I was in a conversation, actually another blog thread, the other day on the subject of job education requirements.

I think education is a fine thing. Everyone should have one as a child. They can learn how to keep it dusted and when to haul it out to impress the relatives.

At least that’s the case with education as it is practiced in the USA.

Now, if you want to talk about Education, as in learning a subject for competence, able to demonstrate skill, ability to produce a predictable result. Hell, I’m all for that too. I just wish we had such a thing.

In my earlier conversation, the one that started this ramble, we had as our subject the Information Technology industry, one I have been familiar with for the last twenty years. When I started, it had been possible for someone to walk in, demonstrate competence, and have a job. Especially when the personal computers exploded onto the market, many of the arbitraries got set aside and competence, willingness, skill and ability to learn could outweigh any lack of paper credentials.

Those days are done.

Today we drown in vast pools of paper experts. People whose qualification is that they managed to sit through four or six or eight years of college, people whose qualification is the diploma, the certificate, the paper–also known as the ticket. Their parent’s money didn’t run out. They were able to get enough loans. And the school looked the other way at drunken binges that had a good percentage of the student body barfing on street corners two or three or four nights out of seven.

Often the subjects taught and the degree obtained are in a field of complete uselessness, completely dreamed up, unproven, unworkable and not needed. Professions whose practitioners leave destruction and confusion in their wakes. Psychologists and MBA’s come to mind, but they are far from alone. Even the technical subjects require no demonstration of competence, no hard measure of skill. All that matters is getting the paper at the end, the ticket.

These paper tigers gravitate to positions where no hard product is seen, where failure is always due to the environment or business conditions or whatever. In those environments, all that matters is the ticket.

When the ticket is the only qualification one has, defense of the ticket’s value becomes a very, very serious thing. Allowing the merely competent, the ticketless, to work or advance demonstrates rather dramatically the real value of the ticket. For those in this age of ignorance, our new age of ignorance, whose only qualification is the ticket, requirements for competence or skill cannot be allowed to threaten the value of that piece of paper.

At times in my career, I have been in the position of interviewing applicants–and in the process turning away four year IT degree holders who were clueless. I remember taking one aside, telling him to buy a computer and learn how to use it.

Could he have learned this in school? Sure, if he had demanded of himself that he learn. But it was not required by the school. At the same time, I had applicants who had taught themselves. Being a practicing professional myself, I was in the position to judge whether the self-taught knew their stuff.

Very often they did.

I’m sure you can guess which I hired.

This, of course, could only go on for so long, especially in large companies. There is a group of people who should properly spend their time filing papers with the government and making sure paychecks are for the proper amounts. They used to be called the “Personnel Department.” It was an honest name for an honest function. However, there’s no ring to that, not much of a claim to power.

Today, as part of their move to the center stage, they are called Human Resources. Replete with a complete and dazzling set of pseudosciences, they now demand respect.

One of the primary functions of Human Resources is to ensure that the tickets are respected. It is not hard to understand why. Each of the HR mucky-mucks advances, if they advance, primarily on the value of their own ticket. It has to be so because the jobs they hold have almost no valid measure of performance. Worse, if the jobs were required to be validly measured, it would have to be done by HR personnel, who typically have no clue how to do such a task.

When it comes to technical fields, such as computer systems, HR people, being as intentionally ignorant of the Information Technology as they are of the details of any industry, are compelled to insist on the paper–this protects the value of their own tickets and gives them something with which to cover their behinds when a new hire fails.

When I wanted entrance into the industry, even twenty years ago, some kind of degree, even a minimal one, was already becoming part of the dues. Having by then been in that exact fight a few times, I swallowed my pride and spent the few years to get the piece of paper. Not that my time in school was a complete waste—I met my wife there. But my IT skills? Those I learned of desire and necessity. Though I picked up a few new skills while in college and the school (to their credit) made it easier to do, I would have acquired the skills anyway if needed–I already knew more than most grads when I started my classes.

Since then one of the saddest things I have seen is doors closing on bright, talented people because they are not in the club.

This reflects a continuing degradation in society, a calcification visible not just in the IT field. When it comes right down to it, we’re not very far from hereditary positions. How far? I don’t know. One generation? Probably not. Two? Three? Five? Maybe. The point is that once competence is thrown out as the key job requirement, the rest comes easy. Many parents want a sure thing for their drooling children. Virtually the entire cycle of royalty was, after the initial power grab, no more than that–seeing to it that junior did not have to compete and did not have to earn a place. We have the same motives in action today, buried under different guises and names, but with the exact same intent.

In every society there are parasites. The longer the society is in place, the more chances the parasites have to find a way to do their leaching. Our society is no different.

Historically, this is all very predictable. Yet is not a pleasant thing to watch.