I have similar experience. LLM is about as good as Google was before enshittification. All it does it replaces 10 minutes of me searching for the correct piece of documentation with 2~3 minutes of using LLM to grab the same information.

Intern could find it for me in an hour, two if he used LLM since AI works much better with jargon.

This was my mindset when I dropped out of college after a year. I then entered the working professional world and did that for 10 years. Then, while still working full time professionally, I went back and completed my degree. What I found was that I had been missing a lot that college filled in those gaps. I was much more successful after getting my degree.

Different experience then. After finishing university I had to learn a lot in my first job in the exact field university was for.

More importantly, college teaches you how to learn.

Strongly disagree, but perhaps your college had special training on this. Mine just gave me material and told me to learn. There was nearly no difference in grades between people who worked on their education daily/weekly and those who just marathoned through this on last week before exams. The biggest “effort” in some cases was either getting over 50% attendance or buying book authored by professor. Luckily it was mostly for some niche subjects.

What I was missing was understanding of the organization, finances, law, markets, geopolitical impacts, risk management/mitigation, and sometimes even the ethics.

If those were part of a single college course, it must have lasted for a decade to cover all of that. At which point job market will prefer person with 10 years of experience instead.

I don’t think I can fully understand your position. I neither been a college dropout, neither have I ever wanted to know why company I work for makes specific decisions. I don’t even have ambition and pride necessary to switch from position of expert to position of manager. From the very beginning of my university years my goal was to become a specialist and never ever agree to any position that would require skills that I neither posses nor are passionate about. At which I largely succeeded. My chances of advancement are zero by choice and I hope I will manage to keep them this way.

What I was aiming at is that university often misses tools, frameworks and knowledge that is more up to date with needs of current job market, instead opting to “give a good base” that is also half a decade outdated in most optimistic case. I guess my take does not match goal “let’s advance as high as we can in company”.

Thank you for your story though - it was an interesting food for thought.

I have several mixed opinions on this.

University is deliberately prolonged. They give you small snippets of knowledge and tell you that you need to wait a week for the next snippet, frequently with knowledge that makes sense only when you have all the pieces shown together referencing each other. And then exam at the end - it rewards people who laze through most of the course and only start learning in the last month or week before exam, turning most of the education into stamp-collecting game similar to watching a tv series (and people marathon/binge those too).

Most of the university education is also worthless on job market. 90% of knowledge you will be using in a company will be company-specific (processes, rules, tools, people) and thus not possible to gain at the university. Employers require university degree as a proof that you are able to come to the same boring, tedious place and waste your time for eight hours a day, five days a week each week. Online courses would be better off tied to specific companies rather than to degrees.

Then again I firmly believe no skill can be attained through theory alone. Not every university has practical exams, but no online course has them at all. This is, I guess, the only advantage of universities. Perhaps a hybrid system would be best? Theory can be learned at your own pace from online course, but then exams - both theoretical and practical, must be done at the physical location.

China institutionalized what USA prefers to make private.

Bar to become enemy of British crown is getting lower and lower…

I’ll be frank with you. As long as my customers are captive on either Apple or Google platforms I can’t do shit.

I second that. I was initially skeptical about switching to Linux Mint, but every game in my Steam library works perfectly the same as on Windows.