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http://philip.greenspun.com/ancient-history/professionalism-for-software-engineers

This is related to this guy's really insightful article about why there are so few women inscience. Short answer: they found better jobs.

I think his advice for how to really get more women in science is applicable here too:

When employers are seriously about hiring more people with certain qualifications, they pay them more. Harvard University, where this entire debate occurred, earned $4.5 billion in investment income in 2006. The basic operation of the university, research and teaching, was cashflow-neutral and therefore Harvard could spend this $4.5 billion in any way that it chooses. Typically universities spend their tax-free investment winnings on lavish real estate development, e.g., $200 million buildings by signature architects that Saddam Hussein or a Saudi royal would have been proud to include among his palaces, and thus we may infer that lavish new buildings are a real priority for them.

With control of the budget at a university, one could change the sex ratio in science and math very quickly. Here's how it might look:

• female undergraduates majoring in science or math pay no tuition, room, or board fees. If a woman maintains an A average, she gets a stipend of $10,000 per year to spend however she wishes.
• female graduate students in science and math earn $70,000 per year, about triple what male graduate students earn.
• female assistant professors in science and math earn a starting salary of $300,000 per year, up there with the average medical specialist
• female tenured professors in science and math get paid $500,000 per year, comparable to what a high-talent professional might earn in mid-career

What would this cost? The Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences employs 700 professors, only a small portion of whom are in science or math. Suppose that our goal is to switch 200 faculty positions from being held by men to being held by women. That would cost approximately $50 million per year in incremental salary by the preceding schedule. Adding in the costs for a (well-paid) mostly-female population of math and science students, it would be difficult to get to a cost of $100 million per year, or only about 1/45th of investment income.

If a woman scientist is worth more to the university and to society than a male scientist, she should be paid more. The fact that she isn't indicates that this issue is lower priority than any of the things that the universities does spend money on, e.g., those palatial new buildings.

"Adjusted for IQ, quantitative skills, and working hours, jobs in science are the lowest paid in the United States."

I studied Math. Not the worst possible choice for an undergrad, really: the level of conceptual abstraction and logical rigor make it difficult, maybe even somewhat more so than some other technical fields, but in terms of sheer number of hours of coursework, it's considerably shorter than engineering, which allows a student to take a lot of other courses and still graduate in a reasonable amount of time. And it's a pretty good education, too.

I don't think I'd do it again.

It's exceptionally clear that not only does the marketplace value other skills (law, finance, business adminstration, plumbing) more highly, but that 90% of the population doesn't even understand what it is you learned. I'd have been far better off to pick a Math minor for core skills and rigor and pair it with an Econ or Business Major. And let's not even go to the Electrical Engineering degree I originally considered. Unless you're doing it for sheer love, it's a waste of time.

That's the general prognosis. As a career choice, STEM fields offer mediocre to middlin' rewards. Particularly when you consider the alternatives.

With all due respect, I don't think you know what you're talking about. A good text editor, even one that'll give you diffs, is nowhere near as fast and as easy as Word's track changes system. As Philip Greenspun, well-known Microsoft shill, says regarding his book writing project:

At least at Macmillan, everyone collaborates using Microsoft Word. I'd wanted to write my book in HTML using Emacs, the text editor I've been using since 1978. That way I wouldn't have to do any extra work to produce the on-line edition and I wouldn't be slowed down by leaving Emacs (the world's most productive text editor, though a bit daunting for first-time users and useless for the kind of fancy formatting that one can do with Frame, Pagemaker, or Word). Macmillan said that the contract provision to use Word was non-negotiable and now I understand why. Microsoft Word incorporates a fairly impressive revision control system. With revision control turned on, you can see what you originally wrote with a big line through it. If you put the mouse over the crossed-out text, Word tells you that "Angela Allen at Ziff Davis Press crossed this out on March 1, 1997 at 2:30 pm." Similarly, new text shows up in a different color and Word remembers who added it. Finally, it is possible to define special styles for, say, Tech Reviewer Comments. These show up in a different color and won't print in the final manuscript.

As for your comment about free software, I'd observe that a) everyone I have to collaborate with has Word and b) only one other person I know has OO.org, which also looks hideously ugly on OS X and, when I've tried to use it, crashes frequently. Most professional writers appear to use Word. That they don't migrate en masse to text editors, which have been around since at least the 1970s, shows that there must be some advantage, even if it's merely network effects, to using Word.

From:
"How to Become As Rich As Bill Gates"
http://philip.greenspun.com/bg/
"""
William Henry Gates III made his best decision on October 28, 1955, the night he was born. He chose J.W. Maxwell as his great-grandfather. Maxwell founded Seattle's National City Bank in 1906. His son, James Willard Maxwell was also a banker and established a million-dollar trust fund for William (Bill) Henry Gates III. In some of the later lessons, you will be encouraged to take entrepreneurial risks. You may find it comforting to remember that at any time you can fall back on a trust fund worth many millions of 1998 dollars.
"""

In Bill Gates' own language, "Is this fair?" The guy is born a multi-millionaire, writes his commercial software on publicly funded computer at Harvard, learned to write software by dumpster diving at a computer center, and then, after all that, he writes a letter like this? That's chutzpah. From:
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bill_Gates
"The best way to prepare [to be a programmer] is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and fished out listings of their operating system."

Bill Gate's could have spent his lifetime writing free software. That being born a multi-millionaire was not enough for him is a sign of an illness that causes "financial obesity", not something to be emulated. But, in the end, it is not Bill Gates who has destroyed our society as much as all the people who want to be the next Bill Gates and support regressive social policies they hope to benefit from someday.

From:
"The Wrath of the Millionaire Wannabe's"
http://conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/47/
"""
Of course eventually, these guy realize that not only are they not millionaires, they're not making much progress toward that noble goal. That's when they get ugly. You see, they see themselves as capable, intelligent, hard working people - and they are for the most part - who "have what it takes" to "make it". They believe that the difference between those who "make it" and those who don't is being "capable, intelligent and hardworking". Things like "having rich parents", "getting just plain lucky" or "being a crook" don't factor into the equation anywhere. No, American society is a natural hierarchy where the most capable are "rich beyond their wildest dreams", and the non-rich are chumps that just don't measure up. ... But here's something I'll bet the dittoheads haven't thought of. Maybe they're the chumps. Maybe they've been sold a bogus "American dream" that never existed. Maybe "the rules" they play by were written by the people who have "made it" - not by the people who haven't. And maybe - just maybe - the people who have "made it" wrote those rules to keep the wannabes chasing a dream that's a mirage. Maybe Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and Samuel Adams didn't fight to make the world safe for John D. Rockefeller - or Don LaPre, either. Maybe the Rolls Royce complete with bimbo was left out of our inalienable rights for a reason. Maybe the "pursuit of happiness" Thomas Jefferson wrote about was something a bit more profound than the empty joy of owning things you don't need so you can look down of down on the lesser mortals who lack your "ability". Maybe Thomas Jefferson intended the "pursuit of happiness" to be something attainable not just for anybody - but for everybody.
"""

See also the way that programmers could afford to work for "free" making free stuff:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income

Bill Gates is a smart and creative and hard working guy, no one can dispute that. It is too bad he did not apply that to helping all of societ

I think it is actually destructive to suggest that creativity and inspiration are not important in science jobs, because the types of jobs that do not require these (in other words, that require a certain level of knowledge but are describable and repetitive), tend to be outsourced to contractors.

I don't think he suggested that creativity and inspiration are unimportant. They are. He just suggested that a dose of reality was good. I think he has a point. If you can find part of the reality tolerable, interesting or even fascinating, then it's worth considering as a career (or hobby). If not, why waste 4-5 years? Or 6-8 years? Why the bait and switch?

http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/

"Summers was deservedly castigated, but not for the right reasons. He claimed to be giving a comprehensive list of reasons why there weren't more women reaching the top jobs in the sciences. Yet Summers, an economist, left one out: Adjusted for IQ, quantitative skills, and working hours, jobs in science are the lowest paid in the United States.

Pursuing science as a career seems so irrational that one wonders why any young American would do it. Yet we do find some young Americans starting out in the sciences and they are mostly men. When the Larry Summers story first broke, I wrote in my Weblog:

A lot more men than women choose to do seemingly irrational things such as become petty criminals, fly homebuilt helicopters, play video games, and keep tropical fish as pets (98 percent of the attendees at the American Cichlid Association convention that I last attended were male). Should we be surprised that it is mostly men who spend 10 years banging their heads against an equation-filled blackboard in hopes of landing a $35,000/year post-doc job?

Having been both a student and teacher at MIT, my personal explanation for men going into science is the following:

1. young men strive to achieve high status among their peer group
2. men tend to lack perspective and are unable to step back and ask the question "is this peer group worth impressing?"

Consider Albert Q. Mathnerd, a math undergrad at MIT ("Course 18" we call it). He works hard and beats his chest to demonstrate that he is the best math nerd at MIT. This is important to Albert because most of his friends are math majors and the rest of his friends are in wimpier departments, impressed that Albert has even taken on such demanding classes. Albert never reflects on the fact that the guy who was the best math undergrad at MIT 20 years ago is now an entry-level public school teacher in Nebraska, having failed to get tenure at a 2nd tier university. When Albert goes to graduate school to get his PhD, his choice will have the same logical foundation as John Hinckley's attempt to impress Jodie Foster by shooting Ronald Reagan.

It is the guys with the poorest social skills who are least likely to talk to adults and find out what the salary and working conditions are like in different occupations. It is mostly guys with rather poor social skills whom one meets in the university science halls.

What about women? Don't they want to impress their peers? Yes, but they are more discriminating about choosing those peers. I've taught a fair number of women students in electrical engineering and computer science classes over the years. I can give you a list of the ones who had the best heads on their shoulders and were the most thoughtful about planning out the rest of their lives. Their names are on files in my 'medical school recommendations' directory."

— Phil Greenspun, Women in Science

"Adjusted for IQ, quantitative skills, and working hours, jobs in science are the lowest paid in the United States. This article explores [a] possible explanation for the dearth of women in science: They found better jobs."

— Philip Greenspun Women in Science

This article explores this fourth possible explanation for the dearth of women in science: They found better jobs.

Basically, it argues that men are too stubborn and competitive to get out of math/science when they should.

This is not news. Baboons do this too.

From: http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=482576

The Austin Chronicle
http://www.austinchronicle.com/issues/dispatch/2001-07-27/cols_smartypants.html

"Stone-throwing baboons in Saudi Arabia waited three days on the side
of a mountain road to take revenge on a driver who had killed one of
their group.

Al-Riyadh reported on Saturday that the primates laid in wait and
ambushed the driver on the same mountain road in southwest Saudi
Arabia from Mecca to Taif where the baboon had been run down earlier
in the week.

After spotting the car responsible for the death, one of the apes
screamed out a signal to the rest to attack, provoking the frenzied
stone throwing. Although the driver was able to escape, the apes broke
out the windshield of his car.

At least 350,000 baboons live in the Gulf state."

LUSENET: STONE-THROWING BABOONS TAKE REVENGE ON DRIVER
http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=004CxB

"In Saudi Arabia, a man learned a lesson in baboon gang warfare.
Apparently, earlier in the week the man was driving through a
mountainous road where he ran over a baboon. Thinking nothing of it,
the driver got back in his car and resumed his life... Finally, the
grieving baboons implemented their revenge. They lay hiding on the
side of the exact mountainous road where their beloved pal had been
killed and waited for the driver. When the car was spotted, one of the
baboons screamed out a signal and the others began to bombard the car
with rocks and stones. The driver escaped, sporting newly soiled
underwear and a broken windshield."

Tablet Newspaper: Monkey Love
http://www.tabletnewspaper.com/vol2iss_21/features/monkeylove.htm

"Stone-throwing baboons waited three days for revenge on the side of a
mountain road in Saudi Arabia to take revenge on a motorist who had
killed one of their group. After finally spotting the car responsible
for the death, one of the apes screamed out a signal for the rest to
attack, provoking a frenzied bout of stone throwing. The baboons then
ripped out the windscreen of the car. The driver managed to escape the
attack, which took place on the same stretch of road, between Mecca
and Taif, where the baboon had been run down."

Ananova: Revenge attack by stone-throwing baboons
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/academic/class/16741-s05/www/baboons09122000.pdf

"Stone-throwing baboons in Saudi Arabia waited three days on the side
of a mountain road to take revenge on a driver who had killed one of
their group. Al-Riyadh reported on Saturday that the primates laid in
wait and ambushed the driver on the same mountain road in southwest
Saudi Arabia from Mecca to Taif where the baboon had been run down
earlier in the week. After spotting the car responsible for the death,
one of the apes screamed out a signal to the rest to attack, provoking
the frenzied stone throwing. Although the driver was able to escape,
the apes broke out the windshield of his car. At least 350,000 baboons
live in the Gulf state. Who says animals have no emotions? If you can
plot revenge, you must be able to feel anger."

The Jekyl Archives
http://www.jekyl.com/jekyl/arc_2000.htm

"Saudi Arabia is particularly baboon prone these days, with tales of
baboons raiding farms, houses, and even schools. But probably the
strangest report was where a troop deliberately wait in ambush.
According to newspaper accounts,

We (meaning America) needs to start churning out more home-grown techies.

Not necessarily. Maybe we can just make do with nothing more than a comparative advantage is in management, insurance, banking, and finance! ;)

Seriously, I'm not sure that the problem is that we can't produce technically proficient and brilliant folks who can advance science. The problem very well may be that as our society doesn't reward these people very well, particularly in comparison to how well it rewards lawyers, medical specialists, and MBAs. Phil Greenspun's classic Women in Science explores this (and is actually far more about the problem of rewards for a scientific career than it is specifically about gender distribution in said careers).

I really don't hold out a lot of hope for this. Academia would be hard to change, but it's changeable, and it's probably easier to steer on a public policy level than the private sector. As for the private sector... our culture there is quite simply primed to value marketers and legal talent and management more than production workers. In fact, it's pretty much a solid tenet in the business world since the advent of industrialism that you want to make production labor as fungible as possible. We've liked to believe that creative/knowledge/information workers are immune from the reach of this, but they're not. The culture will drive management and owners to see science and engineering talent as a production resource and cost center. The other thing -- worse still -- is that it might well be true that legal, finance, and management talent can bring capital holders and business owners better returns than technical talent. At least over the last 30 years or so.

Combine that with the fact that technical fields of study involve some hard intellectual work. And then add to that the problem that even with recent geek chic, there are still plenty of other professions with higher social status (on top of monetary rewards). I really doubt we're going to see any change in whether the US produces more science and engineering talent. Maybe the following could happen, though, in rough order from most to least likely:

1) The economies of foreign countries become better places for their own talent to stay. They don't emigrate here, and local demand grows enough outsourcing isn't cheap either. Scientific / engineering talent becomes more expensive, and people who might have done something else decide it's worthwhile.
2) Education, cultural, and policy changes encourage scientists and engineers to become more entrepreneurial and reap more rewards from their disciplinary sweat equity, so the potential financial rewards rise.
3) Our downturn and narratives about our downturn become so severe towards bankers, finance folks, C-execs, and other suitlike entitites that capital holders and business are reluctant to shower them with rich financial rewards.

We still want to encourage immigration though.

It's true, immigration itself is a somewhat selective process, and being somewhat selective beyond that brings high-quality labor and potential social capital into the system.

However... I don't know about the H1-B model. Seems to me it mostly allows us to place our finger on the scales of balance between talent and compensation.

What's wrong with the standard undergraduate computer science curriculum

(I didn't experience many of the problems in the article at my university, but that's no surprise as I found that link when I was looking through the Director of Studies' website. And friends in civil engineering were always bitching about stuff in the concrete lab not working like it was meant to, or EEs were saying how often the real-world didn't really match up with the theory-world.)

It's old now, and I found the author to be a bit of a know-it-all, but the book itself was great. No code, no requirements, just ideas on making a website useful.

http://philip.greenspun.com/panda/

http://philip.greenspun.com/bg/

I think Philip Greenspun's Career Guide for Engineers and Computer Scientists is probably the most inspiring and useful web page you'll ever view.

There's a link my brother sent me awhile back with a guy with an interesting theory about why there are more men than women in advanced sciences.

http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science

Almost all these replies citing luck, talent, and hard work, and knowledge (all true), leave out a key aspect -- the way you can get or buy all these (or by having free *time* and access to *tools* can develop them), and that thing is access to capital (dollar-denominated ration units in our society). Bill Gates had a lot of ration units (capital) to give him free time and access to tools and learning because his family was wealthy and he was born with a big trust fund. See:
    "How to be as Rich As Bill Gates"
    http://philip.greenspun.com/bg/
"William Henry Gates III made his best decision on October 28, 1955, the night he was born. He chose J.W. Maxwell as his great-grandfather. Maxwell founded Seattle's National City Bank in 1906. His son, James Willard Maxwell was also a banker and established a million-dollar trust fund for William (Bill) Henry Gates III. In some of the later lessons, you will be encouraged to take entrepreneurial risks. You may find it comforting to remember that at any time you can fall back on a trust fund worth many millions of 1998 dollars."

Oh, and Bill Gates dumpster dived at a computer center in his formative years as well:
    http://danbricklin.com/log/2004_03_11.htm#paw
"Interviewer: Is studying computer science the best way to prepare to be a programmer?
Gates: No, the best way to prepare is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and I fished out listings of their operating systems. You've got to be willing to read other people's code, and then write your own, then have other people review your code. You've got to want to be in this incredible feedback loop where you get the world-class people to tell you what you're doing wrong..."

What he describes here sounds a lot like what the free and open source community of programmers does. :-) Not what Microsoft does. He had the guts to drop out of college (Harvard), true, but he also had the safety net of personal wealth already. Starting with wealth and others' information are key aspects of the Bil Gates story (and understanding our society), and it is unfortunate this is all not better known. It puts his early letter to hobbyists in a new perspective, where an already rich guy (from inheritance) claimed poorer hobbyists sharing knowledge and content were hurting this guy economically who already was very wealthy and had gotten a lot of what he knew from reading through others' discarded printouts. (That sharing was before copyright infringement was a felony, by the way, as the laws have been made stricter since to further protect people like Bill Gates.)

I don't know which is worse:
* the ethical hyprocrisy of Gates' letter:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists
* the defense of Gates and the US economic system by "Millionaire Wannabees" who do not know of this history.
    "The Wrath of the Millionaire Wannabe's"
    http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/47
"But here's something I'll bet the dittoheads haven't thought of. Maybe they're the chumps. Maybe they've been sold a bogus "American dream" that never existed. Maybe "the rules" they play by were written by the people who have "made it" - not by the people who haven't. And maybe - just maybe - the people who have "made it" wrote those rules to keep the wannabes chasing a dream that's a mirage."

That would be the Parisians. But the French fishermen would blockade the harbours, the French truckers would blockade the ferry ports and oil refineries, while the French farmers will blockade strategic locations such as the trains, the tunnels, and Disneyland.

I hate having to repost this, but it really becomes relevant to every single discussion of the supposed "failure" of science education at any level in the United States:

Adjusted for IQ, quantitative skills, and working hours, jobs in science are the lowest paid in the United States.

The best article written about this was by Philip Greenspun (MIT Prof) at http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science

The best quote from the article was this: "I've taught a fair number of women students in electrical engineering and computer science classes over the years. I can give you a list of the ones who had the best heads on their shoulders and were the most thoughtful about planning out the rest of their lives. Their names are on files in my "medical school recommendations" directory."

Exactly. Small planes are unregulated and hence much, much more unsafe. The crash record for small planes is staggeringly higher than the commercial industry.

Commercial plane crash stats:
http://www.planecrashinfo.com/cause.htm

http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/safety

This makes general aviation, with 16 deaths per 1 million hours, roughly 20 times as dangerous per hour than driving. .... Big airliners have a fatal crash rate of 0.34 per million flight hours, approximately 50 times safer than general aviation. Try to avoid that final commuter hop, though. Those smaller turboprops crash 10 times as frequently per hour of operation, making them only 5 times as safe as general aviation.

So, commercial flights are safer than driving. Private planes are definitely NOT - but many times depends on pilot.

Finally, private cesna flying is slower than driving because you can't fly in many conditions.

Probably something similar to Philip Greenspun's excellent "Career Guide for Engineers and Computer Scientists". It's probably a good lesson.

http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/

Look, a candidate who can write code obviously may not have an edge over one who can't -- in fact, given the aptness of Philip Greenspun's comparison of pilots vs programmers (see here: http://philip.greenspun.com/materialism/early-retirement/aviation ), it's entirely possible programming skill isn't a great test of broad intellectual ability. :)

But tech issues absolutely underly quite a few other issues of economics and liberty, and those are certainly have a weight equal to other big issues like foreign policy.

But I think there's an even bigger reason why tech workers *definitely* should be looking at how candidates understand and address issues they understand. Because this is the arena where *you* may actually know enough, as a professional, to really gauge a candidates policy acumen. I doubt most slashdotters are experts in military tactics or nation building. Most of us have a shallow grasp of economics -- yes, even most of you Austrian school autodidacts. Same goes for health care, education, criminology, etc -- Slashdot readers may be smart laymen, but that's all most of us are in those fields.

But lots of us are IT pros. And if a candidate seems to really get it in the area where you can tell buzzspeak and platitudes from real knowledge, that tells you quite a bit about their ability to reach into an issue, understand it, and formulate a plan to do something about it.

It's worth paying attention to.

Generation of Bits
Tales of shame and degradation in the Big Idea Lab
by Hunter S. Negroponte

Too Many Bits

The other day I was thanking my good friend Former President Bush (or ``George'' as I call him) for pulling some strings to get my brother out of that Iran-Contra mess, and he asked me if I knew any hot technologies he could sink his Presidential Pension into. In my opinion, the smart money is on filters. It's getting so you can't read Usenet without seeing that ``Dave Jordan'' Ponzi letter followed by forty replies from dickless wannabes threatening to mail-bomb the poster's sysadmin for the ``innapropriate post.'' Of course, I personally have my staff of Elegant British Women pre-edit my .newsrc for me (God how I envy the British), but that option is not open to the unwired masses outside the Media Lab.

One way to eliminate the blather while keeping the First Amendment intact is to create active ``Filter Agents,'' as I like to call them, that presort my Netnews articles and eliminate the tiresome pseudo-commercial posts. Can you imagine what the net's raw content will look like when all the half-literate morons in the U.S. can publish any text that their tiny minds ooze? The very thought makes me want to refill my glass with the '56 Chateau Lafite. America's Intelligentsia will need some serious Digital Butlers guarding our Offramp on the Digital Highway's Mailing Lists (damn metaphors) when this comes to pass.

The Big Lie

Media Lab critics (there have been a few) have occasionally questioned the practical application of our work. Well, have you heard about the Holographic Television? No longer a device found only in the back of comic books, we've actually made this sucker work. An honest-to-god motion-picture hologram, produced in the Media Lab basement on a 2000 pound holography table by computers, lasers and mirrors spinning at 30,000 RPM. It's real! It works! Life Magazine even came in to photograph it in action (of course, they had to fill the room with smoke so the lasers would show up on film). Practical application? Sure, it requires a 2000 pound air-suspended rock table and a Connection Machine II to run, but hell, everyone knows the price of computing power and 2000 pound rock tables is cut in half every year. My point, however, is more mundane: we have created a demo literally from smoke and mirrors, and the Corporate World bought it. Even my good friend Penn (or ``Penn,'' as I call him) Jillette would be proud.

In fact, I'm a few points up on Penn. You may have heard of the Interactive Narrative work that is proceeding in the lab. Folks, I'll be honest with you for a moment. I know as well as you do that it's a stinking load of horseshit. Roger Ebert said ``Six thousand years ago sitting around a campfire a storyteller could have stopped at any time and asked his audience how they wanted the story to come out. But he didn't because that would have ruined the story.'' You think Hollywood would have learned this lesson from the monster ``success'' that Clue, the Movie enjoyed several years ago. But no! I've repackaged the ``Choose your own Adventure'' novels of childhood as Digital Information SuperHighway Yadda Yadda crap, and again, they bought it! Sony right this minute is building an interactive movie theater, with buttons the audience can push to amuse themselves as the story progresses. Dance for me, Corporate America! I'm SHIT-HOT!

Why, just the other day I listened to a member of my staff explain to potential sponsors that we had spent $US 4,000,000 of Japanese sponsor dollars to construct a widescreen version of ``I Love Lucy'' from the original source. And HE SAID IT WITH A STRAIGHT FACE! CAN YOU FUCKING BELIEVE THAT? Boy, I bet those Nips wish they had their money back now! Earthquake? No, we can't do much to rebuild your city, but we SURE AS HELL can give you a 1.66:1 cut of Lucy to fit all those busted

"Don't expect fair apportion of credit, adherence to some glowing paragon of scientific method, or even basic integrity to abound. Most beliefs that outsiders hold about academia are false. In general, I'd advise going into the process with a healthy dose of cynicism."

Oh yes. Before anything, please read:

http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/

It will explain everything you need to know.

For those who think the job of publishing is to create quality works ( ie to filter out the bad ) you should read The book behind the book behind the book which gives a description of what publishing is about.

As for the biology books that the future doctors are reading I do not know about biology/medicine, I do know the books in physics/math/computer science are spread by word of mouth. Your peers know which books are good and which are bad and they talk about them. That's how they know what to buy.

Java Monkeys

Stammbach, Eduard. (1988). "Group responses to specially skilled individuals in a Macaca fascicularis." Behaviour, 107 (December 1988), 241-266

Does the staggering wealth of particular engineers and programmers mean that there is any chance for nerds to rise socially?

Stammbach worked with a colony of longtailed macaques. In the paper cited above, the running header is "Responses to Specially Skilled Java Monkeys." Stammbach took the lowest-ranking macaque out of the society and taught him to operate a complex machine and obtain food. When the nerd monkey was reintroduced to the society, the higher ranking macaques stopped kicking him out of the way long enough for him to complete operation of the machine and obtain food for the community. I.e., society cooperated to create the conditions under which the nerd could toil for them. However, the monkey who acquired these special skills and provided for the society did not achieve any rise in his dominance status.

1. Other posters already mentioned MacIntosh and Tufte.
2. Phil Greenspun's articles: http://philip.greenspun.com/writing/
3. Any Browser Campaign: http://www.anybrowser.org/campaign/ (even if your application isn't on the Web, the principles are similar, particularly for accessibility).
4. Study the Model/Controller/View pattern from the software pattern community. Sorry I don't have a specific pointer. Keep in mind that the 3-part pattern is probably a mistake for most purposes: Controller and View usually have to be combined, because the boundary changes between levels of abstraction. This pattern doesn't have to do with how the interface looks to the user, rather it has to do with structuring software so that you have a prayer of controlling the user interface part of the design. Many projects accomplish this pattern (without necessarily knowing about the pattern idea) by organizing work into a function library and a user interface exercising that library.
5. A key principle (not sure where it's documented) is orthogonality. At some level of design (definitely at the library level), it's very important to identify the fundamental operations that make sense conceptually (in the previous item, these are the natural operations of the Model). "Orthogonality" just means that each fundamentel operation should be essentially independent of the others. Next, make sure that you never lose access to these fundamental operations. Now, you can design combinations of operations to satisfy the most common user needs, without leaving frustrating gaps where a user with a slightly unusual need cannot perform the right operations, because they are only available in unwanted combinations.
6. Whenever you provide a level of operation that you think makes things simple for the user, try to leave some way to get a transparent view of the technical level below it, in case your notion of "simple" isn't always quite the right one. E.g., Apple screwed this principle up very badly in Garage Band, which hides the individual sound files totally from any user who relies on the Mac's views of the file system. Only through a Unix terminal interface does one discover that the "project" is a directory, with lots of files in it. An early version had a bug, in which the "Save As" button did not actually save a file. There was no way to discover this until it was too late (and I lost one of my best audition recordings to this bug, and resolved never to touch Garage Band again).
7. Which reminds me of one of the best ways to learn good interface structure: observe lots of bad examples. They are plentiful. The downside is you can spend infinite time on this survey.

The article writes about suicides at MIT, so perhaps this study would be of interest. It suggests students do prefer to commit suicide around the exam period.

Engineering is still something of a professional occupation, but the economic rewards available to lawyers, doctors, accountants, and management (hell, even real estate as an occupation) are much greater.

Science? Much worse: http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science

So let's sum up here: interest science and engineering often means lower social status and being mocked/stereotyped, plus these fields are highly competitive and intellectually demanding, but there's decreasing job security and economic rewards relative to other professions.

Greenspun's got it right. The question isn't why we have decreasing interest in technical careers, the question is what would make someone interested in pursuing one, especially in the current climate.

What's wrong with a file system (and also what's right)

Despite its unobtrusiveness, the file system on a Macintosh, Unix, or Windows machine is capable of storing any data that may be represented in digital form. For example, suppose that you are storing a mailing list in a file system file. If you accept the limitation that no e-mail address or person's name can contain a newline character, you can store one entry per line. Then you could decide that no e-mail address or name may contain a vertical bar. That lets you separate e-mail address and name fields with the vertical bar character. ... [When inserting two addresses at once, ] Depending on how you wrote your program, the particular kind of file system that you have, and luck, you could get any of the following behaviors:

Both inserts succeed.
One of the inserts is lost.
Information from the two inserts is mixed together so that both are corrupted. ...

So what? Emacs may be ancient but it is still the best text editor in the world. You love using it so you might as well spend your weekends and evenings manually fixing up your flat file databases with Emacs. Who needs concurrency control?

It all depends on what kind of stove you have.

Yes, that's right, your stove. Suppose that you buy a $268,500 condo in Harvard Square. You think to yourself, "Now my friends will really be impressed with me" and invite them over for brunch. Not because you like them, but just to make them envious of your large lifestyle. Imagine your horror when all they can say is "What's this old range doing here? Don't you have a Viking stove?"

A Viking stove?!? They cost $5000. The only way you are going to come up with this kind of cash is to join the growing ranks of on-line entrepreneurs. So you open an Internet bank. An experienced Perl script/flat-file wizard by now, you confidently build a system in which all the checking account balances are stored in one file, checking.text, and all the savings balances are stored in another file, savings.text.

A few days later, an unlucky combination of events occurs. Joe User is transferring $10,000 from his savings to his checking account. Judy User is simultaneously depositing $5 into her savings account. One of your Perl scripts successfully writes the checking account flat file with Joe's new, $10,000 higher, balance. It also writes the savings account file with Joe's new, $10,000 lower, savings balance. However, the script that is processing Judy's deposit started at about the same time and began with the version of the savings file that had Joe's original balance. It eventually finishes and writes Judy's $5 higher balance but also overwrites Joe's new lower balance with the old high balance. Where does that leave you? $10,000 poorer, cooking on an old GE range, and wishing you had Concurrency Control.

What's wrong with a file system (and also what's right)

Despite its unobtrusiveness, the file system on a Macintosh, Unix, or Windows machine is capable of storing any data that may be represented in digital form. For example, suppose that you are storing a mailing list in a file system file. If you accept the limitation that no e-mail address or person's name can contain a newline character, you can store one entry per line. Then you could decide that no e-mail address or name may contain a vertical bar. That lets you separate e-mail address and name fields with the vertical bar character. ... [When inserting two addresses at once, ] Depending on how you wrote your program, the particular kind of file system that you have, and luck, you could get any of the following behaviors:

Both inserts succeed.
One of the inserts is lost.
Information from the two inserts is mixed together so that both are corrupted. ...

So what? Emacs may be ancient but it is still the best text editor in the world. You love using it so you might as well spend your weekends and evenings manually fixing up your flat file databases with Emacs. Who needs concurrency control?

It all depends on what kind of stove you have.

Yes, that's right, your stove. Suppose that you buy a $268,500 condo in Harvard Square. You think to yourself, "Now my friends will really be impressed with me" and invite them over for brunch. Not because you like them, but just to make them envious of your large lifestyle. Imagine your horror when all they can say is "What's this old range doing here? Don't you have a Viking stove?"

A Viking stove?!? They cost $5000. The only way you are going to come up with this kind of cash is to join the growing ranks of on-line entrepreneurs. So you open an Internet bank. An experienced Perl script/flat-file wizard by now, you confidently build a system in which all the checking account balances are stored in one file, checking.text, and all the savings balances are stored in another file, savings.text.

A few days later, an unlucky combination of events occurs. Joe User is transferring $10,000 from his savings to his checking account. Judy User is simultaneously depositing $5 into her savings account. One of your Perl scripts successfully writes the checking account flat file with Joe's new, $10,000 higher, balance. It also writes the savings account file with Joe's new, $10,000 lower, savings balance. However, the script that is processing Judy's deposit started at about the same time and began with the version of the savings file that had Joe's original balance. It eventually finishes and writes Judy's $5 higher balance but also overwrites Joe's new lower balance with the old high balance. Where does that leave you? $10,000 poorer, cooking on an old GE range, and wishing you had Concurrency Control.

This is modded funny, but it's also very true. The smartest 0.1% of Americans feel they should be rewarded well for being that smart. The smartest 0.1% of China or India feels the same. But the salary demand for the 0.1% of Americans pale in comparison to foreign workers.

Why should the smartest 0.1% go into science, when it is no un-rewarding?

http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science

"Adjusted for IQ, quantitative skills, and working hours, jobs in science are the lowest paid in the United States."

Absolutely true. One of the beautiful things about the free market economy is you can differentiate between what people *claim* vs what people actually do. People claim that the US is facing massive shortages in the sciences, but all you have to do is look at the salaries. There's only a "shortage" if businesses wish to pay minimum wage.

It's also interesting how Business Week's research shows the U.S. near the top of lists in science and literacy when others claim we're falling back into the stone age. BW notes the cause of this discrepency:

"Why the sharp discrepancy? Salzman says that reports citing low U.S. international rankings often misinterpret the data. Review of the international rankings, which he says are all based on one of two tests, the Trends in International Mathematics & Science Study (TIMMS) or the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), show the U.S. is in a second-ranked group, not trailing the leading economies of the world as is commonly reported. In fact, the few countries that place higher than the U.S. are generally small nations, and few of these rank consistently high across all grades, subjects, and years tested. Moreover, he says, serious methodological flaws, such as different test populations, and other limitations preclude drawing any meaningful comparison of school systems between countries."

Philip Greenspun has a very good article on why becoming a scientist doesn't make sense for most people:

http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science

The article is titled "Women in Science," but it basically argues that the preparation costs for becoming a scientist (college, grad school, post doc) are so high, and the economic rewards so low and uncertain, that intelligent people are more likely to be drawn to other fields like medicine.

Even Bill Gates had that sort of parent-assisted and grand-parent start:
    http://philip.greenspun.com/bg/
"[His grandfather] established a million-dollar trust fund for William (Bill) Henry Gates III. In some of the later lessons, you will be encouraged to take entrepreneurial risks. You may find it comforting to remember that at any time you can fall back on a trust fund worth many millions of 1998 dollars. "

"William Henry Gates, Jr. and Mary Maxwell were among Seattle's social and financial elite. Bill Gates, Jr. was a prominent corporate lawyer while Mary Maxwell was a board member of First Interstate Bank and Pacific Northwest Bell. She was also on the national board of United Way, along with John Opel, the chief executive officer of IBM who approved the inclusion of MS/DOS with the original IBM PC."

Software Engineering for Internet Applications will guide you in the right direction.

So when he says "The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers.", he's trying to make it true by saying it?

Damn, first I get a college degree, and to make things worse, it was in mathematics. I'm going about this in all the wrong ways.

Philip Greenspun has been dealing with this since there were only a few dozen web sites total. His solution is a Hall of Shame which he has vowed to keep up forever. Of course it helps that he hosts his images himself, and that he never caves to take down and cease-and-desist letters regarding his Hall of Shame. He explains the genesis of his approach here (search for "Personal Approach to Copywright"). As Philip puts it "it has to be muchmore efficient for society than a bunch of corporations hiring lawyers to sling mud at each other in court. Under my system, we can enjoy seeing our work (with credit) on other folks' sites, vent our spleens at midnight by adding to a Web page of transgressors, and then move on to new productive activities."

Philip Greenspun has been dealing with this since there were only a few dozen web sites total. His solution is a Hall of Shame which he has vowed to keep up forever. Of course it helps that he hosts his images himself, and that he never caves to take down and cease-and-desist letters regarding his Hall of Shame. He explains the genesis of his approach here (search for "Personal Approach to Copywright"). As Philip puts it "it has to be muchmore efficient for society than a bunch of corporations hiring lawyers to sling mud at each other in court. Under my system, we can enjoy seeing our work (with credit) on other folks' sites, vent our spleens at midnight by adding to a Web page of transgressors, and then move on to new productive activities."

To quote Philip Greenspun:

"Pursuing science as a career seems so irrational that one wonders why any young American would do it. Yet we do find some young Americans starting out in the sciences and they are mostly men... A lot more men than women choose to do seemingly irrational things such as become petty criminals, fly homebuilt helicopters, play video games, and keep tropical fish as pets (98 percent of the attendees at the American Cichlid Association convention that I last attended were male). Should we be surprised that it is mostly men who spend 10 years banging their heads against an equation-filled blackboard in hopes of landing a $35,000/year post-doc job?

Having been both a student and teacher at MIT, my personal explanation for men going into science is the following:

      1. young men strive to achieve high status among their peer group
      2. men tend to lack perspective and are unable to step back and ask the question "is this peer group worth impressing?"

It is the guys with the poorest social skills who are least likely to talk to adults and find out what the salary and working conditions are like in different occupations. It is mostly guys with rather poor social skills whom one meets in the university science halls...

What about women? Don't they want to impress their peers? Yes, but they are more discriminating about choosing those peers. I've taught a fair number of women students in electrical engineering and computer science classes over the years. I can give you a list of the ones who had the best heads on their shoulders and were the most thoughtful about planning out the rest of their lives. Their names are on files in my "medical school recommendations" directory."

- Women in Science

I'll believe it when I see it.
Sorry, I just can't be optimistic about this. You shouldn't be, either.
Look - today's web browsers can't even really get offline web page caching right.

Only if you're allowed to write an interpreter or compiler for the more powerful language in the less powerful one.

This is what has been called the "Turing Tarpit." In a formal logical sense, all turing complete languages are equivalently powerful. But that means that punching holes in a paper tape by hand is technically as powerful as a high level language. We have high level languages so that we don't have to twiddle ones and zeroes.

High level languages themselves differer in expressiveness. They can all accomplish the same tasks, but some languages make certain tasks a whole lot easier. For some language pairs, the only way to easily accomplish certain tasks in the less powerful language is to write what amounts to "an ad-hoc, informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of " the more powerful language.

As a consequence, there is no "basic" or "generic" list of programming tasks. Tasks that one has become accustomed to do in many languages are a non-issue in some other languages. "Design Patterns" in some languages don't exist in certain others because the language itself makes them unnecessary (see Google's director of search quality, and AI expert Peter Norvig's treatment of the subject especially this slide)

A site like Rosetta Code could only be useful for languages that are so similar that they essentially differ mostly in surface syntax. For languages much different than this their whole paradigms are different, and many of the tasks themselves are no longer the same.

Truly revolutionary ideas comes out of new ideas, that challenge the incumbent ideas. While scientific research has gotten much more complicated, making it harder to enter without the education required of a PhD, the PhD worship is a little twisted.

There was a time that people we're allowed to spout out ideas that the Church opposed, and only the Church could approve ideas, and only the Church chose who was in the Church. This period of time is generally considered to have been bad for human advancement and is called the Dark Ages.

We now have the Academy, and only people allowed by the Academy are allowed to question science. The Academy controls who gets the credentials.

As Climatology coalesced around global warming, how willing to fund and approve PhD research that questions it happens. It's wonderful to say that scientists want the truth, which is true in the abstract, but at the individual level, academics want to publish, because publishing gets them tenure. To publish, they do research, which requires funding, which requires grants.

The Academy has become one giant mess of group-think. Also, while current PhD students may enter the program out of a love of science, the previous generation entered out of a love of draft deferments, which is why you have a collection of leftists professors (the few conservative professors out there would be considered liberal Democrats or liberal Republicans, depending on the state) there to collect checks, ride out their time, and be embittered that there school chums outside make more money than them because they didn't waste their time chasing a tenured professor track. Read Philip Greenspun's essay on the economics of the university and how it enforces the gender divide.

Those that are doing political incorrect research are outside the Academy, often at industry jobs, and are attacked as being on the payroll of corporations. Never-mind that University professors are on the payroll of government bureaucrats or non-profits, non of which are neutral opinions. Both fields attract a combination of incompetents and do-gooders that love to spend other people's money on themselves... ask anyone good that works in non-profits, they want to pull their hair out.

Stop elevating science to a religion, with challenge-proof dogma. Scientific inquiry MUST stand on the merits of the data and strength of arguments, not the credentials of those giving it.

In my opinion, the gap is caused by an innate difference: I don't think women geek out on things like men do; instead they seem to go into whatever field has the greatest intersection of Enjoyable Work and Money.

Adjusted for IQ, quantitative skills, and working hours, jobs in science are the lowest paid in the United States. And women care much, much more than men do about that.

You know what I see it useful in? A camera, so that it could automatically add the location to the EXIF data of each photo taken. I would think Google and Apple would be all over that kind of thing, since it would have really cool possibilities for iPhoto and Google Image Search. Too bad neither of them makes cameras...

If you want more scientists, pay them more! Once an average scientist makes more than your typical lawyer, doctor or business executive, the social status of science will increase accordingly and a higher proportion of the most talented will pursuit a scientific career.

A good writeup on the situation (hooked on the topic of women in science) can be found here: http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-scien ce

Every so often I see a story on slashdot about what degree to go after. Usually they are asking for some trick or some inside knowledge to give them a leg up. Like what programming language to choose (Roll your own make a hybrid between Ruby and Java that'll run on Amigas. It'll be the next killer machine/app). If you really want to know the value of a masters or doctorate you should study very carefully Philip Greenspuns Career Guide for Engineers and Computer Scientists. Unless you are very good the average lifespan of a programmer is about 10 years and age discrimination starts very young like around 36.

I think you would be better off learning the following phrases "Clean up on aisle seven" or "Would you like fries with that?" or "Don't let the door hit your ass on the way out."

Yes, such a course would be very useful. Some people are already teaching courses like this. (See, for example, http://philip.greenspun.com/seia/ )

One difficulty with courses like this is that it puts a different kind of responsibility on the instructor as well as the students. The instructor doesn't merely stand before the class, pontificate for 45 minutes twice a week, and grade routine problems sets and examinations. Rather, the students have to (either independently or in consultation with a "client") build a real, working piece of software. The instructor has to do more mentoring than lecturing, and will have to spend more time and thought grading what the students come up with.

It's about turning CS students into engineers, rather than just programmers, and it's an extremely worthwhile thing to do.