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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."
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.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
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.
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.
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.
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.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
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).
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.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
...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.
How can you tell when you've had a Vietnamese burgle your house? Your VCR is gone, but your homework is done...
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
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..
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".
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.
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.
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
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
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.
blue collar workers turn squiggles on paper into skyscrapers, which is certainly more respectable than the worthless stockbrokers who now work in those skyscrapers
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'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.
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.
And the masses cried out, "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0!"
[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.
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.
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.
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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?
Ezekiel 23:20