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.'"

Comments

The Onus Should Not Be on the Nerds

[eldavojohn]

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?

Re:The Onus Should Not Be on the Nerds

[reginaldo]

American football where I grew up was a right of passage, and pretty much mandatory. It helped teach me self confidence, teamwork, and the ability to bash my head into things. Mostly the head bashing, though.

I use that skill almost every day as a computer programmer, and it is an invaluable part of my toolkit. Poorly written business requirements, bash head. Last minute changes, bash head.

Re:The Onus Should Not Be on the Nerds

[amicusNYCL]

I got the same education by listening to heavy metal.

Re:The Onus Should Not Be on the Nerds

[Chris Mattern]

The mean annual incomes of professionals in the fields of computer science and football might call into question the "monetarily rewarding" part of that statement.

No, they don't, because you're skewing your data. You're looking at the entire comp sci profession and comparing it to those who play football in the NFL--in other words, the general field of one against those who made it to the very top in the other. You need to compare the average per capita income from IT jobs of those who took a computer-related degree against the average per capita income from football of everybody who played varsity football in college. Who wins that contest? Or reverse it--compare NFL players to the likes of Bill Gates, who are the IT field's equivalent of NFL players. Again, who wins that contest?

Re:The Onus Should Not Be on the Nerds

[h4rm0ny]

And in the UK, we play rugby with similar effect. First thing the US needs to do? Get rid of this fucked up idea that there is any dichotomy between being good at sports and being good academically. Second thing it needs to do is to ditch the idea that because you have an interest or work in a particular field, you have to be some media stereotype of that field.

Then people can do what the fuck they want without society telling them they fall into some particular clique.

Re:The Onus Should Not Be on the Nerds

[awyeah]

Its not the media's fault.

Damn right. There's a serious lack of personal responsibility in our culture.

Re:The Onus Should Not Be on the Nerds

[tixxit]

People like to watch things they can relate to. I think most people revere real skill in talent in any field, whether that is singing, math, business, or what-have-you. Einstein is as much a household name as Elvis is. However, your average person cannot go pick up Einstein's special theory of relativity and read it. They can, however, play some of Elvis' music and bop their heads to it. It is a lot easier to (poorly) emulate a football player or a singer then to emulate a mathematician.

Re:The Onus Should Not Be on the Nerds

[Eli Gottlieb]

You don't get it. In the USA, football is Serious Business. People spend hours a day training and practicing, even at the high-school level. This is the underlying reason for the dichotomy: you can't play high-school, college, or professional football without using time for training that you otherwise could have used for studying. So while many people have the talents for both football and academics, it takes someone extra-gifted to get great at both in the time constraints.

Oh really?

[KermodeBear]

'The fear is that if you pursue computer science, you will be stuck in a basement, writing code. That is absolutely not the reality.'

Yeah. The reality is that you will be stuck in a small cube writing code instead.

Re:Oh really?

[Jimmy King]

What do you mean "stuck in a small cube"? I've got tons of space. My employer has reduced our local development team from 7 people down to just me and now I've got the entire area to myself.

Re:Oh really?

[Nadaka]

You think thats bad, they just moved me to a badly lit closet in the basement, completely surrounded by boxes. And someone took my red swingline stapler.

Re:Oh really?

[thenextstevejobs]

'The fear is that if you pursue computer science, you will be stuck in a basement, writing code. That is absolutely not the reality.'

Yeah. The reality is that you will be stuck in a small cube writing code instead.

This story speaks to me in a lot of ways.

My only exposure to anything related to programming before college was HTML. I had no idea of the 'magic' of programming until I was in a college level programming course. Which I was only in because it was a requirement for electrical engineering classes I was interested in because I wanted to understand synthesizers and analog circuits better.

I grew up under a lot more pressure to be an 'artist' or creative-type than engineer. Most of my friends are from this world as well. From the outside, computer science looks pretty bleak. My idea of it was as follows. You sit at a computer terminal for your entire life, typing. And no one even reads what you write. If I was going to sit at a computer, why wouldn't I at least write for an audience? Why would I choose a job that seems solitary and unexciting? It seems like what you'd think being an accountant would be like.

Having just graduated and spent the last few years doing programming internships, it amazes me how wrong I was about the rewards of programming. No one told me the 'power' I would wield, the infinities of computing, the vastness of what you can express with programming language. That I'd confront hundreds of problems with thousands of solutions, and use my creativity and cunning to apply the most elegant and effective one. That the 'barrier to entry' of creating your own startup that could influence millions of users is little more than some education and a laptop and a server in your closet.

I feel like I found a goldmine that no one was hinting at. It is a primary goal of my professional career to expose more kids like myself to programming. The sentiment of the article is right on. Computers are not leveraged nearly enough in the fields I'm interested in. And it's due primarily I think to a misunderstanding about what programming is, and how it feels to do it. I encounter this firsthand often in Linguistics (also something I focused on in college) where many problems of data collection and analysis are considered impossible by my peers but understood as a solvable engineering problem to me.

I hope that this continues to be in focus. Too often it is a dichotomy between being a 'computer-person' or not, and I think many of us who were into other things got sucked into computers when we discovered them. It's a deep field and difficult to get a handle on, I think, coming from another area. But the benefits are too great to ignore.

We have enough.

[girlintraining]

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...

Media Branding

[decipher_saint]

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!

Re:Media Branding

[thisnamestoolong]

We could stop using the word 'nerd', but I prefer to do what I can to make the word a badge of honor. That, to me, is a much easier fight.

Affairs

[FlyingBishop]

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.

That's me!

[Jorgandar]

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.

I've seen things swinging the other direction.

[NoPantsJim]

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.

Re:Solution is easy

[DragonWriter]

It's quite simple. Give the technology classes to people who actually understand the subject and can teach interesting aspects of computer science.

And how, exactly, do you get those people to accept the combination of pay and working conditions given to high school teachers?