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Our Education System Is Failing IT
Nemo the Magnificent (2786867) writes "In this guy's opinion most IT workers can't think critically. They are incapable of diagnosing a problem, developing a possible solution, and implementing it. They also have little fundamental understanding of the businesses their employers are in, which is starting to get limiting as silos are collapsing within some corporations and IT workers are being called upon to participate in broader aspects of the business. Is that what you see where you are?"
Most of the folks in IT are Operators of Interfaces.
Most people think critical thinking is something that "haters" do.
So horrible that hardly any of the European or American young IT workers are qualified.
Too bad there was not some way we could get around this problem. You know perhaps get around this and maybe save some money too hmm.
Just think about how horrible it would be if CIO's and MBAs wrote such an article and published in a well known magazine that they could give to EU politicians and senators on something that needs to be done RIGHT AWAY!
http://saveie6.com/
This is what happens when your field turns from a niche specialist thing where only experts will have a chance to get in... into a field where they're selling degrees during commercial breaks for Jerry Springer. You want the smarts ones, you need to pay for them.
A training company I'm working with has done some research into this topic. They found that only around 15% of people in Canada/USA are critical thinkers. It would be great to see more critical thinking in IT, but most people just aren't wired that way. And with IT being such a broad field, not all IT jobs require sophisticated critical thinking skills.
That said, I'm not opposed to exposing people to situations requiring critical thinking, or stretching people to develop those skills. Let's just not get upset when Joe Cablemonkey isn't a masterful critical thinker.
we need more trades / apprenticeships in IT and not CS that is a lot of theory and lacking in hands on skills.
Okay, let's start with my hours, salary, and other benefits... If they're going lay on extra workload, make sure there's a matching increase on the flip side.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
You can't blame everything on our education system.
First, the majority of people do not possess the ability to think critically. You can't teach that skill. You can try to foster what ability a person might have but you can't turn someone with no ability to think critically into someone who exemplifies that ability. By middle school someone either can think for themselves or they can't.
Second, why is everything the education systems fault? Why don't parents encourage their children to think critically? Why aren't parents responsible for enriching their child's development so that they develop the skills needed to succeed.
Reality check: not all teachers think critically. There are a lot of people of average to below average intelligence / critical thinking ability that are teachers. Want great teachers? Do you want the cream of the crop? Then pay them to deal with your whiny privileged spawn instead of the much more glamorous and lucrative jobs they have. Instead of attracting the best talent we have states actively eroding teacher benefits which drives the talent away and opens the door for Teach for America type excuses for real teachers.
Yes I agree there are a ton of people in IT and every other profession who completely lack the ability to think critically.
No I do not blame "our education system"
If someone is skilled at IT, deeply understands computers and networking, and has critical thinking skills, they can get a better job. There are few people like that anywhere. Why would they be sitting around in IT? They should be designing a router.
And frankly speaking, they don't need to know the deep depths of how everything works. It would be silly for a hospital to demand that every staff member have the highest level of education. It's a waste of resources. The vast majority of work can be done by less skilled people. Just like in a hospital, if a diagnosis seems difficult, you can bring in the expert. You don't need a building full of experts. Sure, it would be nice, but the waste would be staggering.
Is Slashdot linking to Bennett Haselton's dad now?
If the IT sector were really that devoid of workers with an iota of critical thinking ability, the entire state of IT in the country would be in shambles. Now he does have some valid complaints (ie plenty of Cert WIZARDS!), but the entire article is one giant strawman he constructed. I don't think IT (or at least non H1Bs) is any worse off than any other sector of the US job market. This strikes me as a case of "this new generation sucks a lot" which we roll through every 20 years or so. The WW2 generation said the same thing about the Boomers and Gen X.
The first track consisted of self-motivated high school and college students who taught themselves the necessary PC skills to get a job, sometimes before graduation. The second was the trade school, which produced droves of "certified" 20-somethings ripe for the picking in the rapidly growing IT field.
My mileage will vary from most of the people here, but these two sectors make up a small minority of what I've encountered. The first "track" is essentially career service desk folk. They don't really need to think super critically. They aren't paid enough to. The ones who are very good at it end up as Tier-2 or Tier-3 support. They do triage work and respond to critical incidents. They need to know how to diagnose problems and think critically. The second track definitely exists. I've met them. I haven't seen them actively employed for the most part, and those that were employed didn't remain for long.
The circle jerk in the comments section is pretty hilarious too.
But I guess we're cheaper if we're terrified, eh?
people who think critically can't pass L1 quotes and other stuff that to smart for them. Best buy and other places used to pass over the people to smart to sell the rip off extracted warrantys
Though I have seen a few less-badly run ones. Sometimes there's actually a competent guy in there, trying to manage a few hundred servers and dealing with constant user abuse. Sometimes there're nothing but a bunch of monkeys who will just keep trying to reboot the machines in the hopes that will somehow fix all those misconfigured servers. The single unifying theme is that there are never enough resources allocated for even the best people to do a good job in those departments. I could point to companies that could be growing two or three times faster if not for their shoddy IT practices. Or companies that will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to BFI their IT solution, while shackling their developers with Citrix. I guess because even on today's ultra-fast computers, everyone deserves the experience of doing all their work on a network-connected computer via 2400 bps dial-up. I suppose IT will take the blame for that as well, though. It's OK. They're used to it.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Eh, I've been both an IT guy and a lawyer, and honestly the bar exam isn't particularly hard or connected to what lawyers actually do. From what I've heard the higher-end certifications in IT do a decent job.
It isn't education, it's the lack of experience. We've outsourced so many of the entry level jobs, where are the young people supposed to learn? That's the real cost of outsourcing...without an entry-level position and ability to learn how to troubleshoot, there's no place for kids to learn how to do their jobs. Most of the really good systems engineers I know started on the help desk, worked desk-side support and then did infrastructure support (servers/network/storage/security). They understand that their jobs still come down to delivery of solutions to the end-user. They understand that the end-user doesn't care what backend BS broke, it's just that they can't do their job. We're missing that at the mid-level...and most of the really great infrastructure people are in their 40's now.
Why do people have such a hard time spelling "definitely"? Is it that hard?
Mostly random stuff.
And yet the process most of today's IT pros use to learn a skill amounts to asking somebody else how to do something.
Well, that's progress. Progress involves not having to know how the layers underneath work. This allows operating at a higher level of abstraction. How many drivers can change a spark plug today?
The trouble with this in software is that our abstractions are still flaky. Computer users still have to worry about bugs which allow stack overflow attacks, library bugs, backdoors in firmware, and middleware which doesn't conform to spec. (Hardware is in better shape. Users rarely have to worry about CPU design errors, voltage control problems, electrical noise, static electricity, failed gates, or connector intermittents, all of which were problems with early mainframes.)
Computing has become, to some extent, a ritual-taboo culture. We have huge books of examples on how to do things. If you take API documentation and write code to exercise the API in ways not used in examples, it is likely that many of today's APIs will fail. As a result, asking someone how to do something is more likely to work than reading up on an interface and expecting it to work as documented.
(Open source doesn't help. Ever try to get a bug fixed in open source code? I have bug reports with clear test cases that have been outstanding for over five years.)
Apparently there aren't enough welders in America. Not everyone needs to be in IT, or graduate from college.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Why do people have such a hard time spelling "definitely"? Is it that hard?
I know what you mean. It drives me nuts. It's defiantly not that hard to spell.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
Are the business leaders and their "collusion" with the vendors. It's all too easy to require new IT talent to be "Cisco-certified" or Java-certified or this-or-that certified. Think about it. Cisco wants their certified engineers to be "recipe-followers". If they run into a brick wall, they're supposed to run home to mama so the business can buy Cisco support time and contracts. Likewise, the business doesn't want to risk it with someone who isn't Cisco-certified because that gives Cisco an out in case things go wrong (i.e. "your guy messed with something he shouldn't have messed with, covered in clause 32-a-X-35-b-VII-(x$^32) in the support contract, written in 2 point Arial font in white ink. Pay us more or fuck off.").
The same principle applies to other technological areas. I'm not defending them, simply pointing out their (twisted, so-so far gone) logic. It's about risk management and having someone to blame (or sue). That's what the suits care about. It's the single, solitary reason M$ was never in any real danger from Linux on the desktop - corporate IT departments were NEVER going to move away from being able to point the finger at Redmond when shit went down. It's all about self-preservation, really.
Remember that in business (moreso in BIG business), the higher up you are, the more important it is to cover your ass, over being good at your job.
>I know what you mean. It drives me nut's. It's defiantly not that hard too spell.
Fixed that for ya.
Mostly random stuff.
I completely agree. We have far too many people in IT that have no business being in a field that is still evolving. No passion, talent or dedication? Forget it. These people will never be any good.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
IMHO education does not teach how to explore new possibilities. It teaches rules and discipline. Some times, if you are lucky, you find someone that can jump start your brain to think critically and try to find new answers to old questions, that people already answered for you. That is the beginning of the process to find new questions and the respective answers.
In Computer Science the education issue is specially bad because we are taught how to think like the machine. How to constraint our thoughts to fit that little box that is good with math and nothing else. And then teach the machine how to do that. Ow... the irony.
This combination doesn`t exist: ETIs that know about humanity and want to see us dead. Otherwise we wouldn't exist.
As someone who works in ICT as a network administrator it's quite simple. Stop hiring Windows only "IT professionals". I was hired by my employer because I had Cisco studies under my belt (CCNA courses not exams) as well as a broad base in Linux/Unix/Macintosh as well as Windows. I am working in an environment that is 99% Microsoft, but I slip in the odd Linux machine where it helps me work better. Too many people are locked into the mindset of click click, and Microsoft does nothing to make people look into deeper causes of problems. It's shit like rebooting for driver installs, software updates, small patches etc. That is killing the knowledge of IT workers. The Unix mentality is: oh you broke an application, guess you'd better go fix it, because a reboot sure isn't going to. Whereas on Windows, there's a 50/50 chance that what killed your app is crappy memory management on the OS, or a bad configuration. Far too many people graduate with degrees then just happily cruise into their $40-50k/year jobs. Then when they get called upon to do real IT engineering/sysadmin work, they stick their hands up, because they think that troubleshooting some idiot's exchange issue is the same as reinstalling a proper Cisco or Juniper router/switch. Hell I had a level 2 tech the other day, complaining that it was "so hard" to boot a router into rom-mon mode, and upload a PRE-MADE! config file for $400/hr and that he'd have to document it, because it's so hard. What the hell? that stuff is second nature to anyone who's done entry level Cisco, a course that gets taught at High Schools here! The lack fo basic commandline skills is sickening. The amount of money being wasted on over-priced software is sickening. Because noone is spending the time to learn alternatives to the junk they're using now.
Sounds an awful lot like the generic refrain: "Kids these days..."
Or harkening back a few years:
"What is happening to our young people? They disrespect their elders, they disobey their parents. They ignore the law. They riot in the streets inflamed with wild notions. Their morals are decaying. What is to become of them?"
4th century BC (Plato)
When people believed you could use a computer without being able to program. That's how mandatory programming courses got shut down and the incompetence "trickled down".
If IT workers knew how to think critically, they would go into programming, instead.
*cough* OK, that was mean. The thing is, critical thinking skills are notoriously difficult to teach effectively. Maybe we should put more effort into hiring IT workers who can solve problems, instead of looking for people with the right combination of resume bullet-points. If we created greater demand for critical thinkers, instead of creating demand for certifications, perhaps we would see more effort put into learning to solve problems.
Or not. Maybe we just wouldn't find anyone to hire.
Over my course of 13 years in IT Consulting, one of the most often repeated compliments is that I am a "genius" for being able to get up to speed on business requirements and advance a narrow feature set that was more value-added to their user base all over a single conversation.
While I've always seen my ability to understand "C-Level Speak", "Marketing Logic" and business principals as tangible assets that should define the software, I never thought I was anything but slightly more adept than other developers, since it was to me at least a given that all developers account for the business principals we are developing against -- I see now that perhaps I am a rarified quantity.
However, this has prevented me from using services such as O-Desk which focus on having customers spy on screen shots and key strokes of your "clocked in time", as I am all too aware that my most meaningful work is done while having a beer or 3 while I chill-intensify while mulling over the business aspects gleaned during that conversation and deriving user-flows and architectural concepts, which are then presented for approval and adoption. No keystrokes can be logged during that interval, which is really the most value-added and happens throughout the dev cycle as features are added and I work with the stake holders to really hone in on a core feature-set, since the reqs at that stage will change as they work to attract more stake holders. Instead, ODesk and their ilk think I am merely a shit shoveler who's time is merely spent writing code, good or bad.
The issue is that so many of the students are so far behind that you can't bother with critical thinking if you want to prepare them for college.
Which means the only way to give them a proper education is to accept that some kids are not college material.
Do that and the whole system falls into order.
Stop trying to turn kids that have a hard time reading at age 15 into astrophysicists, lawyers, and surgeons. Its a wasted effort.
Rather, get those kids something that will actually be useful in their life. Some job skills that will let them support themselves. And maybe THEIR kids will be college material. But anyone that can't read at age 15 needs to be put on a more realistic career path.
What I've just said is politically incorrect. We're supposed to believe that people that can't read at age 25 can become president or something if just try. Well, no. It isn't happening. Get over it.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
HR often focuses on the technology first, not the organization's industry. If they value company knowledge they'd pay more to keep existing staff. But, they instead often want to dump the older people for those allegedly knowledgeable in the shiny new thing of the month.
Table-ized A.I.
Maybe we would see more people in IT with problem solving skills / critical thinking if we stopped scaring them off with so many amature rote memory based technical interviews. It's ridiculous! IT professionals need to hire people based on their prior work and references and just quit all the sillyness. Who cares if Joe cant remember how to do a bubble sort by hand during an interview, the guy has been professionally coding fo 10+ years etc. To even think that anything significant can be ascertained via technical interviews shows a lack of understanding of how the human mind works; all you will get with most of these silly test are people that are good at taking silly test.
I laugh at inappropriate times.
... "PC" / Windows generation. People my age (upper 30's and above) grew up around a range of different computer types, from those that had no operating system, to those that booted straight into a BASIC of some kind and loaded programmes from cassettes. Through University I was exposed to a huge range of platforms from severely overloaded SunOS minis (which somehow just kept chugging along even with over 400 active users, in a mere 32MB of RAM), to SGI machines, VMS machines. There were labs of Wyse / DEC terminals, X-Terminals and even some labs outfitted with Intel 386 and 486 machines running DOS and Windows 3.1.
We grew up when computing was "fun".
Now, computer users tend to get a PC, pre-installed with Windows, primarily to play games on and their "computing". Their computing education consists of typing in Microsoft Word, putting together slide ware using Microsoft PowerPoint and maybe adding up a column of something in Microsoft Excel.
Like a poster above, I've set practical tests when interviewing for network administrators (the switch and router kind), that have usually consisted of eight scenarios that follow on from one another. Starting from a simple "put port X of switch A into VLAN J", trouble shooting a fibre link (mismatched SX and LX optics) to redistributing routes from one protocol to another. I had one guy manage to crash a Linux laptop that was running minicom full screen, still unsure how he did that.
I highly recommend practical labs to anyone interviewing. It really does sort out the chaff from the wheat.
If you're a year or two from 50 then you're most likely either autodidact or were one of few people with some sort of education in IT.
I'm young enough to having gotten my degree in an established but still fairly new profession, meaning my professors were mathematicians by trade. Knuth was required reading and the classes were very heavy on algorithm theory. People graduating today likely have an education that reflects some tech actually used in the industry and the professors are first- or second-generation IT people. We didn't touch anything remotely related to cisco for all my years at university but I knew the algorithms they and similar devices operated with. Modern graduates are cisco ninjas but they have comparatively little mathematical background to know *why* things work and few have coded a line of assembler in their lives.
This technical proficiency but lacking in background knowledge makes people aggressive. It's a perfectly human trait: we become more cocky and assertive when we are on thin ice because, in a competitive field, everyone wants to "fake it til you make it" and being uncertain is a sign of weakness others will pounce upon. It's a toxic state of affairs and is unsustainable.
IT education has, in your lifetime, gone from being a practically non-existent field to an academic and theory-heavy discipline to being a glorified trade-school. Of course, graduates would be more cocky today than before. They are less flexible, less capable of adapting and extremely box-bound when troubleshooting a tricky issue because they are trained on the equipment, not the theory. Additionally their egos are continously stroked by tech blogs catering to the "digital natives" so everyone thinks they are a rockstar coder.
Who is "this guy" and why should we give a shit about his opinion?
Indeed. There is much talk that we earn a lot and there is a lot of people around to replace us, however, 99% of them dont have the right qualitifcations AND experience.
Dont get us started on that. I work at a university, and I can attest they are stupider, more entitled and snotty than ever. I walked to my uni, not driving daddys car. They can even most of the time flush the toilettes or put the lid up. Parking skills are also a disgrace, probably because the car is not their own, so they dont care wether they damage your car and theirs. They talk TOO loudly too. They herd at main doors (which are small) and seem oblivious people want to get by... And this is just the surface.
A technical interview is mostly a sign the interviewer lacks problem solving skills. Jargon and syntax are easy to test. Pass one of these and you'll probably spend your days working on projects that are a mess before you even arrive. Your new co-workers don't know what's important, they probably value complexity because it makes them feel good about themselves, their code will demonstrate the hard way to do things, and your new boss will probably already be of the opinion that your salary is money shoveled into a hole.
Evaluating a candidate's work using a natural language is a lot like problem solving and requirements gathering. If your interviewer lacks those skills, then those things probably aren't done well at this potential employer. If the candidate lacks the ability to describe his work in a natural language, then he probably lacks those skills, too.
Maybe we would see more people in IT with problem solving skills / critical thinking if we stopped scaring them off with so many amature rote memory based technical interviews... all you will get with most of these silly test are people that are good at taking silly test.
Hi! Sit here and answer support tickets from users. But do it enthusiastically! We never have any plans to promote you, or provide on-the-job training, and we'd like you to help out these indian fellows overseas who are much cheaper to employ...but we really want you to be dedicated and enthusiastic to the company. I mean, we're not that enthusiastic about you, but in this* economy everyone has to make sacrifices!
* It's never not this economy.
Firstly what kind of IT workers are we discussing? IT support, web designers, network administrators, software developers, architects, computer science professors? There's a difference. Anyway. I personally got my first tastes of programming as a kid about thirty years ago. I have a bachelor's degree in computer science and have been working as a developer and also as a development manager for many years. Currently I'm working full time and at the same time I'm studying part time for my master's degree. And I'm actually quite impressed by the students I've met at the university. They don't have much real work experience in development, but they most certainly are very intelligent and talented. Some will go on to take a PhD, some will start working in the business after finishing their master's degree. No matter what direction they decide to head towards, I'm 100% confident that the next generation will be excellent at diagnosing problems, developing solutions, implementing them, and everything else that is needed. I'm not at all worried for the future of computer science anymore.
>I know what you mean. It drives me nut's. It's defiantly not that hard too spell.
Fixed that for ya.
Hey, we didn't give you free reign to go all spelling-nazi. Did you loose your mind? Tow the line!
> Linear time should be expected (if it takes longer per ticket when there are more, thats bad, but non-polynomial, thats just horrid)
If one person is having trouble with the web site, there are x0,000 possible causes, so you start with "what are the symptoms they are experiencing, what browser are they using", etc. If there are a flood of tickets about the web site, a few of which mention "can not resolve host name", you have have a DNS problem. More tickets = more information = less time to fix.
If he asked the junior if he knew the protocol in depth, and the answer was "yes", the junior secerely lacked criticlal thinking. If he didn't even understand the question he is in wrong place. Not to talk about packet communication. I don't even work the field, but I guess education does help in some things. You get the foundation, and a small peek of many fields, so you learn how little you actually know.
I work for a small IT company that shall go unnamed. And I hate my job because it is basically making the trash software of a number of vendors like say Intuit and Microsoft work on the trash hardware of a few vendors like HP work. Or it is telling people no Apple doesn't simply let you export for notes from your iPad or organize your contacts into groups on your iPhone. It is boring menial frustrating work. It is however work that is available.
So let me tell you about my company's hiring process. Well formatted resume and the ability to answer a few questions on the phone gets you a tryout day. We give you some old junker PCs and ask you to evaluate them, install Windows and setup a Quickbooks install. That interview day fails 9 out of 10 people. We work with the 1 out of 10 that pass with more practice PCs, role playing and just getting them to read the newspaper (online).
Two observations: this is not just an educational issue it is cultural. We have lost a fix-it ethic needed for people to enter fields like IT and auto repair. Second, the big PC companies wish that independent IT shops would disappear because getting consumers to buy new stuff continuously is the only way to support their bottom line.
So you say you took a philosophy course and now you can damn the entire field? That's some high-powered thinking right there.
It starts at university, where students learn for exams and not to understand the matter. They are often unable to think at all. If they have a problem, they would not even try to define it and, at least, then google it. They do not read manuals. Faced with a more complex problem, e.g., in a practical course, most of them fail. As, I assume that they are not stupid are general mentally unable to think, it must be laziness. This laziness is a trained behavior learned in school. In school you also have only to write exams, but never to understand the topics deeply. You can learn for and forget after every exam. In history, in writing etc. Especially, when learning to write an article, people should start to think in a structured way. The truth is, they do not.
The second obstacle in IT is prejudice. If a technology, concept or method X is new or a technician is unfamiliar with, it is considered rubbish. As this might be true with some X and other X might be just new names for old X, critical thinking would help to distinguish real new helpful X from the rest. But instead of thinking they rely on hunches. While a hunch is good, you must back it up with a solid examination.
I took a philosophy course and an engineering degree. After working 30 years in engineering, I can tell for sure that philosophy is NOT the answer to engineering problems.
If too many people working on IT are under trained, you may blame the education system for failing to provide them with enough training in that field, not for failing to provide them education in totally unrelated fields.
I work for a major British bank and I see the precisely the same. IT people have become less and less well rounded, less able to think critically. Historically there were always a proportion of IT folks with strong IT skills but poor soft-skills (albeit many were borderline Aspergers). But they were often blended in with people capable of thinking critically, understanding the business, and communicating effectively so it worked out well. And even the most nerdy of the 1970s/1980s were relatively well rounded by today's standards. For example, Bill Gates was on his school's football team, was a voracious reader and could evaluate/write legal text. Nowadays with the influx of east and southern Asians, which is the large majority of our IT line staff, skills have become narrow. The gentle submissiveness and low-cost which made them attractive as employees backfires when then don't challenge bad ideas, cannot communicate, cannot orchestrated broader aspects of work, or low quality work results in crap systems expensive to maintain. Part of it has to do with their educational system, too often modeled after the old Soviet pure technical education. Some has to do with poverty, a well rounded education is expensive. Some of it has to do with culture, narrowness is the norm. Some of it has to do with cost-cutting, well rounded staff are more expensive. But it is to the peril of IT management to recognize where narrow skill staffing is appropriate and where it is not.
Yep, I'm one of those "IT directors" that operates interfaces. I studied EE and graduated with a Comp Sci degree.
Sure, I learned all about this stuff - circuits, logic, algorithms/math...etc. I ended up not making products, but implementing/using them. I understand how the spanning tree protocol in my switches uses a tree data structure to detect and eliminate loops - but do I really need that level of knowledge to be an effective IT guy?
The reason IT guys have devolved into "operators of interfaces" is that of efficiency. I'm the sole guy here in a small school with 200 people in multiple locations depending on me to keep the lights on. I don't have time for lengthy customization or "roll your own" IT products.
So efficiency requires that I take products out of the box "operate the interfaces" according to best practice guidelines and move on with life.
That's just the way it is.
Too bad you don't get the "fixed that for ya" meme. And in what universe is "too spell" correct?
Mostly random stuff.
It's a very long story, but I basically worked as a fixer for an HPC company on contract for a few years. I'd log in remotely or (occasionally) fly out and fix messes made by people who didn't know how to solve problems with Linux servers using critical thinking. I'd watch them sometimes and they'd try the only thing they knew how to do, over and over again, without realizing that it wasn't fixing the problem. Instead of narrowing down what could be causing the issue and then doing some research/googling/RTFM and bothering to understand the issue, they'd just reboot the machine over and over, progressively screw up config files worse and worse, and then eventually I'd get called in to fix it. I don't know if it's possible to teach critical thinking skills, or if they're just developed over a lot of self-directed experiments, or if it's an issue of intelligence, but it's got to be costing companies untold millions of dollars every year in the US alone.
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My brother's school has the largest of the three student populations, my sister-in-law the second largest and my sister's school is the smallest, at about half the size of my sister-in-laws school.
I am certain that if the teaching staff were really good, and the curriculum superb, they would still fail to produce enough functional IT professionals given the social hurdles that the majority of their students face.
I've been to college. I know first hand it's the education.
while
I don't know how we got here, but education is touted as the solution and the cause of all of life's problems.
Lack of jobs? People need more education.
Crime? People just need more education.
Most of these problems are huge and have more to do with other factors like industrial policy, culture... than education which tends to mean the school system.
There was an article recently about Japan making sure people can make things by hand to keep the knowledge so we can automate it better. That is part industrial policy, part culture, part education, part corporate policy...
Or for that matter, during the big recession, Germany paid the wages of its industrial workers, to keep them employed at companies producing goods. Again, industrial policy.
Similarly, this guy has a problem with people not being able to think critically. Here's a magic thought. There isn't a profession on Earth where most people 'think critically' to the level people want of IT workers. Even doctors and lawyer who make hundreds of thousands of dollars. Most just end up learning some very key skills and repeat it. There are a few brilliant lawyers and doctors, but most are just pretty skilled at doing the same tasks over and over. I don't mean to belittle it and I hope no one else does either.
And he wants critical thinking from IT workers who make a decent, but not top wage.
Here's the problem with 'IT'.
You shouldn't need lots of people with critical thinking skills. Most of 'IT" work can and should be run like infrastructure. Well trained people, probably unionized/accredited/guild (like construction),
Right now, people only think IT needs a lot of critical thinking because it is so poorly run. Things constantly changing with no benefit, a skilled and trained workforce is not maintained, architecture and planning not done. Standard tools not there...
Note, that I speak of IT here. There is definite design work that does need critical thinking and innovation. But the number of these jobs is small and these people are definitely out there. Whether they stick around or are in the right role is a different story.
and my favorite dirty phrase "best practices"... Meaning "tell me what to do, I have no clue what the theory of operation is"
It's sad and in my opinion, from over 30 years experience, the product of testing and certification programs.... And manager/HR people who look for exactly those properties.
I do not know of an educational system that fosters critical thinking instead of socialisation, assimilation, indocrination of accepted values, transfer of accpetable knowledge and drilling to acquire practical skills. No educational curriculum includes reading Slashdot.
I can tell for sure that philosophy is NOT the answer to engineering problems.
And you imply that IT problems are engineering problems. I disagree. IT problems are generally human problems. 90% of IT problems are user errors. The designers saw "best utility" as an engineering problem and built something correct, but useless. If it's counter-intuitive to a user, it's bad engineering. Even if it meets all the specifications. The problem is so few bad engineers can recognize it in themselves.
Learn to love Alaska
However note that this approach will be for bottom tier IT workers, it will not have a lot of opportunity for promotion and there will be major problems when (not if) the IT field changes. Ie, we train someone with hands on skills with .NET and then in a decade suddenly no one uses .NET anymore and the person again needs retraining (as opposed to the university trained person who has learned to be adaptable). Or the person loses their job at a Windows house but there's an opening for IT at a company that uses MacOS but the person has no hands on training with it. That's a major problem even today, there are dumb IT workers by the truckload that can not do a bit of work that was not covered on a certificate test. If your entire IT staff has a narrow focus and you ask them to redesign the system from scratch, move away from Microsoft-only products, then they'll just give you a blank stare. It's really sad when a worker getting a decent salary literally starts whining that they don't know how to do something and are unable to learn how on their own.
The courses I was referring to were not the "History of Philosophy" classes. Rather, the formal logic (think Boolean logic) and argument, rhetoric and reason classes.
Teaching you to think and communicate, rather then teaching you what other people have thought before.
Min
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
What happens when there is no playbook and no simple solution? Real inventiveness is hard, takes time, and there is a certain amount of risk involved. Executives dont want want to hear any of this, and employees either too scared to speak up, or too powerless to influence.
Having to spend hours with support or researching the error to make the decision doesn't mean the answer is trivial, just because the question was phased in a yes/no manner.
The real problem is that management degrees do not include enough computer science and are not taught how to incorporate the culture of science into their business model.
Why should a management degree be technical? The management degree is about people and finance, not tech. The tech degree is about tech, to the exclusion of business and people. I agree it would make sense to have a little more generality in degrees, but too much, and you might as well major in "undecided" for all degrees.
Learn to love Alaska
I see the results of a single course in philosophy. You are aware that Newton was a philosopher...had something to do with calculus, maybe you've heard of it.
Ever hear of Jon Barwise. Did seminal work on philosophy of language. Helped develop non-wellfounded set theory which we use to produce models of security for....get this, security problems in engineering systems.
There are really only 3 professions based on the multi-thousand year long history of people in the world, Doctors, Lawyers and Priests. Everyone else is a craftsman.
As soon as I'm ordained by Microsoft, I can be the latter.
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
> Have you never had to deal with constant interruptions from management and clients/customers asking about the status of tickets?
I know what you mean.
"I'd be glad to talk to you about this. Right now, would you prefer that I discuss it with you, or go fix it?"
That line normally puts an end to any interruptions. :)
I've been fortunate that I've always been in a position where I can ask that question. I've either been the president of the company, or the system owner - the only one who can fix it. For Y2K, I did hire a couple of extra people to answer the phone and say "We apologize for the inconvenience. We are aware of the problem and working on resolving it." It turns out that we didn't need them for Y2K since that was just a display issue for any sanely designed software. 2038 could be a much larger problem.
I would ask has there ever been a time that a majority of the working population displayed critical thinking skills? Old timers will likely say, "Back in the day..." but I wager that when they were the young-uns, the older timers likely said the same thing about their skill set. I think the vast majority of people indentured to a wage from top to bottom of the workplace hierarchy are lacking in the ability. But as noted in above comments, I'm just another hater too, or so they say.
Our education system has been failing a lot more subjects than IT. Although I know the majority on here are liberals, school is not a place for indoctrination into any political belief as that is time taken from learning the important subjects like science, history, and English. We need history to prevent redoing the mistakes of the past. We need to be able to construct our writing into logical order, so people will understand what we are talking about and to get our point across no matter what your political beliefs. Being able to out shout the opposition wins no argument and loses converts. "Common core" is far worse than bad. Their approach to math makes it overly complicated, they are weak on science and strong on political correctness. IOW they teach kids to be meek and obedient little elves. They kill creative thinking which is essential for science. Get hold of a teaching guide for common cor. Don't listen to either side. Read the manual and decide for your self. If our school system is poor with science, it will look great compared to common core. They are dumbing school down to the lowest common denominator and making it a cheering section for the entitlement crowd.
t's really sad when a worker getting a decent salary literally starts whining that they don't know how to do something and are unable to learn how on their own.
I agree whining is unprofessional, but I don't see why in IT it's assumed you should be able to pick up anything on short notice with no training.
Our CAD drafters get training on new releases of the software as it can be pretty different, and they can use having new features explained or pointed out.
I don't know why when it comes to general computer use people are expected to get it by osmosis.
And when you're talking about an entirely new environment, sure they probably could wing it enough to get it going, but how likely is it they won't make some boneheaded mistake that might have been avoided if they got basic training on a new platform or design.
A personal example: I come from AD and Group Policy. We started doing Puppet for other platforms. My first inclination was to say, this is probably like a slightly different implementation of GPOs, so I will install an ENC, The Foreman. Then I'll have hostgroups mirror my AD OUs. It turns out that helps, and hurts. Trying to apply manifests to hostgoups like GPOs on OUs can work, but in the way you end up writing manifests, it's often easier or better to do filtering in the manifest (or I'm finding that right now anyway, maybe it'll be different after a few more years). I generally shy away from filtering inside a GPO - both because it's kind of weird (WMI filters, deny apply permissions, GPP with Item Level Targetting) and because it's non-discoverable. In Puppet, a particular manifest pretty much lays it out, so you're not wondering about which of 3 different methods might be making something not apply...
Now, I think I'm doing OK, but maybe having training on Puppet would have had me make a better choice in the beginning, or point out some fundamental thing I'm still getting wrong, but don't see because I'm learning enough to do my current task as I go.
Opera, Proxomitron-Grypen,GPG 0x0A1C6EE3
I certainly have to pick up everything with no training. That's why there are college degrees so that people learn how to learn. Sure, occasionally you bring in a corporate trainer for a day for their product when it's obtuse, but generally you should be able to point people to the stack of manuals, white papers, and the web.
Wah, wah wah. The younger generation is going to hell; the sky is falling; if only those kids were as smart as, good-looking as, (insert your own description) we were/are. I've heard same complaints everywhere - so boring. Yes, there are many ignorant, annoying, lazy people in every profession. In fact, I remember some I worked with in the 1970s and earlier, and some of them were OLD and had advanced degrees and positions. And I'm sick of all the "critical thinking" talk, since no one can define what that means. I'm 76, so, of course, I'm outstanding at everything!