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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.
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.
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.
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
The research on alternative fuel sources is being done by people in the STEM field. STEM education is the source of those people, dumbass.
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.
I find myself unable to discern whether this post is an ingeniously subtle satire on the present state of the industry, or is actually entirely serious. Either way it would make a fantastic Dilbert strip.
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.
This is the crux of the matter. Newer, less-developed languages/frameworks, languages/frameworks that no one can be an expert in because they are still so new...is what employers are looking for "expertise" in.
You can't expect to reason with unreasonable people and the world is full of them.
what do you think about Node, Ruby, Python, etc.
I am NOT old, in fact I am still quite young, but I still don't like them. They are all interpreted languages, with almost no type system (everything dynamic). In Javascript you can't even distinguish between integers and floats.
I don't suggest to go down the java path, but at least use something with a compiler that actually helps you find bugs. All the productivity you "gain" thanks to no static typing you already lose again due to having to write unit tests for even the smallest piece of code.
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.'"
Hell, even just getting admitted into a top tier university is hard because foreign students have priority (affirmitive action).
Affirmative action has nothing to do with admitting foreign students. Affirmative action means that given two equally qualified candidates, you pick the one with more general disadvantages. The quotes for foreign students at specified university courses are completely independent from affirmative action, Those quotes were negotiated for in student exchange programs and similar contracts.
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".
What have frameworks to do with how to start a project? Shouldn't the right answer to that question be something like "Collect and analyse all the customer requirements".
Selection of which third party technologies to employ should be far later and be heavily influenced by everything that went before.
I don't really get what's wrong with Struts from the age perspective though. The latest stable release is not even 2 months old. But I am mostly involved with embedded projects where updating after production is expensive or even impossible.
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.
I think, but don't quota me on this, that there's a possibility of more foreign students in a university than nationals due to the university earning more money from the foreign students.It's nothing to do with affirmative action.
sag
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!
Better energy storage technology, rapid charging, etc.
And better renewable energy sources - like solar panels and related storage/inverter/control systems that are cheaper in total-cost-of deployment, operation, and energy delivered than more grid power.
But we already HAVE that, at least for sunny sites. Good but cheap panels, batteries that have good lifetimes, are efficient, and have hysterically-high charge/discharge rates, inverter and control electronics that have the benefits of decades of Moore's law. Now the flies in the ointment are:
- The improvements are still coming, so fast that by the time you get production of the current stuff ready to ramp up there's something better enough to kill it before you make back your investment.
- Government regulations impeding the deployment and/or distorting the marketplace.
It's not a shortage of research or engineering effort, and there is no shortage of researchers or engineers. (If there were, their pay would be higher, and engineers would not be rejected if they were the wrong color, from schools other than the top three or so, or more than a decade or two out of school (with lots of real-world experience, ongoing self-education, refresher courses, and/or field news publication reading, and the knowledge to not waste time re-attempting certain obvious and attractive solutions that have hidden killer-bugs, but go right to others that work.) So inducting MORE kids into MORE schools and produce MORE unemployed STEM workers isn't going to help.
One thing I see that MAY help is more funding for small-device fusion research - for those non-sunny areas. But even that is proceeding in the private sector, as the governments throw their billions at the monster projects. But I suspect it's better if the government keeps its hands out. Look at how long they delayed solar, by "picking winners" like Solyndra, or polywell, by putting roadblocks in the way of releasing information and getting investment from the private sector after turning off the dribble of government money.
The OTHER thing that would help is GETTING OUT OF THE WAY, mainly by reducing the taxes that bleed out the veins of commerce, and currency inflation, which transfers the value of the rest of the money and investment value from those creating value to the government's cronies.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
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.
But if you saved your salary, it shouldn't matter.
If you saved your salary, it was probably wiped out or otherwise stolen by taxes, inflation, deliberately depressed interest rates, and other economic manipulation (such as the "economic crisis" - or crises) by now. Going forward, with the current policies of effectively zero (or even negative) interest rates it can be expected to be even worse.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
If your money got wiped out then you aren't nearly as smart as you think you are.
Even the stock market managed to recover.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Affirmative action has nothing to do with admitting foreign students.
Foreign students, both out of state or out of country, pay more in tuition than in state students do. The academic ideal got replaced by the altar of cold hard cash.
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.
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
To end users this means absolutely nothing.... just a redo of whats current. Do you know what a technology s-curve is?
love is just extroverted narcissism
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?
...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 would have said that neither rocket design nor software design is science, they're both engineering. At least mostly; if you're trying to create a non-chemical rocket (or other device) to take people to Mars, or you're working on AI, then there's science. But building a low Earth orbit rocket, or building medical (etc.) software, is, IMO, engineering.
Just curious: by "hysterically-high charge/discharge rates", you're referring to hysteresis, not comedy, right?
They thought that back in the 60s. Sort of like nuclear fusion.
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."
Just curious: by "hysterically-high charge/discharge rates", you're referring to hysteresis, not comedy, right?
Neither. The meaning I intended is more like "extremely", but far beyond it. "Extremely" might be read as a substantial improvement but still within the same general range. (Like "ultra-fast", it has been devalued by previous use for smaller deltas.) "Hysterically" would be more in the "whole new ballpark" class - an order of magnitude or much more improvement.
"Hysterically" could mean something like putting a charge of >80% of a cell's total capacity into it (or pulling it out) in half a minute, while "extremely" might still take double-digit minutes as it waits around for things like ions to diffuse in and out of plates.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way