I want to yap about working as a lecturer in a university that prepare students for the industry like a trade school. Specifically, I want to yap about specific members of a specific industry saying stuff about my school.
I’ll drop some context. The school used to heavily cater to the games industry and I was an alumni who work in that industry and returned to teach. The school has grown a lot a decade after my graduation. Cohort sizes has ballooned thanks to a partnership with the local govnerment, the local games industry as well as tech industries changed, and the school’s degrees slowly pivoted to understandably cater to the new technology and industrys.
If I learnt anything, at the end of the day, a school is a business and will be forced to react to the industry’s needs. I do not wholly agree with every decision the school makes, but I do understand their decisions with respect to that.
My gripe is that there are alot of alumni from the games industry, my peers or otherwise, who keeps suggesting or complaining to me (and my collegue who is also an alumni) about the school. There’s a few variations, but I realized that an appaling amount of people in the industry really have no idea how school works, and some don’t seem to acknowledge my words despite me repeatedly telling them what is happening and what they should do!
The first kind are the alumni that reached niche positions (like lead graphics engineer) who tell us that he is appalled by undergraduate’s standards from the school. For context, they are talking about the ComSci degrees we offer that made students learn how to make game engines from scratch. Like look, the reality is that there wasn’t enough positions for a graphics programmer locally, or even game engine programmers . Of course the school will focus less on these topics, simply because the demand is not there!
Sometimes they will say that if the standard continues like this, they fear that the school will lose its niche. I’m glad they are worries but a business or a school simply does not hold onto a niche forever. In fact, if the degree held on to its niche back then, it will probably start dying out considering that the games industry itself requires less and less of it! Heck, when we asked these alumni if they can hire our graduates, their answer is usually “oh we are not looking right now.” Who is looking then? I wonder if these people are so talented in their craft that they are able to ascend to their high positions without thinking about how a company runs? Or is it a common blind spot in their thinking to not think about these things, in which maybe a meetup should solve.
Or do people just generally not care enough?
This brings me to the second kind: the one who just complains and yaps but refuses to take action. I guess this is a semi-rant about how some people hold conversations. There are alumni who come up to me to rant about what they are worried about wrt the industry and the school. But when I offer them suggestions, they either shut the conversation down or steer the conversation elsewhere.
For example, oftentimes they would say that they are (rightfully so) worried about how the school isn’t moving the right direction and that the ‘industry’ (usually just meaning the company they work in) are not going to hire my students and that this will somehow lead to the downfall of the industry. Alumni that graduated as digital artists from my school will also try to tell me that AI is doomed and warn me to tell the school not to invest in it. Okay, let’s propose that AI indeed is doomed, or that the students are not following their ‘industry standards’, I told them to give a visit to the school and talk to people about it if they are care so much. Everyone stops right there, giving all kinds of excuses like “oh the school won’t listen to me”, etc. Like wtf? Can’t you just admit that you don’t care as much as you claim?
(In my perspective, AI is growing at an insane speed that’s affecting many industrys, some for better, some for worse).
I guess this is also what makes me treasure certain groups of friends, friends who openly admit their flaws and work around them instead of turning a blind eye. It’s kind of upsetting to see people you grow up with echo-chamber themselves to the point where they cannot accept things outside their chamber (and they even use this ’echo-chamber’ anology to shut off other groups of people! The irony!).
By far to me, the most interesting thing is that the people I know who can accept how school and industry works are people who are very far detached from this system! There’s a chinese proverb about a “frog in a well”; is it possible that people who stay to long in a system is a “frog in a well” that they created for themselves? Hmm..