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High School Students Compete In 'Microsoft Office Championship' (latimes.com)
An anonymous reader writes:
This week the L.A. Times described a 17-year-old from Virginia who'd spent several hours a day perfecting his technique in Microsoft Excel, "one of 150 students from 50 countries competing in the Microsoft Office Specialist World Championship" at the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim. "At stake: cash, prizes and the clout that comes with being the best in the world at Excel, PowerPoint or Word. 'I'm going to do my best to bring it home for the United States,' John said as he prepared for the competition."
Microsoft's VP of Worldwide Education said the event helps students "to become more employable to companies that build their businesses around the Microsoft suite." For example, the article points out, "Past winners have gone on to attend Ivy League colleges and even work at, yes, Microsoft... Delaware resident Anirudh Narayanan, 17, prepared all summer to compete in the Excel 2013 category, 'looking up obscure facts just in case I might need to know it during the test.' He's hoping the skills he honed will help him at Carnegie Mellon University, where he will begin studying economics in the fall. 'I make sure I do a minimum of five hours a week in Excel,' Anirudh said. 'Then for a while I'll be on YouTube watching videos about Excel.'"
John eventually won the first-place prize in the Excel category -- which was $7,000 and an Xbox.
Microsoft's VP of Worldwide Education said the event helps students "to become more employable to companies that build their businesses around the Microsoft suite." For example, the article points out, "Past winners have gone on to attend Ivy League colleges and even work at, yes, Microsoft... Delaware resident Anirudh Narayanan, 17, prepared all summer to compete in the Excel 2013 category, 'looking up obscure facts just in case I might need to know it during the test.' He's hoping the skills he honed will help him at Carnegie Mellon University, where he will begin studying economics in the fall. 'I make sure I do a minimum of five hours a week in Excel,' Anirudh said. 'Then for a while I'll be on YouTube watching videos about Excel.'"
John eventually won the first-place prize in the Excel category -- which was $7,000 and an Xbox.
The kid put in 3500 hours of studying so that works out to $2.00/hour. That minimum wage clerical job waiting for him is gonna look pretty juicy.
This article kills my soul.
Gee that sounds a lot like studying.
The kid put in 3500 hours of studying so that works out to $2.00/hour. That minimum wage clerical job waiting for him is gonna look pretty juicy.
Of all the Microsoft applications he could have put time into, Excel is probably the best. The skills learned there will transfer to other spreadsheets just fine, and they are really very useful tools.
As a kid I was fascinated by weird computers and operating systems. There were a lot of them around because I lived in Santa Cruz, worked for Silicon Engineering (originally Sequoia Semiconductor) and Cisco (in the office formerly known as TGV) and hung out with students of UCSC which was a fairly early internet presence... and also employees of pre-Caldera SCO. My Unix hobbyism led to my first sysadmin job, and my early website (with all kinds of fringey content on it, no less) led to my working for Tivoli (just post IBM buyout) in Austin, because the recruiter at the time saw it and then contacted me.
Aren't we supposed to celebrate nerdism here? The spreadsheet was arguably the first useful application designed for non-programmers.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The problem with spreadsheets is that there is no way to audit the results. It's very easy for a spreadsheet to become corrupted through inattentive programming or random unintended manipulation. Anything beyond a few hundred cells should be looked on with suspicion.
It's scary to think of the decisions which are being made with these flaky tools.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?