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Johnny Can So Program
theodp writes "In Johnny Can So Program, CS Prof Norm Matloff calls BS on CNET stories like Can Johnny Still Program? and Can the U.S. Still Compete?, saying it's a shame that CNET fails to cover the real threat to American technological competitiveness, the hidden agendas of Chicken Littles like Jim Foley of the Computing Research Association, David Patterson of the ACM and former Intel CEO Craig Barrett, all of whose organizations have a vested interest in playing the education card."
The US education problems are not in computer science, but in the general level of education in history, geography and world affairs ourside of local US issues and what Fox and similar "News" organizations deem rating-worthy.
Only on Mondays.
The rest of the week it's fine.
The way I see it outsourcing is the best thing that ever happened to guys like me. A cheap app gets developed over seas, then the company gets a cheap app back, when they never wanted a cheap app in the first place. The app then gets redeveloped, and it usually ends up on my desk at some point. I've done quite a few of projects like that over the last few years.
This signature has Super Cow Powers
I just love seeing stories where business leaders "fret" over the lack of education in science and technology in this country today.
Of course, then they go and layoff large numbers of technical workers and send their jobs to another country. The message is getting through loud and clear to the younger generations in this country. All the while the business leaders are lamenting the education available here they are shouting at the top of their lungs by their businsess practices - "WHY THE HELL ARE YOU GOING INTO SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, WE DON'T HIRE THOSE KIND OF PEOPLE HERE!!!!"
The kids get it. As the one article states programming isn't glamorous like football. But, even more the kids going to college now look at business and see no need for technical people, because they're sending it all away.
Kids are smarter than people think, they see the writing on the wall. Why go to school for 4-5 years only to find a job market with no room for you. So all the best and brightest kids end up going to law school, which is in and of itself a terrifying thought.
There's really nothing wrong with that. People like to watch TV and movies but don't want to be producers and directors. People like to view art, but don't have the patience to be artists. People like to read books and newspapers but don't want to be editors and writers. If every kid that liked video games became a programmer, we wouldn't have enough people doing all the other things in this society that need to get done.
while we think its our divine right to be No.1, a Chinese individual who doesn't have that perception just works a lot harder than your average American, add to that the sense of having to achieve and beat the No.1 and you get a will that is tougher than steel to win this thing (and any other situation)
We are "Slipping" because we got too comfy in our No.1 spot; not because our education is worse. Its human nature.
Executives want more cheap labor and are doing everything they can to get it. Labor wants higher and higher salaries, particularly if they feel the barriers to entry in their career are high. People are fighting it out, spin doctors are out in force.
I don't know what the right answer is, but it seems to me H1-Bs are far, far better than wholesale outsourcing. My favorite form of this is my own companies current push to hire employees and open it's own design centers in Singapore, Shang-hai, Bangalore and Taiwan. This way they get full benefits of Asian labor, without pesky contracting problems, yet get to live in mansions in the nicer parts of the US.
But Norm's article was good, I just think no one is going to listen to him that doesn't already understand the problem.
A good way to get kids interested in programming is to open up the possibility of them creating their OWN games. Even if the games are simple, doesn't matter. Suddenly they'll want to know how to get x,y, and z done in their code.
"Is this just useless, or is it expensive as well?"
so why is this a problem?
The guy who stays and wants to code is the one we want. It is perfectly normal, IMHO, that in a group of decent size only few actually can program. Our educational system should be designed in a way to identify those precious few and make sure they can go as high as they can.
It is silly to assume that Indian (Chinese, Russian, etc.) person in general is better programmer than an American one or that there are more programmers born there per 1000 population. It is simply those education systems were (for a while) better tuned to identify and pull up those selected ones.
Get over yourself. Sports are important in pratically every country and always get more attention then scientific achievment. Travel anywhere in the world and you will see the local sports hero in the news not the scientists. This is not just a condition to the U.S. lest you forget David Beckham's world popularity. You can find a Beckham jersey in pratically every country in the world. Especially in Asian countries.
I don't think that extrapolating from programming contest results to a nation's programmers' general ability to code is valid. Matloff points out excellent reasons why this doesn't work, but he pays attention mainly to statistics of the rankings and varying amount of training time.
Simply, I don't think that being good at these contests necessarily is the same at being good at producing software in industry or even research. I don't like solving problems under strict time constraints, so I've never volunteered to take part in math or programming competitions. It's simply not fun for me. I like problem solving when I'm free to take the time to explore the design space and maybe go off on tangents that might eventually prove worthwhile (but often don't). Some people enjoy solving problems under strict time constraints; I'm just not one of them. I enjoy other activities that others do not. It's just personal preference.
In the end, we always have time constraints - projects have deadlines, research papers have submission dates - but measuring the amount of time in hours vs. days, weeks or months make a very big difference in how much freedom you have to explore the problem.
And we could use a few more doctors and stuff. An auto mechanic with more than half a brain cell would be a pleasant thing to run into now and again as well. Who the hell decided that being a moron was actually one of the desirable qualities of someone who has to perform complex diagnostics and then fix the problem?
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Parents like to decide what their kids are "going to be" when they're about minus 5 years old. This makes growing up hell on the poor kid who wants to be a concert violinst, but whose parents have him down to be a doctor, balanced by a kid who loves biology, but is forced to practice the hateful violin 6 hours a day.
The process is so pervasive that even kids who "grow up and make their own decision" often don't really, because they aren't actually taught how to make decisions of that nature in the first place.
Quite frankly, the one thing we're up to arses in is apps programers, and, ironically, the one thing in the computer field we're desperately short of right now is computer scientists.
And it's the universities getting into bed with companies like Microsoft and Intel that have resulted in computer science being mistaken for apps programming.
So my question to Norm Matloff is. .
"Is your own house in order?"
Are you, a CS professor, teaching real computer science, or are you teaching programming and calling it computer science at the behest of Intel?
You're right. The competition isn't a valid measure of where the US stands in the tech world. It stands in the fact that we are no longer the number one nation for publishing original computer science papers. We aren't even number two anymore. Japanese kids aren't coming to Boston and Berkeley anymore for the CS educations, they're going to Bejing.
Word is out. We've lost it. We're on the way down The rats started abondoning the ship years ago, but as Van Loon noted when talking about the Roman Empire, empires that have been fallen for hundreds of years are rarely aware of the fact.
I too, like the grandparent, teach privately. I do not, however, take just anybody. Beyond a certain point I'll only work with people, both kids and adults, who I believe are personally involved in the subject. Not who's parents have decided that computer "science" is a good job field for them because they see a lot of ads for Java programmers in the papers.
I do not piss and moan if a kid isn't interested in programming. I try my damndest to find that out, and then direct them to something they are interested in. As it happens, I teach violin too. It's better for everybody that way, and not just the kid.
Because one kid who lives for computer science is worth more than an entire university full of kids who are there because it's a good job field. We are falling behind in the sciences because we no longer focus on that one kid and give him the training and facilities he needs to do brilliant work, but we crank out less than worthless Java apps programmers to satisfy the commercial concerns (yes, that may well mean you, even if you find the concept insulting) by the bucketful.
And one kid who lives to play the violin, but isn't very technically proficient, is going to make more music worth listening to than a whole symphony orchestra full of technically perfect, but bored out of their skulls, orchestra pit monkeys.
Tell ya what, give me 12 kids who have been properly trained as computer scientists and love the field, six theorists and six empiricists, none of whom know a lick of "practical" programming, and just enough capital to set up shop with workbenchs from Sears and computers cobbled together from odd parts, but not enough to hand out free Ferraris to everybody, and in five years the 13 of us will knock all of China on its arse.
But I can't tell you in advance what our output is going to be, because I haven't a frickin' clue and that's the bloody point.
Not that anyone around here would care anyway. Build a better mousetrap, give it away for free; and they'll still buy the latest braindead clusterfuck from Oracle.
I think maybe I'll take another crack at learning Portuguese.
KFG
I can't remember the original source for the quote, but it comes to mind:
Character is when you are willing to finish the task once the sparkle of new is gone.
It seems to apply, and I would think this is true for American's or non-Americans. It is not that 95% of Americans are not willing to finish a task, it is that 95% of all people are not willing to finish a task.
I am old enough to remember how the Japanese were going to make all US auto makers obsolete, and how we could not compete in the 70s and 80s, yet we have done more than fine, even improving BECAUSE of the competition. We can't sit idle and wish for more success (wishing is, afterall, passivity) but I would be hard pressed to believe that America is going to hell in a hand basket due to our "underacheiving kids". We have been there, we have done that, and many more people are wanting to move here than move away. As someone who was once one of those kids who was "lazy, underacheiving and a C- student" I can attest that many get over it.
I, for one, do not fear any new outsourced overlords, nor believe they are coming.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
American education is slipping, not just slipping, its in free fall. Our society doesn't value education, it values vanity. We pay professional athletes millions of dollars, the Paris Hiltons of the world millions of dollars, and for what? Vanity and entertainment. When it comes to education, we just say, "well, suck it up"...its complete BS.
/. is the same way. Sure I still like to work in the tech field, but if I bought into materialism I certainly wouldn't be here, and if I had a family, I know I wouldn't be here, because I'd demand enough money to feed my family and put a roof over their heads, which would be an issue.
So what if "Johnny Can So Program" his job will be sent offshore because "Johnny Demands a Livable Wage". There's very few niche markets where "Johnny" can still get a livable tech wage in America. Can you really blame "Johnny" if instead of studying science and math and learning about technology he blows it off, parties his life away through college, and becomes a business major so he can move on up to a clueless management position and cut jobs and make a decent wage?
Everything I learned about computers in high school, and a lot of my time in college, was learned on my own. I'd say a good portion of
I'm not against outsourcing. I'd say we should be encouraging it, but the kicker being we have to do it responsibly, which corporate America doesn't quite understand.
"But that's just my opinion, I could be wrong" - Dennis Miller
Quite frankly, the one thing we're up to arses in is apps programers, and, ironically, the one thing in the computer field we're desperately short of right now is computer scientists.
We are up to our "arses" in computer apps programmers for a very good reason. Companies make money by producing goods and services. They do not make money by having a gaggle of employees sitting around discussing computer concepts. So those types of people are not hired. Those who know computer science must apply their skills in a manner that is of interest to an employer. This usually translates to apps writers. So, with that said, many of those apps writers you speak poorly of are actually computer scientists.
I do not piss and moan if a kid isn't interested in programming. I try my damndest to find that out, and then direct them to something they are interested in.
Well, I guess it's good that you have taken a personal agenda to weed out those that are not interested in programming. But I am completely mystified to what institution you are teaching from. Teachers in public and private schools in the United States do not "pick and choose" who they teach and do not teach courses to. If you tried to remove a student from your class you'll end up getting removed yourself. This only leaves private teaching. Since most companies only hire employees who have received degrees from credited institutions, I find it unlikely you will ever get students. This is a sharp contrast from violin players who, in truth, do not have such a high requirement on having college degrees. To summarize, I find it hard to believe your claim that you are a teacher.
Personally I think it is kind of sad that my fellow students wouldn't know what a web server, or a mail server, or a router was if it bit them in the ass(on any operating system even).
Contrariwise to the impression some might get from my above post there is a reason why we make students take physics labs, other than annoying them by making them right lab papers.
You don't really understand something until you have touched it with your own hands. That's why there are so many "interpretations" of quantum physics. Everybody understands the results of the experiments, they're really pretty simple and straightforward, but nobody really knows what they "mean" because you can't touch it.
I have no particular love for ivory tower academics either, which is why I choose to teach privately.
KFG
If I ever had my say, I would definitely support using Python (or Ruby, from what little I've seen) for teaching introductory programming. There's plenty of things that are hard enough for most people to understand in programming, the language itself doesn't need to make it even harder.sure makes more sense to a young budding programmer thanThere's nothing wrong with learning C++, but I can definitely attest that at least in my case, it wasn't conducive to a rapid learnign experience. Discovering Python literally renewed my interest in programming because it made it so accessible.
-Jay
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If you would REALLY like to accelerate the shift of jobs overseas, make sure you get some good foreigners trained in US universities with a whole lot of internship contacts in American companies, then refuse to give them a work visa.
They'll go back to their home country, where developers probably get paid half as much, and use their contacts to start a code farming business, taking away American jobs.
The best way to keep jobs in America is to have the best and brightest from around the world COME to America and build their industries HERE. Sending them home, in the long run, sends the jobs with them.
E pluribus unum