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The US Economy Needs More "Cool" Nerds
Hugh Pickens writes "Steve Lohr writes in the NY Times that the country needs more 'cool' nerds — professionals with hybrid careers that combine computing with other fields like medicine, art, or journalism. Not enough young people are embracing computing, often because they are leery of being branded nerds. Educators and technologists say that two things need to change: the image of computing work, and computer science education in high schools. Today, introductory courses in computer science are too often focused merely on teaching students to use software like word processing and spreadsheet programs, says Janice C. Cuny, a program director at the National Science Foundation adding that the Advanced Placement curriculum concentrates too narrowly on programming. 'We're not showing and teaching kids the magic of computing,' Cuny says. The NSF is working to change this by developing a new introductory high school course in computer science and seeking to overhaul Advanced Placement courses as well. The NSF hopes to train 10,000 high school teachers in the modernized courses by 2015. Knowledge of computer science and computer programming is becoming a necessary skill for many professions, not only science and technology but also increasingly for marketing, advertising, journalism and the creative arts. 'We need to gain an understanding in the population that education in computer science is both extraordinarily important and extraordinarily interesting,' says Alfred Spector, vice president for research and special initiatives at Google. 'The fear is that if you pursue computer science, you will be stuck in a basement, writing code. That is absolutely not the reality.'"
Rather, the burden of change should be placed on the populace (parents especially) and media.
I'm going to make some statements with absolutely no sort of proof, weight or even statistics behind them. Statements which need no proof because if you've gone through the American educational system, you know that what I am saying is the truth.
Football (really sports in general) is more important to teenagers and parents than computer science.
Computer science is far more practical/pragmatic (and really productive for society as a whole) and monetarily rewarding later in life than football.
This isn't pressure from the kids. Kids don't develop these hierarchies of what's more important than other things on their own. They get this from their peers who in turn get it from their parents, teachers and--most importantly--the media. Football is the entertainment industry. There are a small percentage of high school football players that go on to hold all the wealth. All the wealth is controlled or pushed through a single league--the NFL. Kids don't realize that their chances of playing in the NFL are equivalent to winning the lottery. And they pass up much more applicable things like math in order to be better at sports. This is what's wrong with the picture. Don't blame nerds for not being iconic enough or cool enough or social enough.
This has slowly turned as shows and parents have realized that the brilliant nerds they graduated with--the ones that spoke Klingon--actually went on to do really cool things with technology. Not only are they really cool but the whole world is trying to throw cash at them in exchange for their services. Compare that to captain of the football team.
I don't want you to write off sports entirely, a healthy body is necessary to live a long life and moderate exercise is actually good for your intelligence. What I'm asking people to do is when they sit down as a father and spend three hours cheering for their team, they should realize that in order to instill a more pragmatic value in their child (who watches and mimics their every move) they should turn around and spend an equally amount of emphasis on how important math, academics, computer science, etc is to their child.
That's not happening. Our economy is suffering from irresponsible parents breeding a generation of gamblers. And by and large they lose--there's just not enough money in entertainment to go around to every high school football player. There is, however, more than enough money in technology to go around to every high school hobbyist that got out in the real world and applied their knowledge.
I'm not a parent but I'd like to ask all the Slashdotters that are parents that have pushed their children in sports and physical abilities to devote more time to that than reading or studying: why do we do this to our kids? And secondly, do you realize you're creating an ecosystem for other people's kids when your kids reinforce the idea that sports are more important than knowledge and they are the path to success?
My work here is dung.
Yeah. The reality is that you will be stuck in a small cube writing code instead.
Love sees no species.
they'll be sitting in mom's basement e-mailing resumes, employers don't want fresh-out-of-school grads. maybe we need a national apprenticeship program to give young people experience in the tech fields.
We have enough raw labor resources in this country to meet any technology demand. Don't blame the culture or this lame-ass idea that people are afraid of being labelled nerds. If I made six figures, they could call me the pink tutu goddess of networking and I wouldn't mind.
The problem is that businesses don't want to pay highly-trained and specialized workers more. They've tried outsourcing, right-sizing, downsizing, globalization, and every other way possible to screw people out of wages. And curiously enough, we keep coming back to the same problem -- no matter how big you make the labor pool, the required training and experience required to do these jobs demands a certain minimum income. Keynesian economics, I'm looking at you -- your adherents continue to believe that if they keep expanding the labor pool they'll reach a price point they want. Well, good luck with that...
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
How about this, stop calling people who use computers to get things done as "nerds" ("geeks", "techies", etc).
Look at any magazine or television commercial, you think all that crap was hand carved out of stone and painted with the tears of virgins? I guarantee a computer was used at some point or another in the creative development behind it. Hell, music has been constantly fusing with new technology for ages, was Les Paul a "nerd"?
Technology, computers especially, penetrated society long ago, the only thing that creates this "us & them" rift is constant stereotype re-enforcement through the media.
Now, if you'll excuse me I have to go re-alphabetize my D&D collection while being bad at sports, good day to you sir!
crazy dynamite monkey
Clearly, Bill Gates, and some of the other titans of the industry need to bite the bullet and have some very public, scandalous affairs so that the media will start talking about how immoral and terrible people software designers are. Then suddenly sportsmen will become model citizens and no one will want to go into sports anymore.
Happy to see somewhere out there someone believes in the cool nerds. (i'm also the gay one, and at work that means i'm triple times fabulous ;). I no longer work in IT but i work in regulatory compliance. Where do i find still my undergrad degree in computing sciences useful? EVERYWHERE and EVERY DAY!!! I believe the biggest mistake of this century is for businesses to isolate their "tech" employees to an IT department. This structure ensures that all computing knowledge is isolated from the rest of the business that could use it to increase productivity! I've written countless scripts, reports and other programs to perform simple otherwise labrous tasks and free business workers to focus on important things. People think i'm some sort of miracle worker. The reality is that i'm simply an anomaly at the firm - a person with a computing background who works in the business side. There needs to be more of us - many more!! When i'm CEO - there will be people with computer science backgrounds positioned everywhere in the company. They are the key to connecting the business with technology needs and making business far more efficient. An "IT" department, no matter how good, isn't as good as mixing knowledge of technology in the business side directly.
Every time I go out somewhere, I can overhear idiots bashfully proclaiming to be "total nerds" to impress girls, despite not being able to string a sentence together or use a word with more than two syllables.
Don't get me wrong, the whole nerd chic thing has been great to me, but guys who used to beat up guys like me calling themselves nerds just to get laid is a bit annoying.
Name...That...Autocomplete!
And how, exactly, do you get those people to accept the combination of pay and working conditions given to high school teachers?
A lot of young people don't find reading, writing, or basic mathematics -- or general science, civics or economics -- interesting either, and we press those on people as educational requirements. Given that computing is a fairly fundamental tool of modern society in every field, a certain baseline understanding of the basic principles involved may be quite reasonable to expect as a core educational requirement.
... just like Mathematics.
It means nothing by itself, except as a means to an end of solving practical problems.
That said, it makes all the sense in the world for most Computer Scientists to learn other domains of knowledge to apply to.
The more disciplines you are familiar with, the more adept you will be at applying your programming skills to solving real-world problems.
We no longer need computing class, and we should avoid attempting to mass produce "geeks" because the more of them there are the lower wages they will command. We don't need more Cool Geeks to impress the public.
Fuck the public. Let them pay for what they want from us.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Steve Lohr writes in the NY Times that the country needs more 'cool' nerds — professionals with hybrid careers that combine computing with other fields like medicine, art, or journalism.
Bad idea (not unless we are talking about people who have a BS/BA degree in a technical field pursuing another BS/BA degree - or even a MS - in another technical field. Now, THAT'S A HYBRID CAREER. We already have a problem with watered down CompSci and MIS programs churning chumps who can't code for shit themselves out of a wet paper bag. CompSci, MIS, Software Development and IT, these are fields that call for people that are domain experts and specialist, not watered down hobbyists with superficial and inadequate training.
It is quite telling of our society that when facing with a shortage of scientific/engineering talent, the solution is to make it more "cool" as opposed to raising the scholastic expectations of kids. As if "cool" makes up for the grey matter required to be a (good) software developer. Either the author thinks software disciplines are shallow enough that they can be weaved in with a medicine, journalist or even an arts curriculum (an art curriculum takes quite a lot of work to get through.) Either that, or he thinks these other disciplines can be watered down so as to allow someone to be graduate in both (notice that I say "graduate", not "be sufficiently competent.")
How come you don't see that type of mentality in India, China or, say Eastern Europe? You want kids to be interested in hard sciences (not just software disciplines)? Then raise the bar and academic rigor starting from 2nd grade all the way to 12th, where the objective is to learn and not simply to pass. You don't solve an educational deficiency by painting "cool" all over it.
On another note, I stopped reading the article when I hit this:
Today, introductory courses in computer science are too often focused merely on teaching students to use software like word processing and spreadsheet programs, said Janice C. Cuny, a program director at the National Science Foundation.
Say fucking what? I know that Computer Science curriculum in most universities have been watered down into Java/C# schools, but give me a fucking break. Either the journalist is misquoting Cuny, or she actually said - and I quote - that introductory courses in computer science are too focused on software like word processing and spreadsheet programs. If it's the later, someone kicks her out of the NSF. There is no "science" in that kind of stupid remark.