Google Blogger: Vietnamese HS Students Excelling At CS

An anonymous reader writes "A Google engineer visiting Vietnam discovered a large portion of Vietnamese high school students might be able to pass a Google interview. According to TFA (and his blog), students start learning computing as early as grade 2. According to the blogger and another senior engineer, about half of the students in an 11th grade class he visited would be able to make through their interview process. The blogger also mentioned U.S. school boards blocking computer science education. The link he posted backing up his claim goes to a Maryland Public Schools website describing No Child Left Behind technicalities. According to the link, computer science is not considered a core subject. While the blogger provided no substantial evidence of U.S. school boards blocking computer science education, he claimed that students at Galileo Academy had difficulty with the HTML image tag. According to the school's Wikipedia page, by California standards, Galileo seems to be one of the state's better secondary schools."

Comments

Not blocking, just ignoring

[RightwingNutjob]

Probably a good half or more of "good" high schools just plain ignore programming and CS, and the people who pass the Google interviews learned most of what they know in college, whether from lectures or from working through it while doing homework and projects.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[Anonymous Coward]

I rather like having a rare and mysterious skill set that guarantees me high marketability and a respectable salary. If more schools follow the example of Vietnam, programming might become another minimum wage job with workers being a dime a dozen.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the typical thing with American education, lazy high school, crazy hard work in college (well those that actually earn degrees and not just party.)

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[GodfatherofSoul]

High school is lax because we don't have tiered curricula like other countries. The slackers staying in school because they'd be arrested otherwise are sitting next to the kids planning on going for PhDs. We need tiered programs so that those pursuing further education aren't slowed down by the kids who are just looking to finish and go off into the work force.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[Anonymous Coward]

It's more about dumbing down the curriculum so they can justify moving the jigs onto higher grade levels and out of the schools more quickly. Welfare minority kids are expensive, even more so when they're held back multiple times having to re-take the same grade over and over; generally being a drain on taxpayer and other educational resources.

Asian kids, however, are still stuck with the all-manual slide-rule mentality. They would be great for performing tedious ballistics calculations by hand(a job held by white women) in the WWII era, but they are poor at thinking "outside the box" and would be spending most of their time stealing your corporate IP and handing it over to their motherlands.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[Anonymous Coward]

programming might become another minimum wage job with workers being a dime a dozen.

I wouldn't worry about it...that's not the point of teaching programming that early. The point is that nearly all jobs of the future will require programming ability. Today, if you want specialized software for a specific area that requires other skills, you hire a programmer and train him/her on the domain. In the future, those kinds of specialized software will be written by people with domain training/expertise. But there will always be strictly programming jobs that require additional training beyond that given in high school. Granted, exposing kids to programming at an early age will allow kids who wouldn't otherwise realize that they love it or have a talent at it, but it won't drastically increase the number of programmers. I'm too lazy to find references, but there's been studies that show that less than 25% of the population is capable of enjoying working as a programmer.

So yes, some of the jobs that are currently filled by programmers will go to people who wouldn't otherwise have been able to accomplish them. But there will be so many more jobs that require programming that it will more than even out.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[Anonymous Coward]

too fucking late

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[c0lo]

I rather like having a rare and mysterious skill set that guarantees me high marketability and a respectable salary.

Learn COBOL.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[anagama]

Hmmm, I'm 44 so it was a while ago I was in HS. I recall there were three tracks when I went: vocational (shop, electricity, etc.,easy math, easy English, basic science, etc.), business (typing and whatever else you might study if your goal was to be a receptionist -- easy classes, essentially shop for girls (we were more sexist then)), or college track (various math classes, literature, foreign language, psychology, etc.).

Now, granting that schools can be different, and maybe not all schools in the 80s did this, I would be really surprised if this has all gone away. I chose to not have kids so I wouldn't know from personal experience, but I could have sworn I heard someone bragging about how well their sprog did in AP something or other recently. The existence of an AP curriculum suggests to me that students are still tiered.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[Intropy]

It would help a lot if we respected blue collar labor more. Your plumber, your carpenter, your steel mill worker, and anyone who knows what the heck he's doing on a factory floor are skilled, valuable workers doing important things that have to be done. We need to stop treating high school like the only valid thing it does is train people for college. We don't have the college capacity, we don't have enough qualified students, and the job force doesn't have the need for as many students as we try to push through to university. Vocational high schools used to be a thing (probably still are some left).

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[Smirker]

In my public high school in Australia, students were split into different classes based on their intelligence (however defined or measured). It was an unspoken thing. Kids in the A,B,C class were the smartest, D,E,F next, and so on. Movement between classes did occur, but was rare. It worked excellently.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[Sperbels]

The point is that nearly all jobs of the future will require programming ability.... In the future, those kinds of specialized software will be written by people with domain training/expertise

This is such crap. You're just talking about flooding the workforce with coders who can't find jobs.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree with the siblings. I don't know what you're talking about. I'm not all too long out of HS and I'm pretty sure my HS's classes are still organized the same way: there were up to 4 levels of each class (some weren't offered at every level if there weren't enough students): LH ("honors") or L1 ("level one") for the students headed to college, L2 for students who couldn't keep up with L1 (didn't go to competitive colleges), and L3 for everyone else. (I believe special ed was a somewhat separate system.) I took some L1 classes (English and history weren't my best subjects) and they tended to have some distracting slackers (because, let's be honest, they were easy classes partially for people too lazy to take honors classes), it wasn't as bad as you are implying.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[Bremic]

I remember this system, it was a slight variation (We had a D music class which tended to be the most successful class, then A, B, C, E, F) but it worked.

The problem is the push for Performance Pay for teachers - which is huge in the US and a LNP push in Australia. If a teacher is paid more if their class gets higher grades, then the focus is on making the students get better grades instead of teaching them the skills they need after school. There are two ways to efficiently increase the grades a student gets. The first is to make the test easier; the second is to focus only on the barest minimum they will need to know for the test, and ignore everything else.

The nature of schooling in the first world is all about the teachers, not the students - it's silly, but true.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[Anonymous Coward]

I graduated 4 years ago. At the time, my hs gpa was weighted, as was everyone's in my graduating class. AP courses were weighted 1.1, so a 100 overall average was recomputed to 110, etc. A regents course, (yes, NYS resident) was weighted 1.08.

After my physics teacher (brilliant woman, paid to go to school by companies she worked for rather than work) complained, the principal's response was, "AP courses really aren't that much harder, are they." I think that says more about the perception of the high school cirriculum than arguing over it's objective merits. The perception is the more important part.

Also, I believe the principal is now some sort of deputy superintendent. Dilbert's law seems to apply.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[Barlo_Mung_42]

I think the No Child Left Behind push towards standardized testing pretty much made that go away. That and budget cuts with art and shop being trimmed way down or tossed out all together in many places.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it's all gone away. There's AP classes for early college credit, honors classes for people who work a little harder, normal classes for everyone, and a couple of one-on-one type classes for people with learning disabilities.

My high school used to have shop, sewing, cooking, programming, electronics, various art classes, etc..., and a partnership with a couple local business (consider this a vocational program with a low population limit). Slowly they've almost all gone away due to budget cuts. You can't cut the core classes, so everything else goes. You do well in your classes and try to get into college. That's the only thing that's pushed. I'm 26. Soon my peers will be in positions of leadership and they won't add back different tracks. They don't remember them.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[Anonymous Coward]

Jigs?

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[jewens]

I'm only 42 (so feel free to ask me to depart your grassy area) and can confirm the exitence of "tracks" in the 80s, however they were not meaningfully separated environments. Sure the AP calc class was full of college bounds but was the cafeteria, the bus, the locker room etc?

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[Smirker]

If performance pay is properly designed, I think you can avoid both problems. In Queensland, every quarter each school sends representatives for each subject to a district "teacher's meeting," and as a component of this, the teachers must assess each other, from test content to top students. I'm not sure of the exact details, but I know it was designed to ensure each school was testing their students equally. I remember that my physics teacher was made to make the final question in our final physics test relatively complicated in order to justify giving certain students top grades.

There is also a state-wide curriculum (or is it national now?), which in my opinion is quite broad, and teachers are made to test many aspects of it.

On top of this district-based system, there is a state-wide test which gives a weighting factor to the grades of students in each school and also to the students within each subject within each school. If a teacher in one school was to somehow bypass the district-based system and give students easier tests, one would assume the students would perform worse in this national test, which would then impact their overall grade regardless. The opposite it also true.

As an interesting side-note, because of the implications bad students have on good students as a result of this weighting system, some schools pressure underperformers (e.g. weed smokers, kids who always skip class, etc) to leave and find work. I'm sure there are varied opinions about whether this is good or bad.

Anyway, to conclude, if performance pay took into consideration the systems that are designed to make assessment fair, then I think it would have a better chance at benefiting students. As with most systems, design is important.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[DNS-and-BIND]

We don't respect blue-collar because in our minds that means uneducated rednecks. Seriously, try that attitude in NYC or Miami and see how far you get.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[Smauler]

I'm not being elitist here (well, perhaps I a little)... but most people can't code. They can't be taught to code, save for in a very limited manner.

The thing is... there are a billion people in china, and the same percentage will be able to code as are here.. You _cannot_ teach people to code if they cannot. It takes a slightly odd mindset, IMO.

ergo... there are always going to be more coders, or those with aptitude to code in China than in the west. I think it's just something we're going to have to deal with.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[Sir Holo]

anagama: ... I recall there were three tracks when I went: vocational (shop, electricity, etc.,easy math, easy English, basic science, etc.), business (typing and whatever else you might study if your goal was to be a receptionist -- easy classes, essentially shop for girls (we were more sexist then)), or college track (various math classes, literature, foreign language, psychology, etc.).

And then some of us went multi-track. I was in all the advanced math/science courses (e.g. Calc. for college credit), but also took several shop classes. I am a much better scientist for having done that. Even though it meant I had to drop choir. :-(

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[Smauler]

It would help a lot if we respected blue collar labor more. Your plumber

I'd be happy respecting them more if I paid them less - plumbers call out fees in the UK are astonishing.

In fact... all your examples of jobs we undervalue seem to be decently paid (save carpentry - that's _all_ imported now). Car mechanics, plumbers, electricians, builders are all complained about at least as much as other services.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm too lazy to find references, but there's been studies that show that less than 25% of the population is capable of enjoying working as a programmer.

I'm pretty sure less than 25% of the population is capable of enjoying working as anything.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[Kal Zekdor]

ergo... there are always going to be more coders, or those with aptitude to code in China than in the west. I think it's just something we're going to have to deal with.

So... who said anything about China? TFA is about Vietnam, which has less than a third of the population of the US.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[Intropy]

I didn't mean undervalued by pay. I meant undervalued by the education system, which goes hand-in-hand with lack of respect (again that's actual respect as in admiration not money). I suggest that we'd be better off if these sorts of trades were treated as worthwhile goals for a student instead of it being "college or nothing" in high school. College is great for some people. College is a waste of time for others. Not everyone is well suited to it, and we don't need as many college graduates as a percentage of population as we seem to want to educate.

It's mildly ironic that the lack of respect causes fewer people to pursue those careers, which causes scarcity and thus the higher pay you mention.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[Anonymous Coward]

They are expensive exactly because they get no respect, hence there aren't enough of them. The ones that are skilled to do those things can almost name their price. School system tries to push everyone to college, we get lots of cheap white collars for the lower positions, and way too much people trying for the higher up positions, that go to CEOs relatives anyways. Easy job, good wage, you won't be outsourced, become a plumber.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[whoever57]

I'd be happy respecting them more if I paid them less - plumbers call out fees in the UK are astonishing.

You should try calling out a plumber in California. You would be glad to pay what whose plumbers are charging you in the UK (and yes, I do know how much plumbers charge in the UK).

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[crutchy]

i'm not sure but i think maybe the OP's point may have been that for someone to write specialist software there will be an increasing demand for specialist qualifications.

the problem is that often these specialist degrees (such as science or engineering) have programming components, and the students have probably already had exposure to programming through high school or hobby so more often in future specialists may be involved in programming their own tools with less help from CS grads.

it's probably more an issue of liability than capability; as threat of litigation increases, companies will be less able to afford to have programmers without specialist qualifications working on development of specialist software.

there are lots of applications that don't require specialist qualifications, but specialist software is a huge area of development that CS grads may have more limited opportunities in down the track unless they follow up their CS degree with another specialist degree.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[PhamNguyen]

Of course you do, everyone prefers to get paid more rather than less, and the less people trained to do your job, the more you will get paid. This is not the government's problem, however. The government should neither try to artificially increase supply, nor decrease supply, of people trained for any kind of job. In practice this would involve making people aware of the opportunities available in all lines of work, in an even handed manner, and providing whatever courses the students wanted.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[curious.corn]

The problem is this: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/25/magazine/skills-dont-pay-the-bills.html Managers still live the early '900, practicing what looks like class warfare, trying to run companies like sweatshops and forgetting the supply-demand rule when it's time for them to cough up... ;)

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[crutchy]

blue collar workers turn squiggles on paper into skyscrapers, which is certainly more respectable than the worthless stockbrokers who now work in those skyscrapers

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[crutchy]

many asian kids are studying overseas (much of australia's higher education is paid for by wealthy parents of full fee paying foreign students, many of them asian). they are among the most astute and studious in the world (stemming from much more intense competition due to higher population).

american kids on the other hand are stuck with the "we are the rulers of the universe" mentality and they turn out to be bums on welfare that vote for morons like obama.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[Anonymous Coward]

Something is very wrong if technical vocational tracks had easy math.
In the Netherlands I went to vocational electronics engineering school, I went on to continue to study further on.
But the math we were not only given in math classes, but also had to practically use on a day to day basis for the other classes was a lot harder than anything I've done later.

The only thing I hadn't learned in 'basic' math was matrices and quarternions, but to be honest I think they will only teach that at university in the Netherlands, at least when I was young. I picked it up myself.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder if the dentist turning plumber joke applies to the whole world.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[theVarangian]

I'm not being elitist here (well, perhaps I a little)... but most people can't code. They can't be taught to code, save for in a very limited manner.

The thing is... there are a billion people in china, and the same percentage will be able to code as are here.. You _cannot_ teach people to code if they cannot. It takes a slightly odd mindset, IMO.

ergo... there are always going to be more coders, or those with aptitude to code in China than in the west. I think it's just something we're going to have to deal with.

So... who said anything about China? TFA is about Vietnam, which has less than a third of the population of the US.

Sigh... Whether he used Vietnam or China as an example is immaterial. If one reads the part of his comment that you conveniently skipped, you will find that he was trying to point out that while the percentage of people that possess the aptitude for coding is probably more or less the same in different populations of modern humans, in areas with high population density there are going to be more talented coders. This is kind of obvious to anybody with a rudimentary grasp of statistical analysis, but people still go "Ooooh.... small Asian country country has lots of coders... what are they doing that we are not? Is there something in the water?". What it really boils down to is population density, quality of education, student motivation and the priorities government and educators set in schools which in Asia is Maths, Physics, CS and other technology related subjects and last but not least whether or not scripture thumping zealots are allowed to dictate what gets taught is schools.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[nightgeometry]

I haven't been to the US for a couple of years, but last few times i _was_ there I was really impressed with... bar tenders. It seemed that some people saw this is a perfectly good career choice, and indeed were very good at it. From minimal chats it seemed like they earned a reasonable wage too.

That seems fair enough, skilled workers, good at their jobs, earning a decent living and getting respect for it. I had assumed that a lot of non-white collar workers in the US were similar, is that not the case? (It seemed to me one of the really good things about the US).

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[Kal Zekdor]

I'm not being elitist here (well, perhaps I a little)... but most people can't code. They can't be taught to code, save for in a very limited manner. The thing is... there are a billion people in china, and the same percentage will be able to code as are here.. You _cannot_ teach people to code if they cannot. It takes a slightly odd mindset, IMO. ergo... there are always going to be more coders, or those with aptitude to code in China than in the west. I think it's just something we're going to have to deal with.

So... who said anything about China? TFA is about Vietnam, which has less than a third of the population of the US.

Sigh... Whether he used Vietnam or China as an example is immaterial. If one reads the part of his comment that you conveniently skipped, you will find that he was trying to point out that while the percentage of people that possess the aptitude for coding is probably more or less the same in different populations of modern humans, in areas with high population density there are going to be more talented coders. This is kind of obvious to anybody with a rudimentary grasp of statistical analysis, but people still go "Ooooh.... small Asian country country has lots of coders... what are they doing that we are not? Is there something in the water?". What it really boils down to is population density, quality of education, student motivation and the priorities government and educators set in schools which in Asia is Maths, Physics, CS and other technology related subjects and last but not least whether or not scripture thumping zealots are allowed to dictate what gets taught is schools.

I read his entire comment. If Vietnam has more high school students who have some knowledge of CS than the US, then it follows that there is a difference in educational policy that is the cause. If China has more than the US, as in his post, then population differences could explain that. The country used in his example is very much material, as a country with less population than us, but more programmers would completely invalidate said example. (If TFA is accurate, of which I cannot be certain.)

However, I can be certain that the educational system in the US needs a serious overhaul. Our students are abysmal in math and science when compared with other major nations. Education should be the primary focus of our government spending. Doing so will have more long term benefits for us as a nation than any other expenditures.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[jopsen]

but most people can't code. They can't be taught to code, save for in a very limited manner.

[Citation needed]

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[KGIII]

I would agree that the future will have more jobs that require computer use but I don't believe your statement that "nearly all jobs of the future will require programming ability" so to speak. It seems unlikely. Computer use != programming which I assume you know and what makes your statement so bizarre.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmm, I'm 44 so it was a while ago I was in HS. I recall there were three tracks when I went: vocational (shop, electricity, etc.,easy math, easy English, basic science, etc.), business (typing and whatever else you might study if your goal was to be a receptionist -- easy classes, essentially shop for girls (we were more sexist then)), or college track (various math classes, literature, foreign language, psychology, etc.).

It is interesting that this description of classes stereotype men to no lesser extent than women, yet it is only for the women that you are calling it sexist.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[ndrw]

But to pretend that a plumber, carpenter, or steel mill worker is trained in the same way as a computer science/engineering student is just stupid.

I have read with some interest that apprenticeship programs are being restored in Britain, Germany, and other European countries to teach the mill workers, carpenters, and other skilled labor workforce.

Engineering, architecture, law, medicine, and other "professions" require a certain base level of knowledge, as opposed to skills. Trying to teach skills in a classroom is not going to work. Trying to learn knowledge "on the job" is not going to work. It's okay to match the learning environment to what is desired to be learned!

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[Anonymous Coward]

I had assumed that a lot of non-white collar workers in the US were similar, is that not the case? (It seemed to me one of the really good things about the US).

The US has a bizarre tipping system that randomly makes a certain subset of public facing jobs much more lucrative than they would otherwise be if you are working in a place with a lot of business. Bartenders can process a large amount of expensive alcohol orders per hour and they receive tips as a percentage of the price. They also get to interact with a large amount of sexually open and available people while on the job. Bartenders are very much a special case.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[hairyfeet]

And there is a good reason for it, not to be blunt you could could probably hire a dozen coders in Vietnam for the cost of a single American. Do I think this is right? Nope and I think we should be a lot more protectionist like China and India but until that day comes one has to face reality and the reality is most CS is gonna end up either overseas (or thanks to scams like "How not to hire an American") or H1-Bs. That's just the way it is.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[TitusC3v5]

I'm a generation behind you (I'm 29), but even when I graduated HS the curriculum had been trimmed down drastically. There were approximately two shop classes, three AP classes, and the rest was only the basic core stuff - a single foreign language (Spanish), biology, algebra, trig, geometry, typing/basic CIS, and a smattering of other subjects.

No psychology, no philosophy, no non-latin foreign languages, no math beyond pre-calculus (which was what we had labeled as AP Calculus), and even chemistry was missing from the curriculum. Granted, it's a school in a poor rural area, but there are a lot of poor rural areas in the US.

Words can't express how far behind I felt when I finally hit university, despite graduating at the top of my class in HS with the most difficult curriculum I was able to piece together from the meager offerings.

Education is heavily touted during election season, but unfortunately it's the first thing sent to the chopping block when budgets are tight.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[nukenerd]

Jopson wrote :-

[Citation needed]

You need a reference for people having a whole range of different personalities, intelligence, capabilities and personalities?

There are many, many people (indeed the vast majority) who just do not have the excruciatingly logical (and perhaps blinkered) mind that a good programmer requires. Unless there is some major racial difference with the Vienamese (I am prepared to believe there is some) the Google blogger is talking bollocks. Even among engineers: I have worked with other engineers all my life and there are some who simply do not have a coder's mindset. I thought I did (I do some small apps in C as a hobby) until I met some real expert coders. The are not "better" people, they just have that particular capability and were certainly less good than I am in other areas like getting a broken-down machinery going again, my own particular skill.

Many people are no more likely to make good programmers than I am to be a good chat-show host - believe me.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[nukenerd]

The point is that nearly all jobs of the future will require programming ability.

One of the silliest statements I have seen here for some time.

In the early days of computers it was assumed that you got one to write programs on it. Many people said they would never want a computer because they would never want to write programs. Then games and apps came along, Progressively since then, programming became more and more the province of the specialist.

We have even reached the point where people do not even expect toi have to use a keyboard, let alone type code, and soon it will be just voice control.

Your statement is like someone in 1900 saying that soon everyone will need to build a car for themselves.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[Anonymous Coward]

My personal opinion is that ignoring computer science per-se is the right thing to do. As a computational scientist working in industry I have to continually learn new things and additional technologies. I am able to succeed because my grade school and high school did a good job of teaching fundamentals. They educated me so that I was able to absorb job training. They did not skip education in order to train me for short-lived jobs that could be easily out-sourced.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[Anonymous Coward]

"restored" and "Germany" does not fit together in this context. Germany has always had a strong system of vocational school/apprenticeship (so there is nothing to restore, it never went away) and some companies like it enough to export it to other companies. Recently saw a report of the company Stihl training their own workers based on the German model in the US.
And yes, it is called "the German model" in quite a few places.
Note that politicians sometimes use it only as a way to make the youths disappear from the unemployment statistics. Considering that it seems to be working surprisingly well in getting people real jobs in the end though.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[rally2xs]

Look, coding is an intellectual pursuit. You need to be above average IQ to do it well. Of course, that means that MOST people cannot code. If you think that most jobs are going to require programming, then you're saying that most people are going to be unemployable.

Sounds like this job framework needs a re-think. We can't have a society where most people are unemployable. We need to bring back good-paying jobs in factories that build the world's products. The only reason we're not doing it now is the income taxes. No, the income taxes take more $$$ out of businesses than the supposed "high wage American worker" does. Get rid of the income taxes, and this country would be #1 in manufacturing, and people who cannot code, but can wire up / plumb up a factory before you can blink twice will be well-paid and society, overall, will be prosperous.

Look at the Fair Tax. It replaces the income taxes with a consumption tax on new retail items for sale. This would make the US a prosperous nation again.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[pspahn]

I graduated just a few years before you, from a pretty decent public school, and even we did not have access to a number of the courses you mentioned.

Growing up that close to Silicon Valley, I was fairly sure what type of work I would find myself doing later in life (not to mention being given my first computer, an 80286, before I was even a teenager). I remember Chemistry class fairly well. It was right after lunch my junior year. The class after lunch was when we had 'silent reading' time... usually when most students were busy copying last night's homework from other people, or trying to flurry together an overdue last-minute project.

I'm pretty sure I barely passed Chemistry, mainly because I rarely paid attention, never did homework, and only scraped it out by doing well on exams. Instead I would spend most of the class just still stuck in my silent reading book... The HTML Bible (circa '94-'95).

By the time that semester was over, I had learned some early fundamentals of web development that are still with me today.

The point is that if you're relying on the education system to adequately prepare you for self-sufficiency down the road, you're probably going to end up like Mr. Titus up there... off to college with a severe lack of confidence when you come to realize all of the things you haven't learned that you maybe should have. I barely had the benefit of the Internet when I was in high school, so there really shouldn't be any excuse for students today, as they can learn anything whenever they like.

Yes, there's a problem with the education system, but there is also a problem with the students. If they don't stand up and demand curricula more relevant to today, it's certainly not going to just materialize. Do you think a majority of education administrators have even a fraction of a clue?

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not being elitist here (well, perhaps I a little)... but most people can't code. They can't be taught to code, save for in a very limited manner.

[...] You _cannot_ teach people to code if they cannot. It takes a slightly odd mindset, IMO.

That's bullshit. It does take a minimal amount of intelligence to do useful coding, but I'm willing to bet that the requirement on that is less than 100 IQ. What programming requires is experience and interest, just like anything else. That's how you develop the mindset that you are talking about - you weren't born with it. There's only few people who can't be taught conditional execution, variables, functions and loops. Give someone a few years of hands-on experience with that in school and then also teach them algorithms and data structures - I am certain you'll find that the majority of people could do programming just fine if given that education. They may not be TopCoder winners all of them, but they'll certainly go beyond "a very limited manner" of programming. This is the way it is with most things, by the way. Give someone who say they have two left feet a few years of dance education and they'll dance far better than average for their peers who didn't do that.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[Anonymous Coward]

The point is that nearly all jobs of the future will require programming ability.... In the future, those kinds of specialized software will be written by people with domain training/expertise

This is such crap. You're just talking about flooding the workforce with coders who can't find jobs.

No, he's talking about making "coding" part of a technical professional's toolbox, in the same way as calculus or thermodynamics. So you don't have to go hire a dedicated programmer to write a software PID controller for your heat pump, you have an engineer who can just as well implement a software controller as tune a Red Lion module.

I don't think I believe him, having seen the 'code' generated by engineering and science students. Maybe they would code with better practices if they had a little more formal programming training, but they would still make 'noob' mistakes and erroneous assumptions.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[c]

that's not the point of teaching programming that early. The point is that nearly all jobs of the future will require programming ability.

Well, not so much as require programming ability as much as having people who treat computers as more than magical black boxes.

Basically, your capacity to learn, use and troubleshoot stuff (software, hardware, machinery, whatever) is increased dramatically when you have a mental model of how that stuff operates that best approximates how it actually works.

Heck, if the only outcome is that there's never a Vietnamese tech support call that stretches an extra 15 minutes because someone doesn't understand the difference between rebooting a computer and turning the monitor on and off, I figure the world is ahead just a little...

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[demonlapin]

Education should be the primary focus of our government spending. Doing so will have more long term benefits for us as a nation than any other expenditures.

This is a nice sound bite, but not really true. We picked the low-hanging fruit of education a long time ago. Despite enormous increases in expenditures, we have not seen significant increases in test scores, etc., over the past 30+ years. It's almost certain that we spend too much on education, not too little, but because people who make government policy are the types who do well in school and can't imagine any other way of being, we keep pushing people to go to more and more of it even when it makes no sense economically. It is entirely possible for college to be a net economic negative for someone.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd be happy respecting them more if I paid them less - plumbers call out fees in the UK are astonishing.

Fix your own 'kin pipes then!

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[Kal Zekdor]

This is a nice sound bite, but not really true. We picked the low-hanging fruit of education a long time ago. Despite enormous increases in expenditures, we have not seen significant increases in test scores, etc., over the past 30+ years. It's almost certain that we spend too much on education, not too little, but because people who make government policy are the types who do well in school and can't imagine any other way of being, we keep pushing people to go to more and more of it even when it makes no sense economically. It is entirely possible for college to be a net economic negative for someone.

I don't claim to be an expert on education. I have no idea what will work. I just know that what we have now does not. You are correct in that not all students are cut out for higher education. However, our current educational system treats all children (more or less) equally. Resources should be spent on those who will make the best return on investment for society. Wasting time and money on a student who is simply not capable is a disservice not only to those that are, but the student in question as well. It's a harsh reality that not all students are equal, one that we need to accept.

More money needs to be spent on education. This does not mean that simply throwing money at the problem will solve anything. That money needs to go to teacher salaries (to attract better teachers), better equipment for schools, and not least of all to research into the science of education.

We don't spend too much on education; we're just not spending it smartly.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[Anonymous Coward]

Look, coding is an intellectual pursuit. You need to be above average IQ to do it well. Of course, that means that MOST people cannot code.

You know, there's coding, and there's coding. Just like there's building and building.

You don't expect anyone to be able to plan and build a skyscraper which doesn't crumble on the first stronger wind (if not earlier). But about everyone can be taught how to build a simple hut. The same is true in programming. Yes, most people would never haver the abilities needed to design and build the software for an airplane. But I believe almost everyone can be taught enough programming to do simple things like the main control software for a house heating system (well, anyone able to grasp the domain specific knowledge for heating systems, anyway). Especially if they can use building blocks already written by professional programmers for things like user interaction or actually controlling the hardware (just like almost no one these days cares about how to actually do I/O on the hardware level; you leave that to the OS kernel and its drivers).

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[Anonymous Coward]

What programming requires is experience and interest, just like anything else.

Absolute nonsense; it requires more than that. I've seen countless college graduates who couldn't code for shit. Sure, they could technically code, but they couldn't do it well. Same with mathematics.

This may surprise you, but most people are, in fact, imbeciles who can't understand abstract logic or contribute even novel innovations to a field; they memorize, but they do not adopt a deep understanding of even semi-complicated material.

Give someone a few years of hands-on experience with that in school and then also teach them algorithms and data structures - I am certain you'll find that the majority of people could do programming just fine if given that education.

My high school actually had a decent CS program--most people failed. Just like most people graduate high school without truly understanding mathematics, they will never truly understand how to be a good programmer. Sorry.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[cheekyjohnson]

Actually, the main problem I have is all the rote memorization and nonsensical standardized tests, not the lack of tiered curricula.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish people would stop saying spouting off that line that US math and science are terrible. Actually go and read the UN report, half of the countries ahead of us are not ahead by any statistically meaningful amount (within 5 points on scores over 500). Almost none of them are better by more than 10% with the exception of Singapore.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[cheekyjohnson]

However, I can be certain that the educational system in the US needs a serious overhaul.

I believe the US is far from alone there.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[cheekyjohnson]

we have not seen significant increases in test scores

Who cares? I firmly believe that rote memorization and teaching to these nonsensical tests that only test for rote memorization are major problems to begin with. I really couldn't care less about these test scores.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[cheekyjohnson]

Trying to teach skills in a classroom is not going to work. Trying to learn knowledge "on the job" is not going to work.

People learn differently, so this isn't necessarily true. It depends on the individual and how they go about it.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[K. S. Kyosuke]

blue collar workers turn squiggles on paper into skyscrapers

So basically, you're saying that architects are like hackers, blueprints are like programs, and blue collars are like trusty, reliable, slightly dull transistors? Well, I think many hackers here *do* have respect for transistor technology, but that's probably not the kind of respect one wishes if one, in fact, *isn't* an uneducated redneck.

The stockbrokers...that would be parasitic capacitances with leak currents?

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Don't forget the fact that job is to make people have fun and they get to *see* them having fun. Talk about job satisfaction... (When you have people skills and like people.)

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[jones_supa]

That's bullshit. It does take a minimal amount of intelligence to do useful coding, but I'm willing to bet that the requirement on that is less than 100 IQ. What programming requires is experience and interest, just like anything else.

Agreed with. You'll probably need some seed of basic problem solving, but that can be expanded greatly by learning stuff.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[CastrTroy]

While I agree that not everybody is equal, and that there should be the resources for people with above average abilities to excel, there's also a need to ensure that everybody in society get at least some minimal level of education. A person with no education who's on welfare and lives a life of crime probably costs the government more in tax dollars than a person who makes $100,000 a year would pay in taxes. Especially once you subtract out the amount of money that goes towards government services for the person who it working. Add to that fact, that most people, no matter how much resources you put into them, could not do a job worth $100,000 a year, and your left with the simple fact that we need to ensure that people can at least hold a job so that they don't cost the state more than they pay in taxes. This is where I believe the US school system (and parenting system) is really failing. It's not that they aren't turning out enough highly educated people, It's that there's too many people who make it through high school without even knowing how to read or do basic arithmetic. This is where the real problem is. Even if you put all your resources into the people who are going to excel, you're still going to end up behind if there are too many people who are leeching off the system producing nothing. And the people who are going to excel are probably going excel anyway even if you don't devote too much resources to them.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[CastrTroy]

The problem here is that the programming equivalent of building a hut is more akin to writing a few excel formulas than it is to any kind of actual application development. The FizzBuzz problem demonstrates this very well. Even among those people who have been trained in programming, and who are applying for jobs in the field, there are a surprising number of people who can't even write an very simple loop that figures out a very simple problem.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[interkin3tic]

Respectable to you and I. Not society. The downside of the american dream is that anything less than "super rich or will be eventually" is seen as "failure."

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[Anonymous Coward]

There are many, many people (indeed the vast majority) who just do not have the excruciatingly logical (and perhaps blinkered) mind that a good programmer requires. Unless there is some major racial difference with the Vienamese (I am prepared to believe there is some) the Google blogger is talking bollocks. Even among engineers: I have worked with other engineers all my life and there are some who simply do not have a coder's mindset. I thought I did (I do some small apps in C as a hobby) until I met some real expert coders. The are not "better" people, they just have that particular capability and were certainly less good than I am in other areas like getting a broken-down machinery going again, my own particular skill.

Mind if I share with you a few insights from AI research ?
1) Nobody is logical, or rational. A rational person would starve in front of the first closed door he finds. Why ? A rational person decides on actions by expected_gain * chance_of_event. Behind the door could be a bear, that would kill you. Sure the chance is tiny, but the cost of dying is -inf ... So no matter the chances involved a rational person would never do anything that might cause his death. And every action can cause death. Now this is the extreme version of this argument, but it applies to everything. Rationality doesn't work. Proof that this isn't so can be mailed, in the form of a prolog program that can deal with any chaotic world, with incomplete information (chaotic in the mathematical sense). Note that AI research worldwide spent about 30 years finding such programs, and none have been found.
2) This means that you are neither logical nor rational too.
3) What can the human mind do ? A human mind copies what it senses (in reality our mind's algorithm is a tiny variation of the genetic algorithm that controls our cells, and it simply runs much faster than evolution does. The speed difference is so ridiculous that large animals - notoriously slow in all actions (takes humans 25 years to reproduce, 14 absolute minimum. That is just painfully slow when it comes to evolution - yet apes' minds easily outsmart bacteria ... THAT is why we have brains. Takes us ~.6 seconds to start to move. Bacteria easily move 100 times their body length in 1/10th that time).
4) EVERY other thing you can do is a "trick" (for lack of a better word, if you want to, use "meme", but know that walking, breathing, coughing, even shitting is a meme that is learned), stored in what might be called RAM in your head.
5) "being an expert coder" is a set of tricks, or memes. It is nothing else, nothing magical, and certainly not a gift from God (or the almighty atheismo, if that's your fancy)
6) Spend enough time with those expert coders and your mind will figure out the tricks, the "memes" and copy them. That is all that's required.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[Anonymous Coward]

Architects are like software architects, blueprints are like block diagrams and blue collars are like programmers.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[Kal Zekdor]

Undoubtedly. The key is to maximize resource efficiency, taking into account not just taxes over the individual's life, but also potential welfare and unemployment costs, prison and law enforcement costs (good education is proven to reduce crime rates), and the societal benefit gained from the individual (which is hard to measure, though). Every student should receive the education required for them to excel at a job that they both want to and are able to perform; no more, no less.

That said, in the US at least, the demand for unskilled labor will continue to drop, due to automation in the long term and outsourcing in the short. I wrote a fairly detailed research paper on this in college. There will never (within the next few centuries, anyway) be zero need for unskilled labor, but unemployment rates will always be higher for those without much education. Unemployed workers (those that are physically able and willing to work) are indicative of failure at societal and economical levels, and a costly one.

A person who earns $40k a year (a low base for skilled labor) will give roughly $10k a year in taxes, at Federal, State, and Local levels combined. If this person works at that salary (modulated only by inflation), for 50 years, then that is half a million in taxes alone over that person's lifetime. If we spent half of that on that person's education to get them there, then from a purely financial standpoint, that's a net gain for the government. I don't know how much is spent per child by the government, but I doubt it approaches anywhere near a quarter million over the length of their education.

Then there is the fact that, as a society, investing in education makes society as a whole better. Increased education lowers crime. That benefits me, sure, I'll help pay for that. Increased education increases supply of skilled labor, lowering costs. That benefits me, sure, I'll help pay for that. Increased education makes it more likely that useful technology or life saving medicine is invented. That benefits me, sure, I'll help pay for that. Et cetera, et cetera.

(Off-topic: Nice signature. I always wondered if that idea had a proper term, but never got around to doing the research. I referred to it as the observer bias, usually when trying to explain to people that it is not miraculous that Earth supports life.)

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[freudigst]

It's amazing how few people in the U.S. economy actually create anything anymore. An education is pretty much jumping through and learning how to brown-nose/shove your way through the corporate world.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[BonThomme]

As an engineer who has done a fair bit of plumbing, carpentry, etc, I'd say that there is a fundamental and critical common ability between the trades and engineering. The ability to conduct a thoughtful analysis and then flip the switch to synthesis to solve a problem makes all the difference in preventing a 30 minute job from turning into a 6 hour job.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[Anonymous Coward]

I would love to but there is this building code that no matter how well I can install a hot water tank, because it wasn't done by a journeyman plumber it won't pass code.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[oreaq]

but most people can't code. They can't be taught to code, save for in a very limited manner.

[Citation needed]

Here.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[dcollins]

I'm 2 years younger than you, and had the same experience. However, my sister is another 2 years younger, and actually between me and her, our high school had a major overhaul and indeed got rid of all those differentiated tracks. Under education-school dogma of the early/mid 90's "tracking" is considered to be a four-letter word and widely forbidden. I was just talking about this to my family last night -- my father was completely bewildered by it, but my mother who still works in a junior high school has had to intimately deal with this for about two decades now.

"Tracking was once popular in English-speaking countries, but is less used now. Strong tracking systems formed the basis of the Tripartite System in England and Wales until the 1970s, and in Northern Ireland until 2009."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracking_%28education%29

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[tehcyder]

Mind if I share with you a few insights from AI research ? 1) Nobody is logical, or rational. A rational person would starve in front of the first closed door he finds. Why ? A rational person decides on actions by expected_gain * chance_of_event. Behind the door could be a bear, that would kill you. Sure the chance is tiny, but the cost of dying is -inf ... So no matter the chances involved a rational person would never do anything that might cause his death. And every action can cause death. Now this is the extreme version of this argument, but it applies to everything. Rationality doesn't work. Proof that this isn't so can be mailed, in the form of a prolog program that can deal with any chaotic world, with incomplete information (chaotic in the mathematical sense). Note that AI research worldwide spent about 30 years finding such programs, and none have been found.

I think that shows the limitations of AI research more than anything actually useful or true about the world.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[tehcyder]

If you think that most jobs are going to require programming, then you're saying that most people are going to be unemployable.

If most jobs will require programming, then computers will be doing that programming. Most people will be unemployed and will have to live lives of leisure with a small element of community service just to keep things relatively sane. Clearly, the computers will have to be owned by the community and not just a few rich oligarchs or else there will be social meltdown.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[tehcyder]

I've seen countless college graduates who couldn't code for shit. Sure, they could technically code, but they couldn't do it well.

It depends what "well" means. In any field there are people who are better and worse than average at doing something. That doesn't mean that there is some absolute divide between good and bad programmers (or painters, musicians, lawyers, farmers or anything else).

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[Anonymous Coward]

I rather like having a rare and mysterious skill set that guarantees me high marketability and a respectable salary.

Learn COBOL.

Get a penis transplant from a horse and be the first man on film to bugger himself to death.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[tehcyder]

This is the typical thing with American education, lazy high school, crazy hard work in college (well those that actually earn degrees and not just party.)

I thought that getting a bachelor's degree in the US was about equivalent to leaving high school able to read and write in most other countries. Why are there so many post-graduates otherwise? There is no need to get a Master's or PhD unless you're going to become an academic for most of us.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[Anonymous Coward]

That doesn't mean that there is some absolute divide between good and bad programmers

You can keep thinking that, but from my experience most people are incapable of truly understand the type of abstract logic that programming and mathematics require (if you want to innovate in either, that is).

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[femtobyte]

On the other hand, there's still a large space between "good programmer" and "non-programmer" where most people can advance with education.

Lots of kids get piano lessons. While very few of them turn out to be the next Mozart (or even professional-level concert pianists), just about any kid that you sit down at a piano and grind through standard lessons can achieve a reasonable level of proficiency (aside from the small portion of the population born anomalously tone/rhythm-deaf). Even if they never need to play the piano for a job, or even a hobby, learning to play provides generally beneficial mental stimulation that bleeds over to other areas. It's also the best way to find the kids who can be concert-pianist material, and teach everyone else to at least appreciate the skill necessary to advance beyond merely competent playing.

The same is likely true for programming. While only a few kids will have the "excruciatingly logical" attributes to be super programmers, I suspect just about all of them will benefit from stretching their symbolic logic capabilities a bit beyond whatever they started with, and achieve a basic level of proficiency (and an increased appreciation for truly artful coders).

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[Attila Dimedici]

The funny thing about that "budget cuts" excuse is that the school budgets did not get smaller after the "budget cuts", they got bigger. If the reason we lost all of these programs is because of budget cuts, how come we are spending more per student today (even after inflation) than ever?

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[Anonymous Coward]

We don't respect blue-collar because in our minds that means Mexicans.

There, fixed that for you.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[cheekyjohnson]

I wish people would stop saying spouting off that line that US math and science are terrible. Actually go and read the UN report, half of the countries ahead of us are not ahead by any statistically meaningful amount (within 5 points on scores over 500).

The fact that other countries are not ahead of the US by large margins doesn't mean that US math and science education isn't terrible; it may indicate that all these countries have improving to do, including the US. That said, I don't take such measurements seriously to begin with at this point in time.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[Hatta]

Your statement is like someone in 1900 saying that soon everyone will need to build a car for themselves.

Or like someone in 1450 predicting that nearly all jobs of the future will require literacy.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[cheekyjohnson]

crazy hard work in college

Wouldn't you have to be going to a somewhat decent college for that to be true? I'm not sure how many of those actually exist in the US.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[femtobyte]

Why does your "rational person" irrationally apply a weight of -inf to death? Death is bad, but not so bad as, e.g., living 50 years in excruciating torment. Once you attach a finite weight of -$BIG_AMOUNT to death, the unexpected bear dilemma becomes perfectly tractable.

Of course, I agree that perfect rationality "doesn't work," because there's no "pure logic" reason to assign any particular "expected_gain" to any event. On a pure mathematical basis, why is "having your testicles smashed" any worse than "getting a free sandwich"? Logic only helps after starting with a giant heap of a-rational (distinct from irrational) initial axioms (like "my pain is bad" and "sandwich is tasty is good"), which imbue the cosmos with non-rationally-derived "meaning."

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[jythie]

Unlikely. Teaching programming early is no more likely to wipe out programming as a profession as teaching math wipes out accounting. I think what this does show however is a bit of a flaw in Google's tests.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[Anonymous Coward]

Sucks to be from shitty schools and also have shitty parents. I'm 30. My HS still offers CS, AP CS, Latin, Philosophy, probably at least 10 AP classes. Although I now have a PhD, the transition from high school to university was shocking. Despite "checking my privilege;" it still shocks me how relatively well prepared I left high school about history, culture, economics, government, art. And I was a total clown and fuck up.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[Anonymous Coward]

lol @ neck beard trying to be special.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[Anonymous Coward]

lol @ dude. hate to break it to you, but putting a conditional in a spreadsheet cell is programming. you lose.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[Anonymous Coward]

He absolutely is not. I'm an Electrical Engineer, I know some programming because the sort of work I does requires it from time to time and it would be retarded to have to talk to a CS major to write a script to crunch set of numbers X in manner Y. However, my ability to "code" pretty much starts and ends at crunching numbers. I don't understand the finer points of OOP. I will not be taking your job. Trust me, I don't want to.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[TheSync]

Despite enormous increases in expenditures, we have not seen significant increases in test scores, etc., over the past 30+ years.

Who could imagine a socialist monopoly would not be able to efficiently deliver the demanded services?

I'm not sure if we are spending too much or too little on education, but I am certain that we are keeping an efficient market in delivering education from forming.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[TheSync]

A person who earns $40k a year (a low base for skilled labor) will give roughly $10k a year in taxes...that's a net gain for the government

Actually someone earning $40k is in the middle quintile of incomes, and will generally receive $15k per year in transfer income from the government, so actually they are a net loss for the government.

They might provide a net gain for the private economy of course (or they would likely not have a job).

Most "net gain" for the government comes from upper quintile income individuals.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[Anonymous Coward]

Who could believe that some well-programmed ideologue might not be able to resist making a completely predictable and entirely redundant post about ideologically anathematised subject X?

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[RougeFemme]

I don't think all jobs of the future will require programming ability. For most people, programmimg is simply a means to an end. Programmimg provides tools that enable people to do their jobs - now and in the future. So, will almost jobs be dependent, directly or indirectly, on some programming? Yes, probably. Will all jobs require programming? Noooooo.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[TheSync]

Who could believe that some well-programmed ideologue might not be able to resist making a completely predictable and entirely redundant post about ideologically anathematised subject X?

Sorry if it is redundant, but sometimes the truth needs to be spelled out several times before needed change occurs.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[Anonymous Coward]

For my district the budget did get smaller per school. They built a new HS before passing the bill to cover operating costs. When the school opened (and we really did need another school), the tax increase failed and we were left with three high schools attempting to operating on the budget of two. I can't say what the HS in the rest of the nation are doing, but I have noticed an unneeded expansion of technology, such as tens of thousands of dollars spent on classroom teleconferencing systems which get used a few times per year.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[painandgreed]

The US has a bizarre tipping system....

Spend an evening with some friends in Germany trying to get the attention of the waitress to get some more drinks while she is standing around talking to the cook sometime and it will make perfect sense. I really wanted to just call our tipping system what it is, "bribery", and introduce it to Germany because it never seems to be worth their time to care if a table of twelve people needs more than one drink order an hour during a major music festival weekend.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[crutchy]

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=how+is+it+made

there is a whole world out there that i'm pretty sure most white collar workers have little idea exists... much of it is now in asia

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[crutchy]

the real problem with the american dream is that real wealth has been confused for fiat paper money

when the stock market crashes and the value of the greenback implodes, what the united states is left with might come as a shock to most americans

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[K. S. Kyosuke]

I've had a series of books on "how things are made" since I was ten or so. I may well have been the only person in the elementary school who had any idea as to how to make soap or paper. I sort of don't consider myself ignorant of these things.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[K. S. Kyosuke]

and blue collars are like programmers.

Well, those who work with CNC machines, anyway. I'm not sure about those who put things into paper boxes.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[demonlapin]

I was thinking of the SAT, but if you want to carry on this conversation, what metric would you use to determine whether any given dollar spent on education is a good or a bad idea?

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[cheekyjohnson]

I was thinking of the SAT

Right.

what metric would you use to determine whether any given dollar spent on education is a good or a bad idea?

Any test that tests for a deep understanding of the material would be better than what we have now, in my opinion.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[demonlapin]

Increased education lowers crime.

No, more educated people commit less crime. Those are not the same statement.

As for cost of education, let's take a good school system - New Trier in the northern suburbs of Chicago. They spent $100M to educate about 4000 students, or $25k/student. That's over a quarter of a million per student. How about a bad one - DC? They spent over $28k per student. Wow. Well, maybe we could choose somewhere poor. The poor souls of McDowell County, WV, are spending over $10k per student for some of the worst results in the state. That's got total expenditure for a K-12 education down to around $130k, so if you can come out of there and succeed, you'll definitely benefit the government, but even then you have to worry about the time value of money - a huge investment over 13 years that takes 13 more years just to break even if you're successful. And you'd have to be really successful - the average working male in McDowell County only makes $26k, not $40k.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[cheekyjohnson]

On the other hand, if you're talking about something like mathematics, merely applying a formula to a specific problem (e.g. finding the length of a side of a triangle while the other two sides are known) should be quite simple for anyone who actually understands the material. I think it's not unfair to say that people who consistently fail to solve such problems probably don't understand the material (unless something else is happening), but that being able to solve the problems doesn't mean that you actually do understand the material.

So maybe you weren't being too unreasonable by being concerned about the fact that the test scores have apparently remained almost constant.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[demonlapin]

They've actually gone down; the SAT was "re-centered" once in the '90s and I think again when they stopped calling them SAT and Achievement Tests and started calling them SAT-I and SAT-II. BTW, good luck designing those tests so that they work and can't be gamed by school districts.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[anagama]

I also took some of these other classes -- keyboarding for example as well as the electrical class which was mostly household wiring but we did get to do some stuff with soldering and resistors and such. During the summer between my junior and senior year, I was allowed to have a key to the dark room so I ended up doing a lot of photography for a while because I could use it any time I wanted to (completely unsupervised) and then used my electives senior year for photography classes. That summer, I dissolved the skin on my fingertips to painful thinness from touching the stop bath (mild acetic acid solution) too much. I had a blast doing it and my fingertips recovered when I went to using tongs.

Anyway, the things people are saying about school now make me think I had a really good HS education.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[mdielmann]

1) Nobody is logical, or rational. A rational person would starve in front of the first closed door he finds. Why ?

So....the rational person would choose to do nothing and die rather than do something and die. How is this rational?

3) What can the human mind do ? A human mind copies what it senses

And if all minds (and bodies) were created equal, then the next Einstein would have studied under him, and advanced quickly from his points, just as Einstein studied under someone just as good as him but without the greater weight of experience that Einstein was given due to his additional mentors. Except this isn't how it happened. And the reason why is because we aren't created identical.

4) EVERY other thing you can do is a "trick" (for lack of a better word, if you want to, use "meme", but know that walking, breathing, coughing, even shitting is a meme that is learned), stored in what might be called RAM in your head.

And yet, some runners are better than others, not because of lack of desire or lack or training, but because of relative lack of ability (they still easily beat 99% of the population).

Sometimes even knowing what the trick is isn't enough to know when it's the right time to use it. The flaws compound from there. Certainly, experience explains some of it, but we aren't just a bunch of cogs, identically toothed and sized. We have strengths and weaknesses, not merely due to our experiences. And even if it is due entirely to our experiences, no two people live identical lives, so people will have more or less capacity to incorporate those memes, or to recognize when best to use them

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[crutchy]

you're probably not part of "most white collar workers" then

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[CastrTroy]

I don't think that it's really a problem you can throw money at. You basically demonstrated this in your response. DC spent more money and got worse results. From a quick Google, I found that in Ontario Canada where I live, we spend about $10K per child. And we usually rate among the best on international rankings. I think a lot of the problem isn't something the government can solve on it's own. The biggest problem is that many parents just don't care about school, or even worse, discourage their kids education.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting. I am 29 and grew up smack dab in the middle of Governor George Bush's Texas education reforms that formed the basis of NCLB in a hick town of 60,000 people that had only one public high school (and one private, church high school). Here are the AP classes I took (and aced):

Calculus AB
Calculus BC
Psychology
English Language
English Literature
Physics: Electricity & Magnetism
Chemistry
American History
Computer Science
Spanish

My school also offered AP Biology, French, German, Statistics, European History, Sociology, and maybe Latin (is there an AP Latin? there definitely was a Latin IV at my school).

All this while we took standardized tests every year and had an incompetent and corrupt school board.

What I'm saying is I don't think it's NCLB that shat all over our education system. Although I do think it shat on part of it.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[Anonymous Coward]

It takes a slightly odd mindset, IMO.

Bullshit. Anyone who can do first-semester college math can program. Any other opinion is just misplaced elitism.

Programming is arcane; it is not difficult.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[lsatenstein]

I'm not being elitist here (well, perhaps I a little)... but most people can't code. They can't be taught to code, save for in a very limited manner.

The thing is... there are a billion people in china, and the same percentage will be able to code as are here.. You _cannot_ teach people to code if they cannot. It takes a slightly odd mindset, IMO.

ergo... there are always going to be more coders, or those with aptitude to code in China than in the west. I think it's just something we're going to have to deal with.

===
Coding brings a skill that is more than doing mechanical thinking. A programmer's mind is receiving training in logical and sequential problem solving. He knows to have an initialization, session, followed by a processing session and to produce results.

This structured learning by students serves them well. They are not lost when faced with a homework or research project. The thinking processes with programming carry over to solving challenges as teenagers and adults.

And of course, VietNam would like to compete with South Korea, a very major developer of hardware and software.

And in the USA and Canada, with absolute concentration on deficit reduction, the students are not getting what they need. It is "Slip, sliding away".

Computer programming teaches logic and rules. Learning a second language does that as well. For North American Students, I believe that children should start a second language, preferably Spanish, as early as kindergarten. Most kids can substitute a second language for programming.

(Why Spanish). There are 37.5 million Hispanics in the USA. Add to this number the populations of Mexico, Puerto-Rico, Cuba, Central and South America, and with 350 million Spanish speaking people, it makes good sense. In the next decade, much more trade will be a north-south hemisphere exchange, and it makes sense to be fluent and ready. Most of the Latinos are schooled with English as a second language.

By the way, my grandchildren are enrolled in a school where French immersion is the intent. From kindergarten to grade 4, all teaching and material is in French. The children learn "good French" well. In grade 4, they are switched to 50-50 French / English, and by grade eleven, 70% English in the courses. The kids speak, read, write both languages fluently. Language is in my view another way of learning to think logically, as does software application programming.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[Anonymous Coward]

but most people can't code. They can't be taught to code, save for in a very limited manner.

[Citation needed]

You need a reference for people having a whole range of different personalities, intelligence, capabilities and personalities?

I'm not the original poster, but I'd need a citation for "Most people can't be taught to code", because that's against the presentation of the science I've come across previously. With regards to personalities, for instance, my personality psychologist friend (who also codes and thus have a personal interest in this) told me me something along the lines of 'While the typical programmer has an personality somewhere close to the INTP-side of an MBTI personality test, and people think "MBTIs are better at programming", this is actually wrong - there's no correlation with ability, but INTPs are more prone to getting into programming'. With regards to being able to train random people to program, there was a case where a random group of people that were laid off where offered a programming course, and it turned out that most of them could be trained to be programmers (and enjoy it).

There are many, many people (indeed the vast majority) who just do not have the excruciatingly logical (and perhaps blinkered) mind that a good programmer requires. Unless there is some major racial difference with the Vienamese (I am prepared to believe there is some) the Google blogger is talking bollocks. Even among engineers: I have worked with other engineers all my life and there are some who simply do not have a coder's mindset. I thought I did (I do some small apps in C as a hobby) until I met some real expert coders. The are not "better" people, they just have that particular capability and were certainly less good than I am in other areas like getting a broken-down machinery going again, my own particular skill.

The excruciatingly logical *skill* that a good programmer requires can be learned. It sounds like the Vietnamese has ended up with a structure where kids learn this.

However, writing apps is probably not the fastest way to learn it - doing algorithmic work and dealing with "toy problems" will give you better abilities in that space, though it won't help you as much with the communication skills that are important in group work, or the ability to dig into documentation and understand new APIs that's important for app development.

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[Sir Holo]

anagama: That summer, I dissolved the skin on my fingertips to painful thinness from touching the stop bath...

That stuff is typically 'glacial' acetic acid. Think super-concentrated vinegar; that is all it is. Just stops the development process (of silver gel film) very quickly. Then your 'fixation' bath inactivates all of the non-reacted photoreceptors/electron photoreceptors, thus rendering the negative an archival record of the 'imaged' event.

Just PRO TIP: (from my just-retiring dermatologist) Foot callouses? NO PROBLEM! Simply (1) wrap them in paper towels, (2) soak the paper towels in vinegar, (3) go to be until the discomfort awakens you around 4:00 am, and finally (4) Peel away the former callouses like cottage cheese from the affected area (usually your heels, balls of feet, and big toe). It all just comes off with your fingers, and leaves baby-smooth skin intact underneath! I've tried it. It works like magic, and it's nearly free!

If you want somethings shorter-acting––buy some 60% glycolic acid on the web. FAR stronger than vinegar, so test spots for 5 minutes, etc.. Buyer beware! This is what actual dermatologists use in facial peels, it is not something to mess around with outside of a highly controlled environment (good timer, quick application, immediate rinse-off at end of timed test. If you go this route for your feet, then do a series of test runs to see how fast it dissolves your callouses. And if you decide to try the stuff on your elbows, face, etc, well––I am not responsible, because I have only described its (wonderful) properties of rejuvenating your feet.

Good luck!

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[Sir Holo]

Wow, didn't mean to go off on a tangent in my previous post...

You learned two fantastic skills. Soldering ability in a graduate student is highly desired.

The other skill, printmaking, is a complicated art that requires not only patience, but also the development of a good eye, and also the 'feeling' of what exposure is going to make print come out great. Those are physical skills that never go away, but they also inform your intuition, so that when you shift to Photoshop, you have all of the 'ocular' skills entrenched in your mind.

Good luck! My best was an 18X11 print made using an ancient enlarger and am 8X11-inch tray. That ws some work, but got me a small prize at the time.

NOTE: Most elargers use spherical lenses, which therefore distort the image outside of the central regoin. You could seek out a super-expensive (Canon) enlarger, but will be better off just getting a good scan of you large, flat negative, and going digital fro therel

Have fun!

Hmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

Google uses Pascal?

Re:Hmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well they should. It's awesome.

Re:Hmm...

[crutchy]

free pascal and lazarus also aren't bad

HTML image tag? Really?

[tjb]

What does an HTML image tag have to do with computer science or being a good software engineer?

Heck, I've been working as a professional software developer in the semiconductor industry for 13 years, can sling C, Matlab and various assembly languages all day long, and think I have a pretty good theoretical grounding, but I'm not terribly familiar with HTML or Java or PHP or whatever the cool kids are using these days (now get off my lawn). I mean, good for them and all, but it seems like a rather hokey standard to judge students by.

Re:HTML image tag? Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

What does an HTML image tag have to do with computer science or being a good software engineer?

Heck, I've been working as a professional software developer in the semiconductor industry for 13 years, can sling C, Matlab and various assembly languages all day long, and think I have a pretty good theoretical grounding, but I'm not terribly familiar with HTML or Java or PHP or whatever the cool kids are using these days (now get off my lawn). I mean, good for them and all, but it seems like a rather hokey standard to judge students by.

It's a fairly fundamental concept -- representing a data structure as a string of text, with the data structure including a level of indirection (i.e. the image tag contains a pointer to the source of the image, in this case expressed as a URL). And while you might not know how to do it, that's not the same thing as "having difficulty" with it, which implies an attempt to learn it that failed.

Re:HTML image tag? Really?

[anagama]

I think the the HTML reference comes from several links deep, not specifically, but topically:

Of the two classes described, neither teaches computer science. The first teaches keyboarding and use of Microsoft applications, while the second teaches website design. While the website design course claims to teach the use of "HTML programming code," this is a misuse of the term, as HTML is a markup language rather than a programming language and requires no understanding of algorithms or program design.

http://blog.carolynworks.com/?p=572

Which was summarized in the article like this:

Teachers often refuse to teach real CS because more often than not they don't understand it. Instead, they end up teaching word processing and website construction, while calling it CS.

http://neil.fraser.name/news/2013/03/16/

So essentially he's saying that US CS curriculum is so bad, students can't even do html, which actually isn't programming anyway, it's just a kind of text formatting.

Re:HTML image tag? Really?

[crutchy]

Matlab is awesome, and so are IDEs like Delphi, but if you can get your head around PHP/JS/HTML/CSS/MySQL it can be very efficient. You just need a junked Windows OEM box to make a LAMP server. I personally like the ability to mash up half decent and usable GUIs without a whole heap of fucking around. Browsers have their quirks, but if you learn some basic principles (Google "top ten mistakes in web page design") and use the W3C validation tool you can't really go wrong for in house (LAN hosted) tools. You can even do charts and diagram automation with PHP's GD extension.

Re:HTML image tag? Really?

[crutchy]

html, which actually isn't programming anyway, it's just a kind of text formatting.

it can get a little bit trickier when generating html from javascript from php

Re:HTML image tag? Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

I am being pedantic, but GD existed for Perl probably longer than PHP existed at all. And it probably exists for a few other languages as well, so no need to stoop down to using PHP just to make charts and diagrams :-P

Re:HTML image tag? Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been working as a professional software developer in the semiconductor industry for 13 years, can sling C, Matlab and various assembly languages all day long, and think I have a pretty good theoretical grounding, but I'm not terribly familiar with HTML or Java or PHP or whatever the cool kids are using these days (now get off my lawn).

Matlab is awesome, and so are IDEs like Delphi, but if you can get your head around PHP/JS/HTML/CSS/MySQL it can be very efficient.

I think the parent's point is that HTML/CSS/MySQL are not especially relevant in much of technical programming or industrial control. You might easily program a whole FIRST soccer team without ever seeing an <IMG> tag, so using knowledge of HTML tags as a measure of "programming" skill is silly. Like evaluating an auto mechanic based on whether he knows how to apply carnuba.

Re:HTML image tag? Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

What does an HTML image tag have to do with computer science or being a good software engineer?

I'm no expert but I would guess as google is mainly a web based company (or atleast their public face is) and HTML is the most known web language and the img tag is one of its most basic parts that's the point of the quote. If you can code in other languages it wouldn't be to much to expert that you could learn HTML quite well and quickly if the need presented itself.

Re:HTML image tag? Really?

[0xdeadbeef]

Teachers often refuse to teach real CS because more often than not they don't understand it. Instead, they end up teaching word processing and website construction, while calling it CS.

Which is funny, considering how people aren't willing to pay programmers the salary market scarcity demands. I expect next they will be complaining that there no people who could be programmers accepting a teacher's salary instead.

Re:HTML image tag? Really?

[metlin]

Even so, it continues to amaze me that people conflate computer science with coding. I am pretty decent at a few areas of computer science (graphics algorithms, machine learning, theoretical c.s., especially around complexity and optimization) but I am a pretty mediocre coder at best.

I "get" software engineering from a systems optimization perspective (more of an operations research perspective) and from a complexity standpoint, but I find most coding and APIs to be just arcane ways of accomplishing a task.

So, I think as long as kids are taught the basics -- vector and linear algebra and physics (for graphics), statistical analysis (for machine learning), operations research and discrete mathematics (for computational complexity), and a smattering of other areas like basic calculus, combinatorics etc, you *are* teaching them computer science.

The ability to code is incidental, and while it is valuable in getting a job, it is not to be conflated with the ability to pursue computer science.

HTML may be nothing more than a markup language. But in a similar vein, computer science has as much to do with coding as astronomy has to do with telescopes (channeling Dijkstra).

Get the basics and the foundations right and the rest will follow.

Re:HTML image tag? Really?

[CastrTroy]

HTML does have a couple aspects that's useful as an introduction to computer science. It's a language that's interpreted by programs which use it as input for computers to do something. Learning HTML will help you understand things such as langauge syntax, and how messing up that syntax causes the computer to do things the writer of the HTML didn't intend. Also, it's a good starting point for programming. Once you've learned HTML as a language for describing to the computer what you want to display on the screen, you can move on to PHP to learn how to tell the computer to display different HTML depending on user input, or to repeat sections of the HTML for each record in a database. Or you could start learning javascript to control things that happen when part of the HTML document is clicked on or hovered over. HTML is technically not a programming language, but it's a good launching point for learning real programming languages.

Re:HTML image tag? Really?

[CastrTroy]

Actually, if more programmers would start out with something like Matlab or Delphi then they would probably have a better time programming. Look at that list of things you need to know to make a web application (PHP/JS/HTML/CSS/SQL). Plus the web is a very non forgiving place for badly coded applications. Sorry you didn't call MySQLReallyEscapeMyQuotesIMeanItThisTime, your database just got emptied by some malicious user to your site. If you screw up desktop application, a user can only mess with their own data, not the data of everybody using your application everywhere. Also, you mention that browsers have their quirks, and this kind of thing will make things frustrating to new developers. Sorry, your HTML is messed up, we don't tell you about how bad it is, and pretend that nothings wrong, but the browser will attempt to fix your code and everything will look just a little messed up. Have fun finding out which part of the HTML is broken, or which part the specific browser you're using decides not to like. At least with a langauge like Delphi, if it compiles, you can be sure that at least the syntax is correct.

Re:HTML image tag? Really?

[RR]

Even so, it continues to amaze me that people conflate computer science with coding.

Could it be that the reason people conflate computer science with coding is because professors, test makers, and the entire industry conflate computer science with coding? (That's a rhetorical question.)

It's yet another problem with teaching introductory computer science using Java. Abelson and Sussman used a pretty but impractical programming language, and Dijkstra specifically forbade making a compiler for his language. The rest of the industry insists on teaching the students a "useful" programming language. The College Board actually insists on using Java for AP Computer Science, if you're in a school with a competent CS instructor.

And then, because you're starting out using Java, you spend most of the introductory course on Java's insane syntax, obtuse type system, and complicated runtime. No wonder normal people avoid CS.

Re:HTML image tag? Really?

[crutchy]

The web is a very nasty place, but i was mainly talking about in-house LAN-only tools.

I cut my teeth with Delphi and it has probably made programming for LAMP much easier

LAMP can be frustrating, but I've found the benefits (particularly from CSS for print and screen layouts)... W3C validation is critical, and for in-house apps I keep track of what browsers are used and use browsershots to test them

Delphi is definitely easier for beginners than LAMP though, and Delphi programs can be made to process a heap of data more efficiently too (like Matlab can process huge matrices in the blink of an eye). Depends on the application I guess.

Re:HTML image tag? Really?

[metlin]

I wish I could mod this comment up. I couldn't agree more, and to me, that's my fundamental bone to pick with CS as it stands today.

Even in the context of the industry, there is an assumption that if you graduated with a degree in CS, you must be a coder or a code monkey. And then, there's the other side of the equation where just because someone is a good coder, they must be good at CS. I have seen some fantastic programmers who know a language inside out, can utilize all kinds of frameworks, and are proficient at what they do. However, they lack critical "CS" skills.

Ask them to do eigen-faces or write a ray-tracer and they are lost. Even relatively simple things, like optimizing a search algorithm, becomes difficult and the question I get asked is, "Isn't there a library I can use?".

In the pursuit of coding over computer science, we are being myopic. Coding is not a difficult skill to pick up. Sure, it's not easy, but compared to, say, computational fluid dynamics or other physical sciences, it is pretty run of the mill. What we need is more people who are equipped with both these skills, because that's what's needed for building the future.

While iPhone apps and websites may be popular, sophisticated and disruptive technologies require a much better understanding of the fundamentals.

but the question is..

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if they can program, and could pass a Google interview. Do they want to be computer programmers/developers? I have met many people who have degrees in CS or are developers (app or web) and they can do the work, but they don't do good work.

They can produce code because they know how, but they have no drive or real desire to do the work. For me those who produce code that is quality code have a real desire to be a developer and to write code. It's not enough just to know how.

Re:but the question is..

[Bremic]

The point of introductory schooling is to help people make the decisions about what career they want to pursue, not about only teaching them what they will need in their chosen vocation.

I don't know the American school system, but in Aus we have grades 1-12. From my schooling (nearly 30 years ago). Grades 1-3 is the basics (reading, writing, arithmetic), 4-6 start covering history, geography, and the generic stuff that's important to everyone. 7-8 was history, science, basic economics, physical education, math - the basic building blocks of finding out what interests you. 9-10 was starting to focus on the things that interested you. You could choose to take a business path, or a arts path, or a science path, or (oddly enough) a sports path. Years 11-12 were for the people who wanted to be educated more in the things that they were interested in continuing in after school was over. General a strong focus in what you started in 9-10, maybe focusing on a particular type of science, or accounting vs legal.

About the only good reason I can think of for doing a purely vocational focus in schools (only teaching what students need for the profession that someone has chosen for them) is that there would be almost no need to ever consider teaching religion in schools.

Seriously, schooling is about educating children enough so that as adults they can start focusing on what they want to do. Not about choosing a path for every student. Schools shouldn't be factory lines putting out clones, though with the recent trends in performance pay for teachers, focusing on grades rather than learning, and parents thinking of teachers purely as cheap child care for 8 hours a day - I understand why you would think that.

Re:but the question is..

[fredgiblet]

In America the finding what you want to do phase has been moved to college for the most part. It's way more profitable that way.

Re:but the question is..

[crutchy]

i have real desire to be a porn star. doesn't mean i would make a good one.

Google Interview Process

[jrumney]

If that blog post is an example of what gets past Google's interview process, then I am not at all surprised that 11th grade high school students could also get past it.

Re:Google Interview Process

[Anonymous Coward]

I've gone through Google interviews before. Their questions are rather poor for identifying any true creativity or ability to learn new things, basically just testing with CS brain teasers and annoying algorithms. eBay was even worse - their Java architect asked moronic things like "name 15 Java keywords as fast as you can" and their C++ architect intentionally focused on way-too low level concepts like how compilers constructed vtables (which having worked on compilers I knew, but given his attitude of wanting to prove candidates wrong would never choose to work with him). Apple's was a lot more balanced, and I admit I bombed one question from misunderstanding what was asked; their loss.

But in any case I'm so glad I didn't take a job at any of those now-bloated corporate workplaces. The startup I ended up at was bought a few years ago and I had enough stock to buy a house and live very comfortably in the Bay Area. Basically at this point Google might want to focus on 17 year old Vietnamese HS students, because the real talent has better options...

Re:Google Interview Process

[crutchy]

the main focus of institutional jobs seems to be the humble idiot test... that only idiots can pass :)

Re:Google Interview Process

[Anonymous Coward]

It's been quite a while since I've read up on their interview process, but my impression was that Google's interview process was basically, "How can we ask questions that only someone fresh out of grad school would bother to have down pat (because people who've been working real jobs would instead focus on how to get actual work done)?"

Re:Google Interview Process

[Anonymous Coward]

Google also suffers from CS degree bigotry. If you don't have a CS degree, they don't care. Doesn't matter how much experience you have or how good you are, they look at CS degree first.

No wonder...

[Anonymous Coward]

Given the incresed rate at which my site gets probed from hackers in Vietnam in the past year or two, this does not surprises me.

Not Blocking Per Se

[KeithIrwin]

What's happened is that the national standard for computing education in this country (which have been adopted by most states) are set by a board of specialists who all specialize in the use of computers in education. They don't specialize in computer science. There are no computer scientists on the board at all. As such, they recommend that teachers teach the sort of skills which make the computer useful in reinforcing learning in other subjects because that's what they specialize in. So, for example, they might recommend that students learn how to use spreadsheets in middle school because it helps them in analyzing experimental data in middle school science. Or they might recommend that students learn how to browse the web because it helps them practice reading and study skills. But they don't recommend learning programming because it is outside of their specialty and they likely don't understand how programming can be used to reinforce learning in other subjects (which I would argue that it can be used very effectively to do so for many subjects, especially math and science).

If we want to change this, we need to get state level boards of education to adopt different standards. That's how change will happen.

Re:Not Blocking Per Se

[ColdWetDog]

If we want to change this, we need to get state level boards of education to adopt different standards. That's how change will happen.

Except that many of the state Boards of Education are grappling with such esoteric topics as the validity of evolution or the value of pi.

We're doomed.

Re:Not Blocking Per Se

[Bremic]

How many skilled programmers are willing to work in schools for the pay that is offered? It's a prime example of if we want kids to have access to knowledge in their schooling, then we need to attract teachers who can impart that knowledge.

Unfortunately in the first world there seems to be a trend to offer as little as possible for education, figuring I suppose that if the next generation is uneducated they will be cheaper to employ.

Re:Not Blocking Per Se

[KeithIrwin]

Being a skilled programmer doesn't necessarily mean being a skilled teacher, especially when it comes to the basics of programming. It can actually be quite difficult for someone to teach to others the things which come easiest to them. However, your overall point that we don't have a surplus of skilled computer science educators is true. But even without that, forcing at least a little basic computer programming on kids, even with unskilled teachers, is a lot better than letting them do without. I'm pretty sure that the teacher who taught me Logo in 2nd grade and BASIC in 3rd didn't understand very much about programming beyond the range of those courses. (I suspect this partially based on, for example, that when I asked when you would use GOSUB instead of GOTO, they didn't have a clear answer). But they were effective at teaching that basic material and that was a great start. I think that the article this was about illustrates this well, as I have trouble believing that Vietnam has a much greater quantity of skilled computer scientists teaching in its schools than the USA does.

Re:Not Blocking Per Se

[crutchy]

or keynesian economics... america is so totally fucked

Re:Not Blocking Per Se

[bertok]

Figuring I suppose that if the next generation is uneducated they will be cheaper to employ.

Assuming a giant conspiracy is rarely the correct answer.

I suspect that it's simply a side effect of a society's path towards modernisation.

First, lets go back to the fundamental problem: I, as a professional programmer with a CS degree, would make 3-5x more income doing work in the industry than I would as a teacher. This isn't even skipping the side-benefits of a teaching career such as long holidays, I get more free time as a consultant or contractor than I would as a teacher and still make truckloads more money. This is typical around the western world, and not just in computer science, but many other areas as well.

It wasn't always so! Not so long ago, roughly around the time my grandparents were teaching classes, they were in a "respected profession" that made them one of the best incomes in their home town.

So what changed? Well, progress did. Essentially, the problem is that most other jobs became more productive, often at a staggering rate. A machinist today can make more widgets with better quality than he could a hundred years ago because of automation and better tools. A factory makes more products. A manager managing workers oversees more productivity. A programmer can work on computers millions of times faster than the first computers, using abstract high-level languages that are vastly more productive to use than assembler was.

All of this has translated into increased income (due to increased productivity) for just about everyone, except teachers, because education has remained largely stagnant in terms of productivity for centuries now. Class sizes are still "optimal" at roughly 30 students per teacher. There is no way to teach certain material to average students before they're old enough, so the process can't be sped up either. The kids get one year older in exactly one year, like they always have! No new technologies have come about either to enable a typical high-school teacher to effectively teach even 300 students, let alone thousands.

Of course, that's not entirely true: new technologies for teaching more efficiently have come about, they just don't look anything at all like a typical classroom, because that has insurmountable scalability problems. Instead, things like the Khan Academy, wiki text books, Wikipedia itself, and the like are slowly starting to make progress towards more efficient and scalable education.

However, none of that translates to increased teacher pay, which is not unusual, because even though it looks like an intellectual profession, in terms of productivity it behaves a lot more like manual labour. A good teacher can teach better, but not more. This is the problem, not some giant conspiracy. The market prices manual labour with low wages, because automation is more efficient and produces more value.

Re:Not Blocking Per Se

[darkstar949]

Seriously you must be joking? Most schools are doing good if they teach even the basic of personal finance in schools these days for economics.

Re:Not Blocking Per Se

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a wickedly interesting hypothesis. I have one problem with it. If the output is people who are more productive, doesn't that make the teachers more productive? Is it not then that our society has decided on a reduced overall value for grade-school teachers?

Re:Not Blocking Per Se

[Attila Dimedici]

According to the statistics I can find, the average class size decreased 41% from 1960 to 2010, yet over that same time period the average teacher's salary, adjusted for inflation, has increased 49%. So exactly when was this mythical time when teachers were paid more relative to everyone else than they are today?

Re:Not Blocking Per Se

[TheSync]

they might recommend that students learn how to use spreadsheets in middle school because it helps them in analyzing experimental data in middle school science

The truth is that you need Microsoft Office skills for pretty much any real job in business these days.

I think all kids should be exposed to some programming, but they better also know Word/Excel/Powerpoint.

Re:Not Blocking Per Se

[nebosuke]

There are a few issues with your line of reasoning.

First is that the increase in productivity has anything to do with teachers. My personal experience has been that it is due to technology (both 'hard' tech like advances in electronics and 'soft' tech like Lean, Balanced Scorecard, and other improvements in the methods by which we organize people) that is responsible for the increase in productivity. The 'teachers' of these tech improvements (consultants, enterprising employees, entrepreneurs, etc.) absolutely have been rewarded.

The second issue is the assumption that the educational system allows for differentiated remuneration based on value provided. If teachers' pay was differentiated based on the quality and quantity of output, there would be incentives (and therefore more effort) by motivated teachers to provide greater numbers of students with a higher quality of education. Many people who actually have the skillset required to improve the educational system would also find it worth their while to participate there rather than in industry. Current systems, however, do not permit such differentiation so there is little economic incentive. Furthermore, interested outside actors (e.g., tomorrow's employers of today's students) have no mechanism by which they can reliably incentivise and provide resources to good teachers, so it is in their best interest to instead withold resources from the K-12 educational system and employ them in internal training systems or to higher ed scholarship programs instead.

The final issue is the fact that progress in every aspect of every society in the world has at times been subject to disruptive change. That is to say, further improvement to the system may be directly detrimental to and against the interests of many current participants in the system. In many cases we can also see that incumbents deferring or preventing the disruption in an area essentially deferred or prevented progress in that area by doing so. Technology and cultural evolution have driven disruptive change in all aspects of industry that are now much more productive than they had been previously, while disruption in the education system has not been allowed by participants in the current system.

In summary, there is no incentive for the educational system to provide education for any purpose besides improving the standardized test scores by which the system's funding is determined, there is no systemic incentive for teachers to teach better or for highly skilled individuals to become teachers in the first place, there is no systemic incentive for outside entities to improve the existing educational system, and there are many systemic barriers to disruptive improvements. In the end, K-12 Teachers are in fact expected to provide less of the total education ultimately required to function in society (one could argue that they have been prevented from providing it), so society has largely distributed the benefits of increased productivity elsewhere.

Just to be clear, I feel that good teachers are among the most valuable people in a society. The issue is that systemic problems essentially limit their ability to actually apply their skills effectively and to receive economic rewards commensurate with value provided. These two overarching problems discourage both idealists (because their ability to make a positive difference will always be limited, minimized, and often even discouraged) as well as pragmatists (because there is no economic incentive). The stranglehold that incumbents have on the system also prevents (or at least significantly hinders) innovative but disruptive improvements from gaining any traction. This has largely resulted in a feedback loop where the improvements in K-12 education have not kept pace with the educational requirements of society, so society allocates more resources to higher ed or other education systems instead, and the people with the knowledge and skills required to improve the system take their skills elsewhere.

Re:Not Blocking Per Se

[crutchy]

teaching nothing is better than teaching the wrong thing

keynesians have never been right about anything

Re:Not Blocking Per Se

[darkstar949]

teaching nothing is better than teaching the wrong thing

On one hand you are right in that ignorance can be better than being wrong at times; but on the other hand, how many people do you know really want to standup and admit they are ignorant about something?

Also, with regards to Keynesian economics, well, the Marshall Plan was quite successful and had a lot of Keynesian aspects to it.

Re:Not Blocking Per Se

[Anonymous Coward]

Finance and econ are not the same thing at all.

Outsource This!

[Tablizer]

They know they are going to get all the outsourced jobs from the US. A US student, on the other hand, has to find something not so easily outsourcable.

Re:Outsource This!

[Anonymous Coward]

Politicians.

Re:Outsource This!

[crutchy]

eventually it will be the other way around; americans will be answering phones in call centers and manufacturing shoes for asians.

The US does other things, though

[sandytaru]

As far back as 1991 I went to "computer camp" - a two week long overnight camp for elementary school kids that was a charitable outreach from our local Army base. During those two weeks, we learned some BASIC and LOGO, did our very first "hello worlds" - and also did some nifty science-camp stuff, like making our own ice cream by hand (and thus learning how salt lowers the freezing point of water) and getting some hands on fundamentals in networking. (Oh token-rings, how we don't miss you.) All for the low low cost of free - although I think I did have to test into the camp.

Not defending the US education's system's oversight in this area, but I bet if Google interviewed some kids at a US engineering high school, they'd have better results.

Re:The US does other things, though

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine explaining to your PHB that the network is broke and that the token fell out of the cable onto the floor, where he proceeds to look for it.

Re:The US does other things, though

[KeithIrwin]

Yeah, we used to teach our kids LOGO and BASIC back in the 80s and early 90s. Now we teach them MS Word, Powerpoint, and Internet Explorer and how to upload videos to YouTube (which is "learning multimedia" in much that same way that the other things are "learning computer science"). We used to do those things. I learned LOGO and BASIC in my elementary school in the early 80s. But you don't find them done any more.

Re:The US does other things, though

[Kal Zekdor]

Not defending the US education's system's oversight in this area, but I bet if Google interviewed some kids at a US engineering high school, they'd have better results.

I went to an engineering high school, and there were a number of programming courses. (In addition to the other random computer related courses, like web design, or matlab.) Granted, I skipped ahead to CS 4 by tenth grade and aced my AP Computer Science test (saving me a semester in college "learning" simple CS topics which I knew since I was 12 and started poking at qbasic), but it was mandatory for everyone to take at least one year of programming. If your job involves science or math in any non-trivial fashion, knowing a bit of programming can make you much more competitive/productive.

While the state of education (primary and secondary) in the US is indeed dismal, CS is not entirely left by the wayside by every school.

Re:The US does other things, though

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah I have to laugh at this as well... the best "programming" class I got was in my (public) high school, straight C++ with a good overview of algorithms and Big-O (class prerequisite on elective math and score therein). went on to do an independent-study AP course (they only offered AB, wanted BC), only to be extremely disappointed in the available curricula when I got into college. I doubt many of my professional peers would pass the tests that were regularly given in those classes, especially as there were no compilation cycles -- you wrote the code on paper, in a room devoid of terminals; failure to compile was tantamount to incorrect results.

to quote some of my favorite CS geeks (the Haskell folks, in the paper for RankN types):

The type system is arguably too complicated for Joe Programmer to understand, but that is true of many type systems, and perhaps it does not matter too much: in practice, Joe Programmer usually works by running the compiler repeatedly, treating the compiler as the specification of the type system. Indeed, a good deal of the complexity of the type system (especially Section 6) is there to accommodate programs that "ought" to work, according to our understanding of Joe's intuitions

One data point...

[pongo000]

...does not prove anything.

he claimed that students at Galileo Academy had difficulty with the HTML image tag

OK, repeat after me: Computer science is not about programming/scripting languages. It is about the methodology and theory of developing programs, applications, and computational systems. To tell you the truth, I don't cover HTML in my computer science curriculum (and yes, Texas has a full-blown CS curriculum), mainly because CS isn't web development.

Re:One data point...

[93 Escort Wagon]

Call me a cynic, but I don't think this story is what it seems to be.

It wasn't more than a couple weeks ago that I read another Microsoft PR piece attempting to influence Congress into increasing the number of H1Bs they can use. For some reason this new story immediately made me think "You know, if Google was going to try getting more H1Bs, this is pretty much how I'd expect them to go about it."

Google's just really ham-handed and ineffective when it comes to attempting to influence public opinion - witness Brin's bizarre "cell phones are emasculating" statement.

Re:One data point...

[complete loony]

I assume there's some context missing. Perhaps the statement would be more accurate as follows;

he claimed that students at Galileo Academy, who had completed a web page authoring subject, had difficulty with the HTML image tag

Re:One data point...

[KeithIrwin]

He also said that they don't understand loops and conditionals. I think that the author is pretty clear that web development isn't CS, based on several of the other articles he linked to (like, this one). But students who have a solid understanding of programming and are used to consulting reference material for how particular commands or functions work would be highly unlikely to be stymied by IMG tags if they were to try to create some. It's not exactly a complex concept. People who have trouble with IMG tags would be people who aren't used to looking at code carefully or ones who think that computers "understand" things. Neither of those should be the case for anyone who has had a reasonable computer science education.

Re:One data point...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not about programming? I hate to tell you, other than programming there really is nothing to CS. Not even sure why they call it a science. The course should be called computer engineering..

Re:One data point...

[gl4ss]

you'd probably still would understand the img tag in 10 seconds, no?

Re:One data point...

[crutchy]

ok, repeat after me: waterfall is shit

Re:One data point...

[loufoque]

That's software engineering.
Computer science is another thing entirely.

Re:One data point...

[darkstar949]

Depends what you are doing, for web applications where lots of user feedback is useful then trying to use a waterfall model is fairly useless, if your are trying to write reactor control softwere that has to be right the first time, well, you are better off using the waterfall model.

Re:One data point...

[dcollins]

"Computer science is not about programming/scripting languages."

They are not identical. But programming is a necessary requirement for computer science -- in the same way that the alphabet, vocabulary, and grammar are necessary requirements for literature.

Re:One data point...

[crutchy]

if you're writing reactor control software, you're better off with the "kiss" principle and only writing programs for things that absolutely need them (in modular form, like the unix philosophy)

i'm not a cs grad, but i've seen that one of the first things taught is about risk, including reference to the therac-25

there are aspects of the waterfall in other models, but the whole idea of a continuous straight line methodology is prone to corruption towards the end even if merely for economic reasons

this guy has an interesting take on waterfall...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XP4o0ArkP4s

Re:One data point...

[darkstar949]

Depending upon the enviorment, KISS is actually a bad idea as you must ensure that things fail safe when lives are potentially on the line. I also tend to pick extreme examples on purpose since there is no single methodlogy that works for everything - there is no silver bullet

Also, other than a couple very extreme examples where you only really got one shot with something I don't think anyone has really ever advocated that the pure waterfall model actually be used. But if you look at every single development methodology othere there you will see the the waterfall model under the hood in one way or another. It's like of the the OSI Model, you have to learn it, but you will likely never see it in a pure form.

Excelling at CS?

[fyngyrz]

Yes, but, there's this .

Not sure that's actually recoverable.

Old Aussie joke

[capt_mulch]

How can you tell when you've had a Vietnamese burgle your house? Your VCR is gone, but your homework is done...

Re:Old Aussie joke

[crutchy]

old (actually probably still current) american joke:-

omg aussies have vcrs?!

Re:Old Aussie joke

[Anonymous Coward]

Guy walks up to Australian immigration and asks to become a citizen. The officer asks him if he had a criminal record, to which he replied "I didn't know that was still a requirement".

I'm just a drop out

[Anonymous Coward]

But I successfully passed a Google interview and got an offer letter.
Not bad for a EE drop out who didn't take any CS classes. But to be honest, being a senior kernel dev for years probably helped.

Re: I'm just a drop out

[Anonymous Coward]

Who cares?

Re:I'm just a drop out

[crutchy]

senior kernel dev

so you're an old fart who worked in a corn field?

Re:I'm just a drop out

[Anonymous Coward]

Since when has a Google interview become the ultimate test for CS knowledge.
We have fallen deep.

Galileo school ethnic profile

[4wdloop]

According to Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_Academy_of_Science_and_Technology Galileo Academy school is 74% asian, 12% latino, 4.6% black, 3.4% white students. Just surprised, not that it has anything to do with image tag.

Re:Galileo school ethnic profile

[crutchy]

the "image tag" from your figures would seem to be that white people are dumber than asians, latinos and blacks, but maybe i'm just dumb (i am a white guy after all)

There is cruft to be sure

[Barlo_Mung_42]

My kid spends way too much time imo learning cursive. They make her do a lot of her work in both cursive and print which seems like a waste of time when the number of hours spent in class keep shrinking. They should be learning to type and print; forget about cursive.

Re:There is cruft to be sure

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree; everyone should write like a 6 year old.

Re:There is cruft to be sure

[Anonymous Coward]

Make it part of their art class. Seriously, kids don't learn much of anything in their art classes--they just experiment with different media and are encouraged to 'be creative'. At least teach them cursive and calligraphy during that time and free up class time for other subjects.

Re:There is cruft to be sure

[Anonymous Coward]

Cursive?

Well, I know 'hell' and 'damn'...

Re:There is cruft to be sure

[Anonymous Coward]

I hardly know how to write cursive anymore, I just use characters by themselves, I guess that is called print?
I couldn't even read cursive anymore.

I still think they need to be able to write, since the collapse of society is always a possibly, it would be nice if people could write stuff on paper.

Re:There is cruft to be sure

[Anonymous Coward]

your kids should aspire to be a doctor, not write like one

Re:There is cruft to be sure

[loufoque]

What else would you like a 6-year-old to be taught? Numerical analysis?

Re:There is cruft to be sure

[Anonymous Coward]

No. people shouldn't write at all. We'll be typing now for about a decade, then we'll be thinking into computers through some sort of neural interface.

Re:There is cruft to be sure

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd rather hire someone who knows how to take minutes of a meeting hauling a laptop or some other gadget into the meeting and typing away (preferably on one of those good noisy keybeds), towards the end hurrying everyone up because the battery is running low. And that is just one example where decent hand writing is handy. I realize that writing long hand is not a very valued skill in anglo-saxon countries, but that's not a reason not to teach it. Calculus, I've heard, is also not a very highly regarded subject ...

Re:There is cruft to be sure

[Anonymous Coward]

Introduction to propositional logic

Re:There is cruft to be sure

[GLMDesigns]

Kids ought to be taught languages -- especially pronunciation of hard to learn sounds such as the trill the r in spanish; the various "ooo" sounds in french; chinese tones. Kids are language sponges - we ought to stress languages: Chinese, French, Arabic at that age.

Re:There is cruft to be sure

[loufoque]

Kids can't even speak English correctly, and you want them to half-learn a bunch of useless languages instead of doing something that is fundamentally useful like learning to write with a pen?

Re:There is cruft to be sure

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you serious? There are so many things 6-year-olds could learn. Languages, cooking, gardening... If they can use a keyboard they can start doing basic programming and get an intuition about how numbers behave, which will be very valuable once they get older and study numerical analysis. Programming is applied math. Instead we clog their brains with a handwriting technique no adult ever uses.

Re:There is cruft to be sure

[GLMDesigns]

I'm not saying that primary school children shouldn't be taught English. Obviously they need to be able to read and write - but children up to the age of 10-12 are wired to learn new languages. This is when it should be started, not in high school or college.

Knowing several human languages (as well as programming languages) is, IMHO, an essential skill set.

Re:There is cruft to be sure

[Anonymous Coward]

Art is virtually non-existent in the schools in our area. Cut to make room for more math and science, because the general public thinks all schools are retarded, and that no free time, and more "time-on-task" will fix the problem.

Re:There is cruft to be sure

[dcollins]

Ha -- I got into a debate last night with both my girlfriend and my mother, who were aggrieved at the apparent lack of cursive instruction in schools today. But I'm with you.

Re:There is cruft to be sure

[TheSync]

46 states no longer mandate that districts must teach cursive in their language arts core curriculum.

Re:There is cruft to be sure

[mdielmann]

While I never use cursive anymore, I find knowing how to read it is useful - I remember not being able to understand it at all before learning how to write it. The greater purpose in my opinion is for assisting in the development of fine motor skills, which all people will benefit from. So I put it in the same category of basic art classes - probably not critical to the core education of most students, but will improve their manual dexterity, and possibly give them an appreciation for skills which they don't possess.

CS is not the only career.

[Anonymous Coward]

why do we want everybody to be a computer scientist? that is not for everybody. I am a pipefitter and I only get by using only a pytagoral theorem. I travel the world. One week I might be in curacao working for shell and the next week for brittish petroleum in the north sea. I work around 7 months of the year and make more than $100,000USD in that time. And I love my Job. At the oil rigs here we work in pairs a pipe fitter and a welder. A welder makes a little bit less than a pipe fitter but still better pay than most college graduates. And guess what we have shortgage of workers. Most people get home sick and do not want to go away from their home town to make a living.
How did I find slashdot? from beeing bored. The CS guy we have here at the rig. According to our computer guy everything here runs on QNX OS and he think he is very smart, but guess what when we go to shore he can't get laid and we make around the same money.

Well the point is that not everyone needs to be a computer scientist if we concentrate in just one thing that would be wrong.

Re:CS is not the only career.

[fredgiblet]

I have no attachment to my local area so I wouldn't mind traveling. I just don't want the kind of responsibility that comes with a job where that much money is on the line.

Re:CS is not the only career.

[Xest]

Yes, it's all fun, games, and high pay until you get beheaded in the Algerian desert, blown up in the gulf of Mexico, or jail time when you're used as a scapegoat for a superior's dodging of H&S standards to get things done on the cheap.

FWIW, you can easily earn the same amount from a CS degree after a few years, and without the risk of injury/loss of life/prison to boot.

Re:Too busy teaching Islam in US schools

[Anonymous Coward]

I realize as an AC that I carry very little weight here, but when you bring up this subject with a very tenuous grasp on reality to most people, you sound like a nutjob. Teaching Islam in public schools isn't nearly as widespread or as big of a threat to anyone as, for instance, those people who are trying to pervert science and claim that there are other legitimate alternatives to the theory of evolution (and they then pervert what "scientific theory" means in order to cast doubt on something where there's no legitimate room for doubt).

Additionally, you'd do well to stop listening to CBN as a source of information for anything outside of whatever comfort you get from Pat Robertson praying into the camera, because they have no comprehension of anything scientific or pretty much anything related to reality. They are either delusional or liars, take your pick.

Re:Too busy teaching Islam in US schools

[jayveekay]

Every religion is a tool invented by people. Tools can be used for good or for evil. Look at the historical record and you wll find examples of that with every belief system invented by man.

No religion should be taught in school. In my opinion, no religion should be taught to any child. When they turn 18 and have an understanding of reason and logic, then they can choose to learn about religion and choose to just "believe" something if they want. Indoctrination of children into a belief system when they are unable to make an informed choice is wrong.

Re:Too busy teaching Islam in US schools

[wichawa]

Anyone who knows anything about abrogation knows that Islam is an evil ideology, racist and certainly not a religion of peace.

As a non-Muslim, completely non religious person that has recently read the Bible, the Quran, and the Chumash, I feel like this statement is incredibly bigoted. All of your follow up statements only cement my feelings about your bigotry.

The only way you can state this without being bigoted is if you also state that every organized religion is an evil ideology rooted in racism, and not respectful of peace. No religion should be taught in public schools (save for topical interest/history classes) and I have no idea why you brought this into an article discussion regarding CS education. You could have simply stated that some schools are misappropriating their funds/energy on various other types of programs, when there money/energy would be better spent with programs like Computer Science.

To counter your bigotry, I posit that in order to protect its survival and serve its own self interests, every organized religion is constantly waging a war for your "soul," also known as your money/goods/services/time. This is done in many ways with many tactics or justifications, but the end goal of every major world religion is for one religion to reign supreme - be it the Yahweh/Allah schools of thought or some other totally cool god/gods I've never heard of. Faith does not co-exist with other organized faiths, as every faith is right and no faith uses the scientific method to show how much more right said faith might be. How is the Muslim ideology that much different than that of the Jewish and Christian faiths when all three schools of thought believe in the exact same mythical character that governs the universe?

Maybe, instead of more Computer Science education for kids and teens around the globe, we should just have more education focused in logic.

This should help create better theory around computational processes and design anyways, and would prevent entire internet posts from being written - like the one I am responding to right now..

Re:Too busy teaching Islam in US schools

[wichawa]

* their, not there.........

fake, as always

[Anonymous Coward]

Vietnamese here, I have read that article a few days ago in my language. It is very likely that the school selected the best students in the whole school, put them in one 'class' for the test. It's commonly accepted here to do anything so you won't "lose face" and appear better than you really are. We have a proverb for that, "Show the beauty, hide the ugly".

Re:fake, as always

[Anonymous Coward]

In that case, they could have shipped in the best students from far away too.

Re:fake, as always

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, the guy who wrote the blog claims he didn't create a test, he just showed up unannounced at a class and looked at what they were doing. If so, the school would have had to have prepared for such an event in advance. It could be done: spend a month making sure that most students are able to solve a specific hard problem that you show them how to solve over and over again. Then when you get an unannounced visitor, you give the problem to the students and pretend they haven't seen it before. Would they really go to that much trouble, though?

What seems more likely to me is that the students have not seen this problem before, but they have seen and have been instructed in a great number of quite similar problems and that's why they can solve it. For example maybe they've already had lots of maze problems before, including mazes with diagonal walls, but the other times the things they had to do with the mazes were different from this particular problem. That's how education works in most places, too: give students problems that gradually build on each other.

Re:fake, as always

[janimal]

Mod up. It's important to remember that Vietnam doesn't live by the same social rules that we are used to. To assume that they do is dangerous.

Re:fake, as always

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm an American, with Vietnamese wife, who has been in and out of Viet nam since 1969. We are retired and live in more or less rural costal Viet nam near Phan Tiet.

It's not quite as fake as you might think. Ten years ago, I provided computer support and training for my nephew who was starting a video editing business. Now his son is in Sai Gon majoring in CS security and will likely join a child, now grown, CS security expert that I guided into his profession.

The big issues are
1) Having to pay teachers extra money for classes at the teacher's home that cover things that should have been taught in class
2) Having to bribe and finagle your way into a good University
3) Deplorable living conditions for most, less than wealthy, students in Sia Gon.

Yes I've heard that the correct way to say Sai Gon is TP HCM. I go along with the people who live there. Sai Gon is Sai Gon.

Google's H1B visa lobbying

[0-9a-zA-Z_. !*'()123]

Wouldn't it be clever for the pro-H1B visa lobbyists at Google to plant news stories about how gifted foreign workers are?

If the argument is "US ed bad, Foreign ed good" and therefore "US workers bad, Foreign workers good" necessitates liberalizing H1B visas, well it just writes itself.

Not saying that /. is just a plant for Google PR hacks or nothing. Ok, maybe I am.

Re:Google's H1B visa lobbying

[H0p313ss]

It might amuse you to discover that the blogger in question is a Canadian/British dual citizen.

Re:Google's H1B visa lobbying

[Anonymous Coward]

No, of course not, google is not an evil capitalist company and would not do this. Or would it?

The U.S. teaches kids what the markets will handle

[asmkm22]

U.S. labor is expensive, so teaching every kid here programming at young ages will do very little for their job prospects (companies will still prefer H1-B's). It's one thing to talk about how our education system is falling behind, etc, etc, and another thing entirely for the country -- and the companies within it -- to actually hire American workers when they can get them cheaper overseas. If not outsource entirely.

This whole thing is disingenuous

[tlambert]

This whole thing is disingenuous.

That might have been acceptable to present as an interview question (before it was disclosed), but those kids would not have passed the interview process on a single question, nor would they have even passed the single session interview which used that question, if they took 45+ minutes to arrive at it.

An interview session typically lasts 45 minutes in total, and the point of presenting the problem is to gauge the persons problem solving ability, and their ability to think in terms of their ability to apply CS tools to solve the problem optimally. Taking the full 45 minutes for a single solution would not cut it, even if they ended up with the optimal solution. If they knew the question because someone had leaked it to a jobs board, then immediately solved it optimally, then the immediate response of the interviewer should be to vary the premise to make it a related but slightly different problem. If they didn't solve it optimally, and the interviewer had them iterate on their solution to optimize it, that's the best possible outcome, as far as an interviewer is concerned, as it speaks to the persons thought processes and problem solving capability.

They also would not have passed the educational bar. There are a lot of self-taught programmers who are brilliant at it, but who can not work on teams because they lack the common terminology for algorithms and so on. So they are able to solve a problem in isolation, but they are unable to communicate this information to their peers, and neither can they document it in such a way that a future engineer can pick up where they left off when changing requirements force an incremental update to the design. Without that critical communication, it's impossible to make minimum necessary changes to accomplish a goal, while remaining cognizant of the side effects. So there is typically a degree requirement, and from the fact that you have a degree, you are expected to know things like "big O" notation, and a set of 20-30 algorithms by name so that you recognize them when they are used in code you are later asked to maintain.

It's great that he bought them a teacher for a year by pulling $1,200 out of his personal bank account, but this emphasis recently on Slashdot of trying to get everyone to be a programmer in elementary school is misguided and misses the fundamental point that you can not narrowly focus an early education and expect to have people come out of it with the ability to retrain in other careers should their career become obsolete.

Re:This whole thing is disingenuous

[Anonymous Coward]

Google interviews also happen at a whiteboard, not a computer, so typing speed and ease of editing is drastically reduced and you have to spend lots of time talking to the interviewer, including chatting about your CV, instead of just having quiet time to think and then code. Also, probably these kids have already been exposed to similar maze problems before. Maybe maze problems have been a common thread in their education for the past 5 years. However, I think the point is that if these kids can get close to this level of performance so early, then they are doing very well, even if the mention of passing an actual Google interview is an exaggeration.

Re:This whole thing is disingenuous

[Anonymous Coward]

I doubt that "there are a lot of self-taught programmers who are brilliant at it," who have not learned fundamentals such as algorithms and "big O" notation. Whether self taught or university schooled, those are things a good programmer must know, unless she is extremely specialized (limited).

Laughing at the Vietnamese ?

[Taco Cowboy]

You guys can laugh at the Vietnamese

Go ahead, have your laugh now

In Great Britain, they do have "computer classes" in their high schools. But do you know what they teach?

How to use Microsoft Words

How to make a Powerpoint Presentation

Re:Laughing at the Vietnamese ?

[fyngyrz]

I'm just laughing at their canine... fashion sense. I'm perfectly ok with being out-programmed by them. But my animals are better accoutered. :)

Re:Laughing at the Vietnamese ?

[Bongo]

A far cry from let's help kids develop cognition and imagination by learning programming; a developmental tool like how Alan Kay might have wished.

Re:Laughing at the Vietnamese ?

[pspahn]

Did you seriously just admit to owning a cat stroller, while at the same time ridiculing a dog owner for giving their pet a jacket? ...and THEN say your pet is better?

Someone... please, take care of the riff-raff.

Re:Laughing at the Vietnamese ?

[BonThomme]

Microsoft Words?

Developers Developers Developers Developers!

Re:Laughing at the Vietnamese ?

[RougeFemme]

In the U.S., unfortunately, there are plenty of high schools that do the same - teach MS Office in "technology" classes. And even that were considered earth-shattering (which it obviously isn't). . .in some school systems, the kids have "technology" classes from elementary through high school. And what do they learn how to do in lower elementary school (when some of them still can't read)? Change text fonts. And what do they learn how to do in high school?? CHANGE TEXT FONTS!!

Re:Laughing at the Vietnamese ?

[fyngyrz]

No. I said my pet was better accoutered.

Reading. It's fundamental. :)

What school is that ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not that I don't think possible and few schools are good, but general VN school kids are beaten, learn nothing they will not need to be working in a factory
Key is that teachers make most of the salary for extra classes

How do I know this, my brother in laws kids

Re:Too busy teaching Islam in US schools

[SplashMyBandit]

Sorry, it seems you read but don't understand. Perhaps you could start here ...
http://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/quran/index.htm
http://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/quran/abs/long.html
http://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/quran/int/long.html
http://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/quran/cruelty/long.html
http://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/quran/science/long.html

Please clarify how I was bigoted. As far as I an see, I am consistent with *facts* such as these:

Please let me define bigot for you: "Bigotry is the state of mind of a bigot: someone who, as a result of their prejudices, treats other people with hatred, contempt, and intolerance on the basis of a person's race, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, religion, language, socioeconomic status, or other status."

What contempt did I display for any *person* ? I said I hated Islam because I have studied it extensively and *understand it*. Please note that Islam is an *ideology* not a person. As such it is always able to be subject to criticism - even harsh criticism - and this never constitutes "bigotry".

How is the Muslim ideology that much different than that of the Jewish and Christian faiths when all three schools of thought believe in the exact same mythical character that governs the universe?

You read the books and cannot tell the difference? are you *sure* you read them? the differences are stark! For example: Christ commanded compassion for your enemies, Mohammed commanded death; Christ demonstrated continence and never appeared to take a wife; Muhammed had multiple wives, including slave wives, and raped Saffiya on the day he murdered her tribe and tortured her husband to death by kindling a fire on his chest while he looked for the tribes riches; in Islam is is permitted to to have sex with children because Mohammed at 54 years old had sex with Aisha at 9 lunar years (8 solar years) - and no, this was not normal even for those times; then we have the commandments for every able bodies Muslim to conduct jihad asghar against non-Muslims; then we have Mohammed ordering assassinations and permitting lying to do this (both big no-nos against the Mosaic Law); then we have the so called "Satanic verses" of Islam where Mohammed was tricked/possessed (unlike Christ who resisted Satan); then we have the claim that Islam is the direct divine and unalterable word of God (in contrast to all historical evidence, eg the 1972 Sa'ana Quran discovery that is changed from the later orthodox Caliphate version); then we have the whole historicity aspect, where the pagan Moon God illah became the single god "Allah"; then we have the sections of the Qur'an that are plagiarized from the Torah and Bible but the plagiarism is inaccurate and they get some things wrong (eg. the relationship of Mary); then we have Mohammed as a prophet of the religion when only Jews can be prophets. There are heaps more differences but I think that is enough to start. Still can't distinguish between the doctrines in the books you so proudly read?

Please also note that the Qur'an is only one third of the scriptures of Islam. You have to also have to read the hadiths to understand the religion. That's why your understanding of the differences between Christianity, Judaism and Islam is so poor and as a result you are confused and incorrectly cast around the ad-hominem of "bigot" as a result of your lack of understanding (sorry to be harsh, but you need to understand the truth - which is why you don't understand just how evil Mohammed was and the ideology of Islam is).

Re:Too busy teaching Islam in US schools

[SplashMyBandit]

I agree with you wholeheartedly. However Islam is particularly bad because it asserts claims on non-believers. There is one religion that is an exception, it is called Jainism. It is a weird philosophy, and I don't actually agree with it as it is not practical and conducive to scientific progress, but at its fundamental level it is a religion of peace (unlike the Abrahamic religions). Here is seven and a half minutes of great insight from Sam Harris:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDMOxjHIt0U

Ethnicity breakdown of Galileo Academy

[BurstElement]

Wow... I can't believe the ethnicity breakdown listed for that school... 74% of students are Asian, 12% Latino and only 3.4% Caucasian!
And from the Wikipedia article... "Math scores remain one of Galileo's best academic strengths"... Lol.

Re:Ethnicity breakdown of Galileo Academy

[RR]

Wow... I can't believe the ethnicity breakdown listed for that school... 74% of students are Asian, 12% Latino and only 3.4% Caucasian!
And from the Wikipedia article... "Math scores remain one of Galileo's best academic strengths"... Lol.

Well, among the kids in San Francisco, Galileo is known as a "fob" school. I haven't actually gone to verify it, but a lot of the students may not even speak English that well.

The socially adjusted kids want to go to Lincoln or Washington or Balboa. The smart kids' parents force them to go to Lowell. (64% Asian, 8% Latino, 14% Caucasian)

The ethnic breakdown is a little misleading. San Francisco has a lot of Asian immigrants, and immigrants have more children than native United States citizens, so there are way more Asian kids than normal. SFUSD as a whole is 35% Asian, 24% Latino, and 12% Caucasian.

Re:Not Surprised

[crutchy]

girls in america are too busy trying to look like the cover girls of vogue and cosmopolitan magazines, because that's what is expected of them

is there any wonder how girls growing up in such a vain and stereotypical society become so vain themselves?

it's less to do with whether girls are good at programming or not; female programmers just aren't able to compete in a male dominated profession (for salary, credibility, acceptance, etc).

Re:Too busy teaching Islam in US schools

[crutchy]

i think a far more serious perversion of american education is being subjected to the "wisdom" of morons like bill o'reilly

Re:Too busy teaching Islam in US schools

[crutchy]

a lot of people have blind faith in science by merely reading a book, which is no less religious than believing what you read in any bible

preaching the word of science in school is no less religious than preaching the word of god. the only difference between science and religion in school is that science offers a more practical perspective of a few aspects. science has a lot of theories, but only those that can be proven experimentally have any more credibility than anything in any religious text, and even those experiments are only valid under the conditions in which they take place (unless enough experiments are performed that interpolation is statistically reasonable).

even atheism is a religious belief in the lack of any god (without any proof)

by the way, i don't consider myself to be religious, but i am neither a scientist, atheist or anti-religious. i'm open to the possibility of phenomenon that have neither been explained nor explained away, and as i have heard that some parts of various religious texts may be based to some extent on real events i'm not surprised. i think people (kids in particular) should be exposed to all religions and be free to learn about and choose their own beliefs, that needn't fit into any particular stereotype.

Re:Not Surprised

[Anonymous Coward]

More that female programmers don't like the extra attention and being constantly harassed by a few of the males in the profession. Why put up with that when we don't have to?

The amazing part is the willingness to teach this

[Anonymous Coward]

To be fair, the example question is very easy if you've just come out of a class about the painting algorithm necessary to solve it. The actual hard part is mapping the inconvenient diagonal walls correctly into a way to figure out what locations are adjacent, which isn't that difficult if you've seen that before. Supposing that such diagonal wall mazes and painting algorithms were covered at length in the curriculum previously, this isn't that amazing. It's equivalent to walking into a Google interview when someone told you the solution already. What is amazing is just that they have the will to teach this stuff so early.

Re:Not Surprised

[crutchy]

exactly

Re:Too busy teaching Islam in US schools

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't waste your time on him he's a little Hitler wannabe (and this is a valid use of the term for once).

He spouts his far right rhetoric in just about every thread nowadays.

His mind is full of bile and all rationality has long gone, you can't reason with Fourth Reich wannabes.

Re:Too busy teaching Islam in US schools

[Anonymous Coward]

You never read the old testament

Why Bother With CS, Really?

[rally2xs]

Learn CS, and Bill Gates just imports cheap foreign labor to lower the wage scale, so you work your butt off at highly-intellectual education and end up earning $40K / yr, because the foreigners will work for that. The average auto mechanic in 2011 earned $38K, and could go to work out of high school, and get good with OJT and various classes along the way without taking a 4-year bite out of lifetime earnings to attend college or acquire a student loan debt. There's no money in CS except at the really top-level programming jobs, or working for the gov't in jobs that require "classified" work that foreigners can't be hired for.

Re:The U.S. teaches kids what the markets will han

[rally2xs]

Back up a notch, US labor is cheap. German auto workers get about $66/hr on average, the best-paid union workers in the US about $33/hr. And, overall, US labor takes the smallest bite out of manufacturing expenses because US manufacturers automate like nowhere else.

Its not the labor rates that are killing us, it is the income taxes. Income tax in ANY form is absolutely toxic to prosperity, and we are doing so poorly in the prosperity department because US corporate income taxes were the highest on the planet even before this last round of tax hikes. You can't expect to come walking thru the front door with your gov't gun pointed and walk out with 40% - 45% of the profits, and expect prosperity to happen. The only way for American companies to make money under this American taxation system is to flee it, and set up manufacturing plants overseas, which is why we are at a situation with 46 million people in poverty.

Nickle B

[Bayoudegradeable]

NCLB (called Nickel B around here in the education world) encouraged schools to ditch CS,arts, Latin, and any course that wasn't in the core tested areas. Schools were forced to play ball if they wanted to "be successful." A HUGE problem with NCLB was that it mandated tons and tons of requirements, then provided virtually no funding to ensure those requirements come to life. So that created a system where any resources being spent on non-core issues were pulled off of non-core and put onto core NCLB goals. So in addition to the whole "teach the test" mentality, it gutted many, many programs. But how many districts nation-wide had strong CS programs to begin with? That was just stuff for a handful of uber-smart nerds; most kids were never going to go near that so not a lot of money was put into it. I am sure you can cite your super awesome school as a counter-example. However, of all the public schools in our country, the total number with strong CS programs was and remains tiny. And in the code world, ever meet a coder/tech guru that doesn't have a college degree? What about those that didn't even finish high school in a traditional manner? How many top skilled professions does that occur in? Clearly, the subject is not being taught successfully.

Re:Nickle B

[Anonymous Coward]

Until society will put emphasis on being smart is cool, great, respectable , nothing good will come out of the education system.

People needs to be motivated to be smart and I am not talking about money here. Look at those asian countries. Kids want to learn.

In US people are motivated to be dumb.

Re:Nickle B

[Anonymous Coward]

Look at those asian countries. Kids want to learn.

Rote memorization paradises, you mean? The only way they differ from the US is that they have more effectively applied rote memorization, but their educational standards are still abysmal.

This is the problem with looking at test scores. Oftentimes, standardized tests are no better than a game of Jeopardy at testing for true understanding.

Re:Nickle B

[Anonymous Coward]

You, probably a teacher or married to one still don't get. Whether NCLB is bad or not, it purposefully highlights the fact that 10-80% of kids, depending on school district, CAN'T FUCKING READ, WRITE, or even COMPREHEND and COMPLETE BASIC MATH OPERATIONS.

GET IT THROUGH YOUR FUCKING HEAD.

IF YOU CAN'T DO THE "3 R's", THEN CS, ARTS, AND EVERY OTHER FUCKING ELECTIVE DON'T MATTER! THEY DON'T UNDERSTAND IT!

THEY FAIL BECAUSE YOU FAILED! YOU! NOT THEM!

Re:Too busy teaching Islam in US schools

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of people have blind faith in science by merely reading a book, which is no less religious than believing what you read in any bible. preaching the word of science in school is no less religious than preaching the word of god.

Stop inventing meanings of words. You may think that people should be more critical of science, but that doesn't make science religion.

even atheism is a religious belief in the lack of any god (without any proof)

Collecting stamps is a hobby. Not collecting stamps is not a hobby - it is an absence of that hobby. Not having a religion is not a religion. You can't just apply the label religious to things because you want to. Atheists take the same stance on God as they do on Santa Claus. Explain why you believe that Santa Claus doesn't exist (note that you can't prove it) and you know how atheists think. From your description it appears that you are an atheist without wanting to come out and say it. You can believe that God doesn't exist while still being open to the thought that a god could exist as long as there is good evidence for that. Just like you can believe that Santa Claus doesn't exist while still being able to accept that Santa Claus could exist in the unlikely case there would be good evidence for that.

well IT is not CS and not all IT work is programmi

[Joe_Dragon]

well IT is not CS and not all IT work is programming or needs the full CS load of theory.

Another Comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_literacy_rate : In Vietnam, only 94% of people over 15 can read. Compare this to the US, where 99% of people over 6 can read. Perhaps the US education system isn't so vastly inferior after all?

stay in school and get the masters / phd in CS tha

[Joe_Dragon]

stay in school and get the masters / phd in CS that will put you on the skilled teacher track but then your being a skilled programmer will be more booked based and less real world based.

How much of this HS is teach the test???

[Joe_Dragon]

How much of this HS is teach the test???

What the point of being able to pass the test but not really knowing about day to day work. As the test is more of a high level over view with questions that most programmers who have been working for years may not be able to pass as they don't think much about what that test covers.

Re:How much of this HS is teach the test???

[GLMDesigns]

If the test is an accurate reflection of what one needs to know then "teaching the test" is not a bad idea.

What if

[Anonymous Coward]

the interview is conducted in English?

Vietnamese Universities

[Anonymous Coward]

I did an internship at a Vietnamese university (TNUT), coming from a respectable uni in the EU region.

I met many interesting and clever people. However, the teaching was rather disorganized and there was no research at all. It was kind of sad really. I'm thinking of going back as a teacher, there's so much room for improvement there.

Interestingly and completely unrelatedly enough, in spite of stories I'd heard of bigger percentages of female engineering students in communist countries, 80% of the engineering students were male.

Algorithm

[Brian Kendig]

So, the programming problem posed in the article is:

"Given a data file describing a maze with diagonal walls, count the number of enclosed areas, and measure the size of the largest one."

Who wants to take a stab at an algorithm for that?

Re:Algorithm

[Anonymous Coward]

binary search tree, with a bias to left (also called the left hand rule). The 'diagonal wall' bit is just a red herring.

Most maze solving is done that way.

Finding an enclosed area is just a matter of finding places you can not go after exhaustively searching the whole 'open' space. Diameter would be a matter of following the 'right hand rule' on the enclosed areas. If you just want the 'area' it you are pretty much done when you search the open space by subtracting the total - open area.

What? CS major :)

Also those 'requirements' are a bit loose and need to be tightened up a bit :)

Re:Algorithm

[Anonymous Coward]

About 250 comments and not one discussion about the problem that the Google engineer blogged about. Instead we have
- Pedantic comments about how you need more than programming to get job. Of course, the blogger had exaggerated to emphasis his point. It is obvious he meant the problem is of the same caliber the ask in their interview among other things.
- Jingoistic bashing of other cultures, rants about H1B
- Smug comments about how not everyone can be a programmer.

I can only conclude this place has been going downhill. 10 years ago, I would have seen couple of solutions, best runtime, how the answer would change if vertical and horizontal bars were allowed apart from the diagonals.

For a mXn grid, I can think of doing it in O(m^2 n). The trick is to exploit that you can only have / or \ and figure out open shapes and keep adding to open shapes for their area. Then close the shapes when they end. There can at the most be n/2 shapes and you go over the grid once.

Re:Algorithm

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the 3 posts on the algorithm. And so much smugness for wrong answer. If you subtracting the total - open area, you get sum of all closed areas. How would you identify each closed area. There is a much more efficient algorithm. The post below seems to point to the correct solution, but it is slightly wrong as there can be at most n/2 open shapes per line not in total. Otherwise I agree with it.

Why is this place so bad? People claiming things like not everyone can be programmer and why they are great and no posts about the algorithm in question.

How to think

[Anonymous Coward]

What else would you like a 6-year-old to be taught?

Formal logic and critical thinking skills. Know that 0+1 is less than 1+1? You are ready for classical reasoning.

Dust_2

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a little surprised, as Starcraft is big in Korea I would think Vietnam would go the RTS route..oh well

Re:the same social rules that we are used to

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod up. It's important to remember that Vietnam doesn't live by the same social rules that we are used to. To assume that they do is dangerous.

Yes, nobody in the U.S. would ever game a system to make themselves look better than they should.

Re:Too busy teaching Islam in US schools

[BonThomme]

"even atheism is a religious belief in the lack of any god (without any proof)"

I'm stunned that you are on /. and would post something so patently at odds with logic.

Re:Too busy teaching Islam in US schools

[BonThomme]

It's very smitey.

Re:The U.S. teaches kids what the markets will han

[BonThomme]

"US corporate income taxes were the highest on the planet"

effective US tax rates are at a 40 year low of 12%

of course that won't change your mind at all because you love the enveloping mind-numbing warmth of unfounded Republican talking points.

Re:The U.S. teaches kids what the markets will han

[rally2xs]

"Effective" tax rates are a red herring.

First, only large corporations have the wherewithall to hire the accountants and lawyers required to navigate the tax code in order to lower their taxes in that manner.

Second, small business that gets taxed through the small business owner's personal income tax also gets taxed at the highest rate, and makes starting a business and growing it nearly impossible in the face of competition from already existing, larger businesses that CAN afford the lawyers and accountants to guide their companies into the actions that are taxed the least or offer the biggest loopholes.

Third, even the largest corporations do not pay the suppsoed 12% because they use up a great amount of resources in paying the lawyers and accountants to find the loopholes to exploit. The cost of the lawyers and accountants that do this, plus the resultant tax that they could not avoid, is said to be about 75% of the cost of just paying the tax without trying to avoid it, making the hiring of the lawyers and accountants desireable, and yet keeping actual tax revenue away from the gov't.

So, in short, the income tax experiences a large failure in actually collecting tax from the largest corporations, while making impossible the starting of new companies to be successful in challenging existing large corporations.

The income taxes should be abolished, and industry should not be taxed. All tax $$$ that those industries pay comes from other people anyway - the stockholders get smaller dividends, the employees get smaller wages, and the customers get higher prices. Income taxes are what is preventing this country from absolutely blowing away the rest of the world in manufacturing competitiveness.

I bet our young ones are learning

[Mister Liberty]

... the ropes of Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer though.

Re:Too busy teaching Islam in US schools

[crutchy]

do you have any proof that there is no god?

Re:Too busy teaching Islam in US schools

[crutchy]

Stop inventing meanings of words. You may think that people should be more critical of science, but that doesn't make science religion.

i didn't define science as religion... i merely compared science to religion

if you are offended by my comparison, go confess to your physics teacher

Not having a religion is not a religion

you are again confusing organised religion with religious belief... science may not be a religion, but there are many people that religiously believe in science

you must be an atheist because they believe that because there is no proof of god (that they are aware of) that there is no god, and completely ignore the fact that human understanding of the universe is largely incomplete (which means that in the future, evidence for the existence of god could conceivably be discovered).

many scientists largely write off the possibility of paranormal phenomenon as kook theory merely because they can't explain it or it doesn't fit with their theories so therefore it doesn't exist. that is by definition religious (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/religious)

Re:Too busy teaching Islam in US schools

[wichawa]

I originally had a whole bunch written out to prove how malicious your logic was, but figured it was not best to poke the flamebait any harder. Instead, I am simply addressing one of your points, because what I ended up writing for this one point actually made myself laugh:

How is the Muslim ideology that much different than that of the Jewish and Christian faiths when all three schools of thought believe in the exact same mythical character that governs the universe?

You read the books and cannot tell the difference? are you *sure* you read them? the differences are stark!

I think it is quite obvious that all three of these religions have different prophets and theories about the one true God, but it is hard to deny that they all share the exact same one true God.

Let me break this down for you as simply as possible: If the Jewish faith worshipped the Computing Device in front of you as God (instead of God himself), then you must also accept that all sects of the Christian faith worship that same Computing Device in front of you (if you don't, you clearly are not familiar with the Old and New Testament). The Computing Device for these two people is often referred to as Yahweh, maybe for the sake of this story we can call it Apple.

In Christianity, they believe that this Computing Device gave birth to your Mobile Computing Device which they worship as Jesus Christ, and a USB Cord to connect the two, known as the Holy Spirit. Together, the Computing Device , the Mobile Computing Device, and the USB Cord compose the Holy Trinity of God for Christians, but that the Computing Device remains the father of all devices.

In Judaism, they do not believe that the Computing Device has yet produced a Mobile Computing Device and USB Cord that is good enough for them. Both Christians and Jews have written many Manuals as to how to best use your Computing Device .

Many centuries after your Computing Device gave birth to an empirically non-existant character known as your Mobile Computing Device, an empirically existant dude named Mohammed rolled around and claimed that we may have had it wrong about using a USB Cord connection with our Mobile Computing Device in conjunction with our Computing Device . He thanked the Mobile Computing Device and the USB Cord connection for their framework, though he was slightly pissed that only some of the software and hardware were open sourced. He then created his own Manual for how one should use said Computing Device , while many others created more Manuals. The Muslim Computing Device is known as Allah, but is still an Apple Computing Device

Moral of the story: The Computing Device still reigns supreme over all three of these groups.

Re:Too busy teaching Islam in US schools

[SplashMyBandit]

I think it is quite obvious that all three of these religions have different prophets and theories about the one true God, but it is hard to deny that they all share the exact same one true God.

One one level you are true, on another your statement is not true. The Muslims will talk about the "God of Abraham". This is intended to give Christians and Jews warm fuzzies and hoping some of them will jump on the "bridge between faiths" (which only goes one way, you will notice). So, at first glance your statement seems true. However, one more learned in the Qur'an will understand that they also consider the Christian Trinitarian God to be a heresy that does not describe Allah. Hence they consider Christians as heretics worshiping a false god. The false god cannot be the same as the true god, so Muslims believe (and are in fact taught) that the Christians do not worship the same god. Although strangely, Moses and Jesus were Muslims (it's bad enough when countries claim rockstars, but claiming prophets is going a bit far :) ).

However, despite claiming the "God of Abraham" the Muslims then proceed to lay out and even more evil deity that has attributes that are against attributes defined by Abraham/Judaism. Just because a claim is made does not make the claim true, claiming Allah is YHWH does not make it true. Similarly, "calling SplashMyBandit a bigot because calls Islam evil does not make the claim of bigotry true" [or even sensible, given the formal definition of what constitutes bigotry].

Consider the which starts the prayer said five times a day by Muslims, Sura. So what seems a relatively innocuous phrase is dissing both Jews and Christians - five times a day. All this is explained for you in depth, here:
http://www.islam-watch.org/authors/139-louis-palme/1082-behind-the-muslim-prayers.html
My point is that Islam conforms to Shrek's definition of an ogre. It has layers. Unfortunately the layers do not get nicer the more and more you peel back. Underneath the grandiose facade of Islam is a basement with a terrible stink. Most people know the stink instinctively but don't know or care to open the door to find out why. Once you open the door you understand where the stink is coming from - the evil ideology that has already claimed 270 million lives and would gladly claim the life of every single living thing on this planet if it was thought to please Allah. Regrettably, there are people already working toward making exactly that happen (I'm looking at you Iran, who have within the last week launched and even more evil and inhuman wave of oppression - for those that have been taking notes).

Still think Allah is the same as God and YHWH/Elohim/HaShem/Melech HaOlam? Check these out:
http://www.danielpipes.org/comments/58626
http://www.answering-islam.org/Shamoun/god.htm

In fact, the more you delve into it you will find that the characteristics that Islam attributes to their deity are almost exactly opposite to the characteristics of the God of Abraham. However, the God of Islam prides himself as the "greatest deceiver" numerous times in the Qur'an - so it is no surprise that he would produce the deceit that he was the same as the God of Abraham. The reality is that the attributes of both (fictional) deities are different. Therefore, logic dictates that the deities are different. ISLAM MAY CLAIM TO HAVE THE GOD OF ABRAHAM, BUT THEIR SCRIPTURE DEFINES A DIFFERENT BEING (a deceptive anti-God, if you will).

So you see, one can read the Qur'an but there are layers there. It is something else to understand what the words are trying to convey. Like I said, Osama bin Laden agrees on the meaning of Islam with Al Azhar (as you know, the foremost authority for Sunnis) and the Muslim Brotherhood etc etc. They

Re:Too busy teaching Islam in US schools

[SplashMyBandit]

Sorry about the typos. I'm ashamed. My poor excuse is that I was writing furtively at work and didn't have time to proof. My apologies for the typos (but not the content, if you can still follow it).

Re:Too busy teaching Islam in US schools

[crutchy]

From your description it appears that you are an atheist without wanting to come out and say it.

i don't associate my beliefs with any particular label because my beliefs aren't subject to any fixed dogma or doctrine

Re:Too busy teaching Islam in US schools

[SplashMyBandit]

That's the usual response of those who don't even want to listen to arguments that are against their narrative. You don't dispute the historical facts I provide, nor the statements from the Qur'an. Instead you simply apply the tactics of the fascist Left, simply call someone names instead of debating rationally on their points (although, its understandable, you simply don't know enough to even attempt to counter the *facts*).

Asian point of view

[Anonymous Coward]

I am an Asian who has lived briefly in US. Too much is being made out of one incident. For all you know they got the students prepared for the answer much before the Google guy appeared. Having studied in Asia, I know schools generally prep up the classes and students before an inspection.
Anybody can learn programming, its the basics like math,science that matter and American schools need to stress on same. You have a great education system please dont go the Asian way which is rote and kills creative thinking