test and the US military has IQ tests. If the Wonderlic test did nothing, might not the NFL drop it? As a single number, the IQ test has indeed been found to be a fantastic predictor of the success of a person, despite objections. People hate on it all day long, and perhaps their reasons to hate it are correct, but it remains an extremely useful as a _heuristic_, if you're allowed to measure it. The alternative seems to be 4 years of schooling that saddles the student with crushing and increasingly-crushing amounts of debt.
Those tend to be primarily web development roles (i.e HTML/CSS) or doing some basic scripting not for "full stack" devs creating complex web applications.
I do agree though that somebody wanting to enter a software development role might as well skip the CS degree and learn the basics to enter these 'entry level' dev jobs while learning the more complex stuff in parallel to level up
I guess not a physical science (although there was some crossover last year between some results in quantum computing and physics, there's probably lots other examples that I'm not familiar with too) [1] but it fits squarely in the formal sciences (which includes math, logic, etc). And it doesn't concern any particular physical computer, but it does have topics on what an idealized/ theoretical computer could do haha
If what you’re doing isn’t research it isn’t technically philosophy. The more applied a field is, the less philosophical it is, because a general “way” of doing things has been established. That’s why you can have an entire undergraduate about “solved problems”, and only after that do you start advancing the field by tackling unsolved problems.
Pursuing this question is quite the rabbit hole, but doing research in mathematics makes me believe that math is a science: you have questions, you collect evidence by exploring examples (i.e., conducting experiments), and you formulate hypotheses as conjectures. If you're lucky, your conjectures are correct and you prove them! Proofs are even better than the accumulated evidence on which theories in other sciences depend, in that proven theorems are immune to falsifiability within the axiomatic system in use.
Some UK institutions (including some pretty respected ones) adopted the term "School of Informatics" and confer Informatics degrees instead of using the term Computer Science.
I suspect the university marketing teams will eventually change this to Computer Science much like "Natural Philosophy" evolved into "Physics" at many places though...
KCL was Informatics and it was broadly classed w/ maths/'natural sciences' when I was there 10 years ago - according to a younger colleague they have since rebranded to CS.
In the UK, the A level I took was called "Computing". My university called it that as well and treated it as an MEng rather than an MSc, but most UK universities still call it Computer Science I think.
My point is that the current system isn't even that great at teaching academic CS. Even learning a version of CS which doesn't pretend to be SE well requires developing practical skills which many students don't have the opportunity to acquire until after they graduate. This isn't a flaw that's specific to CS, it's true of many disciplines. In fact, in some ways CS is less guilty of it than others.
Does it matter? If remote working is completely viable, I don't see why remote part time formal education wouldn't be. I'm not sure why someone who preferred WFH full time would otherwise decide that in person classes were important.
Very good point. This is similar to stiff you do in business school, where you sure can talk about why BetaMax, but you can't experience it. Similarly you can be told that it's a good idea to think about your abstractions when coding, but if you don't get enough time to build a ball of spaghetti, you might not get it straight away.
Some of the online CS master's programs allow you to take in person classes if you want, so when work is busy you can make progress online and you can pick the in person classes that really interest you. The program you're talking about exists, though it may not be marketed that way.
I did this a few years ago and highly recommend it.
I could only access the first of paragraph of the article, but this recalls a line I bookmarked in The Long Haul, the memoir of a liberal arts school dropout who ended up as successful trucker for high-end moving company criss-crossing America:
Municipal officials always seem to want auto assembly plants and call centers, but a real and lasting economic engine gets running when there's a university in town. As far as I can figure, the only places left in America that can be vibrant downtowns are college towns and high-end tourist towns. In the rest of the country the downtowns were hollowed out when nobody was looking.
Maybe. Living in Boulder, which has both a university and tourism, downtown got pretty gutted by COVID, and like probably everywhere, small local businesses are being replaced with chains (that was already happening). And it was already very difficult to live in the same city you work in (or really go to school in - people commute just to work on their undergrad), if you're in the service industry as you weren't given a living wage to do so in a city that's so expensive. That does take us to the present day problem of pressure from employers to actually do that.
Not to be too finger pointy, but the influx of Googlers and similar ilk isn't helping with scarcity of places to live or the skyrocketing price of rentals and buying a home. Double so that Boulder has a very problematic occupancy limit of three unrelated people that may live in a house (even if that house has 5 bedrooms).
These problems aren't specific to Boulder, but the Uni and tourism aren't shielding it from these problems. It's not assembly plants and call centers, but it's Uber driving and Amazon Prime delivery.
I wonder what the attraction to attracting call centers is caused by. My guess is that it’s a low-capital way to bring in lots of jobs. However, unless these are totally different call centers than the ones in my area, those are pretty much all jobs with low pay and high turnover.
I've heard a few reasons for call centers being "desirable". Anyone can do the work. It's "real work", not the kind of stuff college graduates do. It's not dangerous. It brings in money from outside the area.
The housing market in Ithaca, NY (where Cornell is) has become very tight.
One sad thing about university access these days is that so much library content is electronic, and not accessible to the general public, even if they walk into a physical library on campus.
>so much library content is electronic, and not accessible to the general public
This is an irrationally huge deal to me. There's so much material one has student access to at a decent college library. I, as 'Joe Public' am locked out of almost all of it and am forced to scrounge around on less-than-legal websites for books and papers. It's infuriating. Hell, I'd pay to have that access, but many universities adamantly refuse to provide it, even at cost.
University libraries will often have 40x copies of an essential textbook, because they know they have 40x students taking that course. I guess if you let random people use the library that becomes a problem.
I think the traditional solution is library memberships that don't permit you to checkout the books, but do provide you with access to books and resources provided you stay in the library. Reading rooms and all that
It's pretty rare, at least for my kids, that a course has an actual book you can hold in your hands. They all use a DRM scheme and require some Nth edition that's new (and probably only has a few minor changes from N-1). Sometimes we can find it on Library Genesis, often we can't. There's almost never an actual book.
Does this not apply in computer science? Is it something you get in fields like law? When I think of the key text books in computer science they usually just have two editions max and have been set in stone for a couple of decades as the basics aren't changing.
That and the tests. Many teachers like the pre canned tests these books come with (please finish problems 10-50 even by the next class). Now it is online run by the publisher. Cheating is now even more rampant than it was before the code thing with many sites having the answers.
I would wait 1-2 weeks after class started to buy books. Especially if the teacher decided you need 6 of them to finish the class. It was usually pretty clear which ones they were going to use by that point.
That has to do with licensing and copyright. Whether that is good or bad is not really for the university to decide. They have to adhere to the contract.
University libraries will often have 40x copies of an essential textbook
If that's true, it's a huge change from when I was in the university. But it seems implausible in the extreme, IE, I'd call bs here. University libraries wouldn't want to buy class textbook 'cause they're worthless at the end of the term. Students are expected to buy (electronic, DRM'd) textbooks are at student stores, not check them out of libraries. Libraries are not expected to service individual course but to be places of general research. Professors have the whole Internet to give links for supplemental material. Photocopied "Course Readers" is another avenue.
I suppose it depends on the material. Textbooks for intro-level general courses (e.g. calculus, physics, statistics, etc.) tend to get republished yearly.
Since the fundamentals of the material are unlikely to change within the span of a year, the revisions to the textbooks are mostly cosmetic in nature—updated graphic design, rearranged problem sets (to deter the used book market), etc.
Also note: I'm speaking about the US. Things could very well be different elsewhere.
The library of the university to which I went used to have one or two books out of X which wouldn't be available for check out, only for reading on site.
Sure, if a bunch of random people show up and take them all at the same time, which prevents actual students from using them, it may be a problem. In practice, I don't remember ever having this issue.
Access to the library was free for all, you didn't have to be a student or anything.
I my opinion this helps fuel the rise of misinformation. How can you expect the average citizen to be informed when they're locked out of the most credible information sources? The academic publishing system is complicit in the disinformation age.
In my observations, unfortunately most of the people spreading misinformation are not really interested in "the truth", but in re-affirming what they already think is the truth. This applies equally to "all sides". This is also compounded by a widespread erosion of institutional trust (whether justified or not).
Most vendors license based on students served, not public that pays taxes. If a university is licensing content based on the number of students or faculty at the university, it's likely that they are not allowed to offer it to tax payers. I understand your point is that you are paying, but that will not mean you can walk into a university and demand access. They would need to renegotiate with the vendor.
Many public universities allow public access to all resources when you are physically at the library. Their licenses are broad enough (and expensive enough) to allow access to anyone from campus. Also, if you're on campus, it can be difficult to determine who is a student / staff, etc...
The college library in my hometown had public access via a paid card. It was inexpensive and about equal to the cost students paid in fees each year or their access. I know a few local authors that heavily relied on that library for researching their works. I bet many college libraries have similar programs or could be motivated by locals to add the option.
I've considered signing up for college classes in retirement, not only for library access but also to get access to the student health plans, which are remarkably cheap compared to ACA plans.
The only question is whether the cost of the college courses exceed the benefit of the cheaper health insurance, and whether I wish to dedicate the time to take the classes
A friend is a faculty and says the institution online access to books and articles often does not work. Login issues, VPN issues, cookie issues if you started the VPN after trying to access the paywalled paper (might work in incognito mode but not in normal windows), and so on. Thankfully sci-hub and libgen are easier to get the information quickly.
That's incredibly unfortunate. Is this also true for local K-12 students? In high school I lived near universities and recall my parents [0] taking me to the library to do research/reading on various topics. Including checking out books. I never did that as an adult without any kind of school affiliation, though. Mostly because until recently I didn't live near a university (or near enough for it to make sense to drive to).
[0] I didn't have a driver's license, too young at the first high school, and insurance was too much for my parents or me to afford at the second.
At my undergrad school, which was pretty open for physical access pre-COVID (who knows what happens now), I'd need to pay for a borrowing card to actually check out a book. And electronic access seems to have been tightened up. You used to be able to access most of their electronic catalog from a public terminal on the local network but you couldn't seem to do that last time I tried maybe about 18 months ago. (It wasn't a big deal so I didn't feel like bothering a librarian.)
And some universities will definitely require ID to enter the library.
At the UBC libraries, at least when I was studying there, it was common to see students yelling and running around in a hurry after returning from the washroom. Laptops, iPads, and cell phones left out in the open were common targets for thieves.
Even universities that are pretty open about physical library access tend to require credentials for electronic access. The one I use sometimes used to be pretty open so long as you were physically in a library but last I checked they seemed to have clamped down. I could probably get a day pass--I'm an alumnus--but it's definitely gotten tighter.
I think there's a difference between "university" libraries and "public" libraries in that university libraries are private for students who've paid their tuition (and faculty/staff), while public libraries are for the general public. I don't mean to be snarky, please let me know if you disagree with how the terminology works.
Edit: I also think it may be for safety reasons, they want only those authorized to be there to have access. This is most seen in closed universities where most/all buildings require IDs.
There is a downside to living in college towns. I lived in a small Southern college town for three years while my now-wife got her second degree.
It's harder to find friends for people who aren't 19. You hang out with other graduate students, locals, or university employees your age, but the pool tends to be small.
Lol Boulder and tuscon are not college towns in my opinion... I think of college town as a small town where almost all the population is directly related to the campus. I went to UC Davis. Davis is a college town. About 65k population and 30k of students. It was fun stayed for few years after school but then left. As it was not a real town it was some kind of bubble from the real world sometimes.
This poster is being unfairly downvoted. Having a college in your city does not make your city a “college town” by the colloquial definition most people would use in casual conversation. The term is generally reserved for cities that only exist outside of the rural land around them because of the state university that got placed there.
No one would ever refer to Miami Florida as a college town despite there being a major university, USF, there. Same with Tampa Florida where UCF is. But Gainesville, where UF is, would be a giant watermelon farm if the college wasn’t there so it’s referred to as a college town.
USF is in Tampa, not Miami. The major Universities in Miami are FIU and U of Miami, but the latter is in Coral Gables, and is a lot like some other college towns like Cambridge, Berkeley, or Evanston.
Is Evanston really a college town? I was in grad school there and its so close to Chicago it just feels like a suburb. I've never lived in a true small college town. In Toronto my university experience was even less of a college town feel with the campus right downtown in a city of millions.
This. My rule is if the the college never came would this place even exist? I saw someone saying Berkely is college town.. I guess people just have wildly different definitions of college town.
This is super interesting and something I've been thinking of for some time. As an engineer who can clearly do my job just as well remotely as in person, why should I pay high rent and live in cramped flat when there are rural mansions with acres of land that cost less?
The big difference is community, of course. The city has my friends, living alone away from everyone else would be lonely. But new communities can be built. I've recently started to realise how strange it is that in the West, we don't build new cities or towns any more. What's stopping a small group of engineers (perhaps backed by VCs) from buying a big plot of land a few hours of drive away from London / NYC / SF and building a small village with large houses and a community centre? Water and electricity would be difficult for sure, but I'm sure its not an unsolvable problem.
Of course, new communities like this couldn't just house engineers and other wealthy folks, but you would need health services, plumbers, delivery workers and so on. But I think it's strange that nobody is even thinking of something like this as an option. Festivals like Burning Man and the ubiquity of hiking as a hobby show that there is a need of better connection to nature amongst people who live in big cities.
Yes, with the failure of silicon valley producing a real city, like developing San Jose downtown into a world class place, I think it's clear that no matter how much money we have we won't convert these old places into something good. We are still suck with these ancient ranch houses, shitty Comcast internet, and "luxury" apartment mega complexes that are a joke and whose main purpose is clearly to be an investment rather than a quality experience.
Time to start from the ground up with things like community and general quality of life as top concerns. Investors can shove it.
I think the interesting question is: will there be college towns like we know them in a decade or two?
I'm not thinking of places that are essentially also (or adjacent to) large metropolitan areas. Austin and Durham will be fine. I'm thinking of towns where the college is basically the number one attraction and employer.
And I'd put my money on many of those towns being on the wrong-end of the remote learning trend, while only nominally on the right-end of the remote working trend.
Fewer people will be attracted to your once-attractive college town when the student population shrinks dramatically and the businesses they kept alive start to die off (restaurants, movie theaters, performance venues, etc.).
Alternately, many college towns may become more appealing for non-college students as demographics shift. Boston proper peaks at ~30% of its population being students, the main student neighborhoods are infrequently visited by those who aren't students.
I would absolutely apply to a program like this at the right university. Most of the amenities of city life (including the all-important broadband internet) without all the downsides of urban life.
I don't know about these specific programs, but a lot of college towns generally are appealing choices. There's some level of culture, dining, infrastructure, and other activities while often being fairly rural but not too isolated. I'm fine with where I live but I would absolutely consider various college towns and small cities if I were looking for somewhere to move to/retire to.
I've visited places like Missoula, MT; Bloomington, IN;, Urbana-Champaign, IL; Flagstaff, AZ; Eugene, OR; Santa Barbara, CA; Durham, NC and similar and would consider most of them.
I would not enjoy remote learning for the same reason that I don't enjoy remote working. It's not conducive to a good learning environment. Because most learning is not about the stuff on the whiteboard, but what you learn through casual conversation.
Later in my career I suspect I'll feel differently.
I have a good number of years in my career, and even still think remote work is an uphill battle. It’s not so bad if you started in an office, or visit frequently, but starting remote is challenging.
I think there are a percentage of people who love remote, but only because they’ve built the network and relationships prior to being full time remote. When they switch jobs they may find this to be challenging.
If we do move to our glorious 100% remote future, then why should colleges be any different?
Why should students, who unlike workers don't even earn money, spend a significantly higher premium than workers pay to work in a big city, for the buildings and other auxiliary stuff that colleges have, when they can just take those classes from home remotely, and pay a fraction of the costs.
2.5 hours to a major airport and 1 hour to a medium-sized airport really isn't that bad. If you live in a large metro, it probably takes 40 minutes to get to the airport because of traffic or slow transit.
2.5 hours to an airport to fly direct or 1 hour to a flight with a connection + layover is pretty terrible if you fly regularly. If you live in the major metro area you can usually find somewhere to live close to the airport.
Presumably that means Evanston would be acceptable for you?
My point is that as in everything, there will be winners and losers. I don't think people are implying that all college towns will do as well as, say, Austin, Boston, or Berkeley. Only that places like Ann Arbor, Eugene, Pittsburgh, and Madison probably have, at the least, an opportunity to take advantage of an obvious trend.
I've lived and worked near Evanston and Berkeley actually. If you're within spitting distance there are better places to live, to be honest.
My interpretation of this post was that it was trying to draw people away from major urban areas. Some of those examples you give are either in or on the edges of major cities.
The lamest thing about college bars is it's full of younger kids that don't work. The culture is a lot of "I'm invincible" instead of "I'm just another number." In my experience, people in the former are snobbish and think their shit is really good to eat. The latter is filled with people who lived and just wanna kill time or have a bit of fun.
Remote work isn't rising. Soon as COVID blows over everybody will be expected to go back to the office. The class with all the cards in employment -- the business class -- gets too warm and fuzzy from the bustle of a busy office for it to be otherwise.
While college towns mostly fit the bill, what I think people really want are vibrant, small to medium sized towns, with a lot of money. Places such as Ashville, which is not a college town, is equally desirable
It's wild that there are towns in America that will literally pay you to move there, while college towns in California like Davis and Chico have some of the most dysfunctional housing markets in the world.
Much of the economic wealth of the last 40 years has gone to the coastal states, while draining from the middle of the country. The loss of manufacturing in the path towards financialization of the economy really hollowed out opportunities in states like Indiana and West Virginia. (Though West Virginia has always kinda been on the shitlist)
This is the situation I'm in now - I attended the University of Wisconsin, loved the city enough to stick around Madison, and now have a great quality of life working remotely for a company where I'm the only employee in this timezone. There are other young people around, college sports, educational opportunities at the nearby technical college (starting night classes in their paramedic program this fall), and decent housing costs. The university facilitates a lot of this by opening up the student unions to alumni and paying members.
This "king of the castle" is probably most important, at least for middle management. To paraphrase Eric Blair, How to assert one's superiority over another if not to make them suffer?
Many remote work opportunities have arisen during this time, and it allows a lot of companies to become creative and flexible in their services. It's a good thing that people are starting to become accustomed to this new normal, and I hope many people will realize that remote work and modern technology will greatly affect the world's workforce.
Urban or suburban universities are entirely different than "college towns" particularly in the midwest and southeast.
Berkeley and Palo Alto have very little in common with these places - it would be more like Madison, Ann Arbor, Champaign and Urbana, Iowa City, Bloomington, Normal, etc.
Why would any adult want to live in a loud college town filled with children? This is candidly why I decided to take a break from Boston. It's nice once and a while when you go out / do anything social to be able to meet people who actually have jobs, are your own relative age and aren't well... college students. I really enjoyed my time in boston as a college student, but we all know one weird friend in their mid to late twenties who still thinks it's "cool" to hang out with college kids - that's also really freaking weird.
However, I'm also VERY excited to return to a small office / co-working space.
I can't speak to Boston, but in the couple college towns I've lived in, it really depends on where you go... there were certainly plenty of places where so-called townies frequented way more than the students, even in towns were the seasonal student population dwarfs the local one.
And before anybody jumps on you, I fully agree with the sentiment, college students in party mode can be extremely annoying to deal with if you aren't in the same mindset.
6th Street in Austin is a really good example of this phenomenon.
It seems weird to me to call Boston a college "town" but, yeah, you probably don't want to buy a place next to a frat. In Ithaca, I'm not going to live in Collegetown (where there's a lot of student housing and hangouts). But in my experience, it's generally pretty easy to get away from maximum student disruption.
Yes, Boston is far too large of a city to be classified as a "College Town".
And the GP commenter asked a completely valid question. The answer is clearly that most families with remote working parents and most mature couples that can remote work are not likely to prioritize a college town as a place to enjoy their years or raise a family.
Young single people who remote work seem to be the target of these efforts. And that is great because there are an increasing number of them.
This could help stimulate the socialization and dating scene for young single adults as well. Instead of relying on moving where the jobs are and doing online dating with random strangers.
>not likely to prioritize a college town as a place to enjoy their years or raise a family.
Maybe. I'd probably argue that, if you want to live in/near a smallish town/city that isn't on the outskirts of a large city, you may find ones with colleges often better than those without. Leave aside the students, there is a significant group of professionals (and alumni visiting from time to time) that can make those towns more interesting than a random small town out in the country someplace.
Of course, tourist towns can have similar although that comes with its own set of problems.
> if you want to live in/near a smallish town/city that isn't on the outskirts of a large city, you may find ones with colleges often better than those without.
Right the tradeoff is how much value your adult personality derives out of the "collegiate" side of the town over the "students" side of the town.
Definitely agreed that it's weird to "go out" (even if you're just trying to have a nice beer at a decent brewery) in college towns once you're no longer of college age. I once considered living in Burlington VT and the college kid scene was enough to eliminate it from my list of options entirely.
However, as someone who lives in a top-10 major US city right now... college towns are nice. The older I get, the more I want to buy a house, have a lawn, a garage, etc... and not only is that so expensive in my city that I'll never be able to afford it, I also don't trust my city to, say, prevent homeless folks from camping on my front lawn, breaking into my garage, stealing my bikes, etc. Or even bother cleaning my street once in a while so it isn't covered in garbage. So college towns seem like a more and more reasonable balance where I can work remotely, actually afford a house (I know they're still expensive, but not quite NYC/SF/Austin expensive), go on trips without too much traffic, and remain relatively insulated from crime. Plus they're walkable, have nice restaurants/breweries/bars/etc, and I could even adjunct teach as an option in the future.
Living in a college-adjacent town (Lansing, next to Michigan State University in East Lansing) has been pretty ideal. Somehow, students tend to stay in East Lansing for the obnoxious benders, but grad students and professors live in Lansing and the scene tends to be calmer, with nicer/cooler restaurants and bars. I never expected to stay around here for an extended time, but I have yet to be bored, and the small size means I have a lot of connections in the community.
Not only are there students in college towns, but there are a large number of highly educated faculty, administrators, and support staff in college towns. If you know the right places to go, the intellectual and artistic lives of adults in college towns can be very high level.
Also, Boston is full of colleges and universities, but has so, so, so much more. It’s all easily avoided if you care to.
There are plenty of places in Boston to avoid the college crowd. For the most part you won't see them in the nicer (i.e. more expensive) places.
If you live in South Boston, Mission Hill, Allston or certain parts of Cambridge that's all you'll be exposed to. The South End, Beacon Hill, and the entire South West sections of Boston (JP, Roslindale) are almost completely devoid of any college students.
Because it's still a town? It just happens to also have a college in it. The transient population results in more stuff (industry, services, transportation, ...) than you'd get otherwise, minus the traffic and real estate prices. There are still people of all ages just like any town. You have to go out of your way to meet students, so just don't do that.
Where you live is only half the problem. The other half is that the modern undergrad has, apparently, unlimited free time. A consequence is that if I want an ice cream cone in Berkeley I have to stand in a line 45 minutes deep. It's actually sort of a big issue!
Actually it's a notoriously bad environment for retail businesses, with astronomical rents, high labor costs, endless red tape, and a thriving industry of extortion from "neighborhood benefits organizations" and other organized criminals.
Boston has a lot of students but it's also a major coastal city. I probably wouldn't live there--but that would be because it's urban (and expensive), not because there are a fair number of students there.
a non-trivial number of people in their mid-to-late twenties are college students. not everyone starts college immediately after highschool or finishes in exactly four years. this is pretty common at non-elite schools. if you're a 25 yo full-time college student, who tf else are you going to hang out with?
I wish "college towns" would die. They're everything that's wrong with tourism towns but with a significant portion of the population not having the life experience to realize they're being taken for a ride whereas at least with tourism everyone's on the same page about it.
A largely transient population creates economic incentives to create and perpetuate all sorts of bad and immoral behavior.
And by "bad and immoral" I'm not talking about drinking to excess and the bar that doesn't ID, I'm talking about running a predatory towing company, being a jerk slumlord landlord because your tenants won't be around to take you to court, etc. etc. Often times the local governments even try and take a cut by engaging in revenue policing (as if they weren't already in a better revenue position than the surrounding towns). And when you're in an economic environment like that the only way to get ahead is to do all the bad things everyone else is doing. You can't run an honest business when your commercial landlord is setting rates based on the profits of all the dishonest businesses.
Also, anecdotally, I went to UC Davis and have not seen any slumlord type of housing in that city. I'm sure there are other college towns with slumlords. But they also exist in any other city.
OK. I got the thing about towing and the city horning in on towing revenue, and collegiate slumlords, but I don't see how that impacts commercial rents. What dishonest types of businesses are you referring to?
>What dishonest types of businesses are you referring to?
Crazy markups at retail, over charging for services, exploitative labor practices against a labor pool that is mostly ill-informed of their rights. And it all rolls around in a giant cycle that nobody can break out of. This is basically a 1:1 copypasta from a seasonal tourism economy.
The guy who wants to run an honest bookstore on mains street can't afford the rent because the rent reflects the money you'd make importing overpriced clothes branded with the town name. The commercial landlord can't lower the rent because the plumber and electrician know there's big bucks to be made so they charge accordingly. The guy who wants to run a landscaping service has to charge the plumber big bucks to grade his yard and work his employees to the bone because the tire shop charged him $2k to put $500 tires on his skid steer because he's being screwed by his landlord who's being screwed by his plumber.
And this rat race where everything is inflated wears out and runs down the people who want to make an honest living (they tend to get out if they can). And eventually over time the only people left are the ones who drink the kool-aid and the ones who don't see anything wrong with this sort of "screw everyone as hard as you can every time, you win some you lose some but hopefully you win more in the end" behavior that becomes the default in the local economy.
I'm sure (just like tourist towns) some college towns are better and some are worse depending on how much of the local industry money gleaned from the transient population represents.
