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Microsoft President Brad Smith: Computer Science Is Space Race of Today
theodp writes: Q. How is K-12 computer science like the Cold War? A. It could use a Sputnik moment, at least that's the gist of an op-ed penned by Senator Jerry Moran (R., KS) and Microsoft President Brad Smith. From the article: "In the wake of the Soviet Union's 1957 Sputnik launch, President Eisenhower confronted the reality that America's educational standards were holding back the country's opportunity to compete on a global technological scale. He responded and called for support of math and science, which resulted in the National Defense Education Act of 1958 and helped send the country to the moon by the end of the next decade. It also created the educational foundation for a new generation of technology, leadership and prosperity. Today we face a similar challenge as the United States competes with nations across the globe in the indispensable field of computer science. To be up to the task, we must do a better job preparing our students for tomorrow's jobs." Smith is also a Board member of tech-bankrolled Code.org, which invoked Sputnik in its 2014 Senate testimony ("learning computer science is this generation's Sputnik moment") as it called for "comprehensive immigration reform efforts that tie H-1B visa fees to a new STEM education fund [...] to support the teaching and learning of more computer science," nicely echoing Microsoft's National Talent Strategy. Tying the lack of K-12 CS education to the need for tech visas is a time-honored tradition of sorts for Microsoft and politicians. As early as 2004, Bill Gates argued that CS education needed its own Sputnik moment, a sentiment shared by Senator Hillary Clinton in 2007 as she and fellow Senators listened to Gates make the case for more H-1B visas as he lamented the lack of CS-savvy U.S. high school students.
... dearth of inspiration or even otherwise useful things to say. It's all transparently self-serving but so conspicuously lacking in substance and foundation.
If you really wanted to ensure a solid influx of STEM university students a few years down the line, you wouldn't be bothering with "learning to code" today. You'd make sure they get a solid grounding in the basics. You know, spelling, grammar, thinking, coming up with things to say. And, of course, math. Not "new math", but actual real math taught in a way that is maybe not huggy-feely, but certainly imparts the skill without putting off. Mathematicians have known for years that the math grounding is awful (along with the rest of highschool), and that it only gets interesting once you "catch the bug" and dive in, later, much later. Do something about that and raise the expected literacy and math proficiency floor from "typically functionally illiterate" to, well, somewhat higher at least.
But that isn't sexy. That's boring and hard work. Companies and politicians don't want to sponsor that.
And stop with the night and weekend hours, 72 hour weeks, and low status compared to the sales and marketing wing of the country.
But having a career that ends 20 years after you start is the worst part. It was true even in the late 1980s when i saw lots of 45ish year old programmers laid off and pushed out of the field.
When you combine the low status, long hours, short career window, you can see why people avoid the field.
It sorta has pay going for it- but not so much when you consider the sudden age discrimination end compared to many other fields.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Is this the guy who talked about creating a computer science crisis?
So we went to the moon before the Soviets got there and they gave up. Big deal. There's still no moon base, let alone anything beyond that, and there won't be any for the foreseeable future.
Computer science of today is more like the espionage part of the cold war, not space race. IT companies, including Microsoft, are now concentrating just on gathering more and more of information out of people.
China is not repeating the mistakes of the USSR. They know showing their superiority would spur the very kind of reaction Smith longs for, so they keep most of their progress under wraps. A competing nation supporting a competing societal ideology, which can send stuff to space before everyone else, that can scare/motivate people. A few hackers in a basement that know your blood type and what brand of detergent your order online, that's not scary.
Damn it!
Person in thinks is the most important.
You could replace industry with sector or even department. I hear it all the time that without department X the company would be useless. They are right, because if that department would be useless, it would not excist. What is forgotten that this is true for all the other departments as well. It is true that if some are removed the time impact is felt might not be as soon as others, but it will be felt.
So what I would like to hear is what people would think is the second most important and even then you might see a biased answer.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
If we really wanted to make the world a better place and invoke the space race analogy, then the race should be about getting us off fossil fuels. Better energy storage technology, rapid charging, etc. Anything that gets us off oil as quickly as possible. Look at the misery the Middle East has caused the world, and it's all over oil.
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
Microsoft attempting to stay relevant again.
It's too late. Tech seemed like a great career many years ago, but the successful tech corporations lobbied their way to bring in cheap foreign labor and for tax breaks for moving call centers and jobs to overseas locations. And even today they complain about how expensive (!!) tech labor is while they hide their profits in foreign tax havens.
So you spend all this tax money (from a treasury these tech companies are avoiding paying into) to push kids into STEM fields where they will fail to get employment because those companies don't want to hire expensive Americans.
Don't fall for it! The US still needs plumbers, electricians, welders and other skilled workers that can't be done offshore. Or get a LEED certification and learn Spanish. so you can manage construction crews of Honduran guest workers.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
It doesn't look like a race to me. That, or Microsoft doesn't do computer science.
The research on alternative fuel sources is being done by people in the STEM field. STEM education is the source of those people, dumbass.
We interviewed a number of people in their mid to late 40s and asked them some questions like "how would you build a project from scratch today" or "what do you think about Node, Ruby, Python, etc." One senior "architect" had never even considered that people wouldn't use JavaEE. We had one senior developer (middle age) respond that he'd consider starting a new project in 2015 (time of interview) with Struts. Struts for a new project! Not even JAX-RS, Spring Boot, etc. Struts...
There's a difference. One is a fundamental science, the other is the latest shiny.
Tech is a great career, it gives you a good salary for 20-25 years.
Is finding work harder in your late 40s and beyond? Of course. But if you saved your salary, it shouldn't matter. If retiring in your mid 40s isn't an option, you fucked up.
Oh hell no.
These rotten pieces of protoplasm are not mankind's friend.
They have lost the right to dictate this conversation.
Only big media amplifies their voices.
If you have a head, you know damn well, there is no more negotiation with these untrusted lying backstabbers.
That doesn't mean they can't force things through the system using their muscle.
In the end, through their lawyers, it won't be good and you won't have any rights.
Go linux - any flavor and get a free key to your jail cell door.
Put a stake through their finances and boycott their fascist takeover, the people do not need them.
If you need H1B visa money to be doing something about a manhattin project for coding, YOU GOT PROBLEMS and don't give a crap about the law of the land you stand on. For alone you must be boycotted if this country is to survive.
Fast and Furious right now if it's vetted, looks like TREASON at the highest levels!
Wake up from your dreamworld before these pieces of shit cause a fucking civil war from migrants and open borders.
Reframe "computer science" as "guns" and you may even get a lobbying group trying to get your gov of choice to fund the heck out of the thing, and lots of people yelling "don't take away our computer science".
This post's intention it to show what sort of arms are attractive and what sort just elicits "nerd!" of of the other group.
a sentiment shared by Senator Hillary Clinton in 2007
How is that relevant to anything? Just a blatant slashvertisment for a political candidate.
Anyone in a technical field who thinks they can change lives (or change economies as a surrogate of lives) thinks their field is in a space race. I'm sorry, but figuring out how to bend computers to one's will is like driving a car. Some people will be driving formula 1 where there is competition and art; most will be driving minivans to drop kids off at school. We need lots of minivans and not all that many F1 seats. Decrying the shortage of highly skilled workers is what companies who want to create armies of F1-trained drivers for few seats to drive down the cost. What we really need are F1 drivers who also know how to navigate to new places -- to bring it back around -- we need people who want to work on interesting problems, often skillfully manipulating computing resources is key to solving those problems.
Back in the days of the space race it was the environment that got people interested and they went into the field that mattered most to them.
Today they are trying to force computer "science" onto every child and hope that it sticks with them. It's going to turn kids off computers more than get them onto programming because it's being forced on them for the whole of their education. While I have no problem with it being offered and having it introduced to everyone I don't think it should be shoved down their throats. Our schools should not be used to train students for particular jobs. I believe that a school should be teaching students a wide variety of skills in order to let them discover what they enjoy.
I read this as: the population needs to worry about who is first to build AI, and needs to give away a large sum of their money through taxes to companies like Microsoft who will try to beat the enemies who has already been making big progress in the AI market. Soon we will be conquered by the enemies AI controlled robots if we do nothing.
"We don't have any real challenges, so let's struggle to define one using words that don't apply."
Boring and hard work isn't what they want. Instead, what they are wanting is to push earnings down in the sectors that they have employees. Pure and simple. If this were not the case, no tech company would give a rat's ass about STEM majors.
It is sad seeing this hand wringing because tech companies just want cheap labor. From wanting more H-1Bs, when there are many colleges here in the US churning out CS students that can do the job, to giving free US residency permits for any foreign national who gets a degree in basket weaving at a mail order college.
Lets be real here. It isn't an arms race. It is pure and simple, big business squeezing the worker bees for bigger profits. These companies want IT and program development to be like meat packing, textile weaving and picking fruit off of trees. A very low priced skill, combined with so many workers that individuals are fungible. It is about grabbing people who are willing to work for cheap to lower the income level overall.
And students see that. One reason why there are not STEM majors in the US is because there are no jobs for them. Hell, even just getting admitted into a top tier university is hard because foreign students have priority (affirmitive action). There is no future for an engineer in the US, other than trying to have to always out-do the dirt-cheap imported labor at every turn. Want to feed your kids? Get a J. D., plumbing, electrician, or HVAC license. Go into a trade where H-1Bs are not imported by the battalion.
If there is a space race presently here on Earth it is to develop energy from Thorium --- specifically the LFTR as envisioned by Weinberg, but also the various other approaches such as fission U-233 burners and denatured molten salt reactors.
Major players include,
The United States who developed the technology, then shelved it. Now a handful of individuals and small companies are struggling to attract the attention of investors. Canada, as our closest ally in LFTR. India whose interest in Thorium has been mainly asa solid fuel (moot so long as uranium if plentiful). And China which is going all-out and is on track to beat us to a working prototype. That's the only real 'space race' going on today. Nothing else is as game-changing.
This is the paragraph where I list all the good things about wind and solar as base load energy sources. Paragraph ends.
Imagine you're running for President of the United States, and you receive this letter . Might it help inspire you to declare complete energy independence as a goal, and a concerted effort to jump-start manufacturing and steel production within the country?
Say you're a state senator and you receive this letter. You know your state is 'rich' in untapped natural gas right now, though in the long term it will require increasingly aggressive means to extract it, with untold consequences and uncertain ends down the road. Would you glimpse an better future in this path?
Imagine you are a multinational oil exploration and services industry player, and you receive this letter . On the day it arrives your stock is climbing towards $70 and you don't have a care in the world. Though you may recognize there is a viable technology described here, it's very different from what your corporation specializes in. Could something like this be the perfect hedge for the future?
We'll see. The letters are in their hands.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Guess what the space race of today is? It's another space race! And guess what the USA is doing in this race? That's right, it's ceding it to corporations. Bombing brown people for economic benefit is more important. Better cross your fingers that SpaceX keeps improving, because they're our space program now
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Could it possibly be that those 45 year olds that got laid off had become complacent and hadn't kept their skills current?
OK, here we go the "keep the skills current"...
OK. You're working a job - say in the insurance industry - that has millions of lines of COBOL code. You're working your ass off and want to have a life. You see the new flavor on the block is Java and you go and take a class and there are NO Java projects where you work. Then you get laid off. Guess what happens.
"I'm sorry, but we need someone with on-the-job experience."
That has been MY experience.
Staying current is hard work.
Current in what? See, if you are as old as you say you are, then you'll remember all the new technologies that were flying around in the 90s. I became a hell of a Palm Pilot programmer myself. Didn't matter anyway - "Sorry, we need someone with at least 2 years of experience." And Plam disappeared. Then the iOS. Well, Apple had a real shitty track record with handheld devices then and I was already burned and out of pocket for my Palm experience. Well, now the market is flooded with iOS developers.
So, let me put it this way, you got lucky and stepped into something that has allowed you to keep working into decrepitude.
BUT WAIT! There's more!
Years ago I worked at a company with this guy who was completely happy doing the same shit year and year out. DOS/C programming. Technologies came and went. People came and went. And eventually, the company just couldn't get ANYONE else because - no young person wanted to program DOC/C because they wanted to work on something "current". As far as I know, he worked until he died. Probably laughed at all of chasing "current" technologies and getting laid off overtime the IT wind changed.
It's MORE than just skills. There's this myth that it's all about the "skills". I have had matched the laundry lists of job postings before and after applying, I get an email asking some questions. So I answer honestly (dumb right there). One of the questions is "what did you make at your last job?"
I tell them.
I get an email in an hour saying, "Sorry, you don't have the skills."
Riiiiiiight. Cheap bastards. The "skills" they were looking for was someone to work cheap.
You say you work at a "startup". Well, are you being paid a shit salary and getting stock options or equity or some other phony money instead?
I bet there is MUCH more to YOUR story than that you "have the skills".
Maybe I've been working at the wrong companies but in my 20~ year career I've met maybe 2 competent programmers.
You can't win.
There is no cost to enter...
It is all up to learning the foundations. Arithmetic, algebra, geometry, more mathematics (the science is ALL mathematical).
The space race was the recognition that space made certain types of attacks VERY simple, and next to impossible to defend against.
Not ANOTHER new bandwagon - get everyone on board, start with the kids, anyone who doesn't buy into it is anti-american.... BS. .NET, C#, IoT, Homeland Security, Star Wars, etc.
AI. XML.
So we got here because of the new, suggested things? I think NOT.
We got here because people who liked this stuff learned about things, discovered things, and did it.
NOT because of a nationwide drive of forced education.
So much fertilizer here that there should be corn sprouting spontaneously....
By the time students in kindergarten graduate self-programming machines will be the norm and there will be no programming jobs.
Ok, I have designed a small spherical computer program that does nothing but beep at me every 20 minutes.
I'll accept my Nobel Prize and high-level position at Microsoft now, thank you.
Bing the public record of Microsoft vs. Federal Court cases. It's about money, and hiring someone on the other side of the planet, instead of Americans. And why is he taking his case to an American politician, when his money is off shore? Why is his "woe is me" noise pollution in the halls of congress?
Murders Spies And Voting Lies: The Clint Curtis Story is an incredible documentary which tells the story of a computer programmer who was contacted by a private company' with ties to convicted Chinese spies, to write a program that could be used to rig elections...what follows is the breaking of a massive conspiracy in which there would be hard evidence of vote manipulation via electronic voting machines-whether using Curtis's program or the twenty year old bootloader hack which, as show by students at Princeton University, could be loaded onto any of these machines in less than a minute; the sketchy firing of two employees-one being Curtis himself- from the Florida Dept of Transportation; corrupt ties to leading members of Diebold-one of two companies responsible for vote counting in the US; and a dead Florida DOT investigator- Raymond Lemme RIP- who was privately investigating the claims made by Curtis...who conveniently committed suicide in Georgia, where autopsies are not done on suicide victims, as opposed to Florida where an autopsy would have been automatic. What really happened in 2000 to Al Gore and Ohio & Florida, and again in 2004.....now you can finally know the truth, and it ain't pretty!
When I was younger hearing things like this scared me, now that I'm mostly on my way to 45 I know exactly who those people that get laid off are. They're the people that refuse to learn anything new past getting a job. Learning is a life long activity. If you aren't continually updating your skill sets during your entire career you're going to find yourself obsolete.
Take a hypothetical example of an old programmer that refuses to learn about newfangled "Makefiles". For a while they'll be able to carry on just fine doing their job. But add a decade or two and suddenly they're the slowest part of the development process and let go. You have a 'highly skilled' person in their 40s that is lacking a skillset that makes them a non-starter in the hiring process.
The same thing with Engineers and CAD decades ago. It's easy to look back and say that "Everyone" knows CAD but there was once a time when Engineers refused to learn it because it wasn't the same as paper drafting. Eventually those that refused got laid off. People with Masters and PhD degrees were being replaced by fresh college grads. If you asked those that got laid off it was ageism, people stealing their jobs, etc. But it boiled down to the fact that they were no longer relevant.
Some of us are writing the tools of 2050 and are having a near impossible time getting our co-workers to use it. "Oh it only takes 5 minutes." "It's not that hard to do the old way" etc. In most circumstances my life would be better off if I could get rid of half of them and replace them with H1Bs that would actually use the new tools.
What job doesn't change significantly in the ~45 years between when someone starts in their 20s to when they retire in their 60s? Adapt or get left behind.
All of what you mention is based on the same Computer Science Theory ?
Did you get Monkey Training ?
Then hit the library, I suggest. And do not look for Monkey Books.
Apply in Moscow, Minsk, Beijing, Singapore, Brasilia, Bangalore.
Of course that requires disregarding the Sheeple Propaganda your 1% feeds you. ("all so horrible with the Rooskies" etc)
I did it and found wonderful people.
While the comment regarding coding miss the mark and is in line with the latest groupthink from non-techies thinking that computer science is just typing with curly braces, there is a valid point about the cultural shift away from science in the USA.
In the USA we seem to be giving up on science. Our pop culture glorifies lawyers, advertisers, financial middle men, and sales. The scientists and engineers are almost always portrayed as awkward, unhappy, and somehow flawed. This has always been the case to some extent, but it seems far more pervasive now. From what I have seen, the graduate programs in science and engineering are filled with foreign students because american students aren't interested anymore. We stopped making things long ago, now it seems like we have stopped doing things. Our science and engineering economy is still strong because people still move here.
I work as an electrical engineer and our group has people from all over the world. Somewhere between 5% - 10% are from the US, the rest typically did undergraduate work overseas and got a graduate degree in the US.* I have noticed that below a certain age, you see almost 0 American engineers. Most of the American engineers I see are old enough to have grown up in an era where the US valued science and engineering. IOW, when we still had a space program and computing was relatively new.
*This is not a visa abuse situation. Most people are on fast track to a green card, buy houses here, raise their families here, become US citizens, etc.
Quit your country for some time. That will be an eye opener. When you come back you will have a much more relaxed attitude.
In the US and Western Europe they keep an army on mind-slaves and they treat their slaves quite shitty.
Go looking somewhere else, at least for a bunch of years. In many other places they do not cooperate with that silliness for too long.
can go a long way to dodge the Collection Industry.
Do it.
And turn off your phone most of the day. Especially when on the move.
I hate to sound like an old fart but I think we are at the top of the s-curve in computing.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Now I am really scared about these evil yellow-sliteyes.
Oh wait, in the real world IT WAS HILLARY CLINTON ORDERING COLLECTION OF DNA !
Source:Wikileaks
You Americans are the key threat to world peace, not the other way around !
Macro$hit is by now staffed by cheap Indians and you can feel it in their products.
You have been so stupid to vote for Hillary and her lefty friends to enable this.
Have a brown sugar water bottle on this !
I have my altruistic day of the year today and will throw your miserable existence a bone: Some people work in industries such as aerospace, medical, large scale spying, advanced weapons, ABS brakes and so on.
For them, software engineering is indeed a science.
Maybe Mr Boy should have a look into this. It will be totally different from Mr. Boy's "IT" projects.
..you have the TV turned on too often. If you believe in the Cultural Marxist stuff. If you allow yourself to be tricked into self-destructive thinking by communist and bankster (two sides of same coin, btw) propaganda experts.
Remember what your father and mother did. Maybe you should simply follow their lives, values, customs and resist all these "progressives". This is a game of "who can be brainfucked".
The Cyber War Domain thing will require a complete rebuild of the best part of computing. Just at 10 to 100 times more effort than before, because we cannot afford everything to be hackable.
So - lots of business for those who are contrarians to the "lets build shit even faster and dirtier inside agile hamsterwheels". Go slower, be 100% correct. Test the hell, prove the hell out of it. Make it 100% secure. Give middle finger to NSA-GCHQ.
Simple.
Correct.
Provably Correct.
100% Secure.
100% Safe.
Failure Containment.
Modular Security instead of Bell Labs Kernel Shite.
Memory Safety.
Proof Supporting Tools.
That is the future.
Effectively we're saying we need a crash program that wasted billions of dollars in an effort to reach a goal that the neither side is really interested in pursuing except how the research was pertinent to other related applications (missiles capable of deploying nuclear weapons.)
So we need an event that ends up creating an artificially inflated bubble to waste trillions of dollars that benefit corporations' bottom lines and can be dropped after the bubble bursts. (For example, see the $2 million Apollo landing simulator that was determined to be pretty useless after Apollo 11 and not used again.)
Yep, politics as usual.
(And I am a great fan of space, space technology and exploration, and astronomy in general. But, enjoying the science of it, I try not to be deluded into seeing history for something it wasn't.)
call centers and jobs to overseas locations
If your "tech" career is working in a call center, you deserve to be replaced with an H1B.
Doesn't take a lot of savvy to read off a script.
Let's blow off the self-serving bullshit and consider an inadvertently interesting question. What would a "Sputnik moment" look like in CS and is it possible to have one?
These mega-corps want to flood the country with labor so they can help their bottom line. It's time the government forced them to hire Americans, but whatever means necessary. If that requires government-sponsored re-training, so be it. If it requires a age-quota system to make sure the companies don't stack the deck, so be it.
...a wage race to the bottom. Programming isn't just being used for elite government projects with unlimited funding, it's everywhere.
And CS != programming, dammit. Programming can be done just fine without knowing a damn thing about how a computer works, any more than I need to know the human auditory system to communicate via spoken language. Are tomorrow's jobs really going to be designing higher performance processors and new paradigms for information transformation? Or, primarily using what we have to move data around faster and extract meaning from it? I suspect the former is saturated with homegrown talent. The latter probably requires community college on top of existing high school programs.
I'm an American who graduated with a masters in electrical engineering a few years ago. Never could find anyone willing to hire me for engineering work, and I work on a farm now.
I still value science and engineering, and do my best to improve my skills in that area with the little free time I have. I haven't given up on science, but for whatever reason employers seem to have given up on me.
This is just a push by the tech companies to push-down wages and benefits. Once "everybody can code", the skills will be considered worthless. This is true of any human skill. For example: everybody can walk, so nobody needs to be paid much to do it. Pick any other skill everybody can do: same thing.
If there was a shortage of so-called STEM people, the basic and inviolable rules of economics would cause the following two things:
1. Wages and benefits in these fields would rise (google: "supply and demand")
2. Companies would re-train workers they have as needed, rather than laying them off.
Since wages in the STEM fields have been flat for 15 years and all these big employers demanding more H1-B visas and more STEM training have been laying off THOUSANDS of STEM employees, you know that their claims are complete lies.
One big difference between rocket "science" and CS is that the rocket science remained the province of a few countries for a long time (Soviet Union and US, later China, the EU and India, with most other countries still struggling to field mid-range missiles). But CS, and particularly programming skills, can be copied and then used by almost any other country. And that makes a CS race comparable to the Space Race of the 60s rather unlikely. ...and I realize that basic programming skills are not computer _science_. But even real computer science (e.g. algorithmic complexity) is much more available to the public than rocket "science."