If you've got engineering skills then you normally want to go to a new engineering job. An engineer doesn't fit in well with a bank for instance. Sure, if the tech economy goes bust there then at least you can start over as an 50 year old underpaid junior employee.
Apps are those dumbed down things on smartphones. Bundle some pictures and URLs inside some XML, with zero code, and you've got an "app". Whereas Microsoft Paint was an "application"; people wrote code for it, it runs on the machine locally and not in the cloud.
Well, when Windows 8.0 was first out, I would have agreed. Microsoft was intentionally trying to kill the desktop version of Windows. They were turning a thousand dollar PC into a smartphone wannabe, because they were trying to get their own smartphone to take off. But fast forward and even Microsoft cannot deny that a Windows phone is never going to succeed, they keep sabotaging that product too. So killing the desktop can't be their plan, unless they're just so much more incompetent that we ever imagined.
Right now their money is from the business market only. The home market is tepid and are moving away from full blown PCs towards phones and tablets, or anything that can have a browser. Out of the business market, the enterprise is the real bread and butter, they're the ones that buy Microsoft products wholesale. The enterprise isn't going to give a damn about a stupid store, they don't even allow their users to install their own products. They want Office, and only Office. And yet the enterprise is starting to move away from Windows and Office in many ways; the servers are being replaced with Linux or cloud services, Macs are showing up more often in R&D, and once that door is cracked open there's going to be a lot of IT execs who start realizing they don't need to stay in bed with Microsoft. If Microsoft did have a brain they would see this and start acting a lot nicer to this market segment.
None of their "Metro" apps are worth the time it takes to open them. They're all dysfunctional, especially the ones written by Microsoft. Seriously, the browser based version of Bing is more useful than the Bing app, what does that say when Microsoft can't even be bothered to write a decent app for one of their top strategic plans to overtake Google?
You really don't have any idea that a CS graduate can program either. As for a degree, any degree, they do seem to matter a lot of advancement opportunities. There is often a sturdy ceiling that limits promotions or raises for those without a degree. It might not be fair but I have seen this happen.
And, what do the members of that scientific field think about the journal? If you're in the field then you know what's a bullshit journal and what isn't.
No, the peer reviewer's job is not to replicate the experiment. Other people will do that *after* the paper is published. The peer reviewer is to decide if the paper is suitable, adheres to rigorous principles, that the experiment was well specified so that it could be reproduced by others, suggestions for missing tables that would explain things better, and so forth.
Nobody in science is going to change their mind over a single experiment in a paper, that's what fluffy press is for, to trumpet the news "chocolate binging shows correlation to better foot health". A scientist will wait for more experiments, try the experiments, work through the math to see if it holds up, suggest ways to experiment differently, and so forth.
When I was in grad school, getting a paper in a journal was prestigious. Getting a paper in a conference proceedings not as much. That's because it the standards for the journal were very high, but there were a thousand conferences who needed to get more papers submitted. Of course, everyone knew what conferences were more prestigious than others, always the pecking order. Your career was going nowhere if you could only publish in the fluff conferences, and they certainly weren't gaining you any brownie points in your PhD committee.
What six figure starting salary? If they have to repeat the class then they're not going to be one of those getting the high paying job straight out of school.
This is not always the student's fault. I saw students in the past that were highly stressed out in intro classes because they knew they had no aptitude but it was what their parents demanded they do.
This has always happened, and will happen again. Parents push their children for the job needs of today, regardless of actual aptitude or interest. But in four years those jobs may not be as plentiful, the student may be totally uninterested in it, and so forth. When I started undergrad in early 80s, CS as the new "plastics". A couple years later the department was glutted, and the requirements to get into upper division classes were getting progressively more difficult just to weed out people. When I graduated, the economy wasn't so great and it was hard to get a job.
What you need are skills or experience that others don't have. With that CS degree, don't aim for the mass market. The more people who can do your job the easier it is to get replaced. That doesn't mean stay away from CS or programming, it means be the best you can and don't settle for average, look at other sorts of jobs at companies that aren't following the fads, and get enough skills that you can swap between programming jobs as needed and be the person considered for promotion.
So some places will be willing to hire programmers as long as they can program and have a degree in something. If they don't have the degree then everywhere is going to want to see a lot more experience on that resume and they're going to be checking with the references.
When the EE grad is a new hire, they are still doing grunt work. Everyone works their way up. So the CS person may not be doing CS as an entry level person, but they may be doing CS when they're a senior programmer, architect, manager.
I am totally dismayed by the lack of knowledge most cashiers have these days. They don't even know how to count back change properly. They're 100% dependent upon the numbers displayed on the machine. I counted out change to go with a $10 bill once, and the cashier handed back the coins to me along with additional coins as if I had only given $10.
The theoretical education pays off in the long run. You want your software designers to understand algorithms and complexity theory. You want your network designer to understand Markoff chains and queuing theory. You want the people programming on an embedded device to understand time/space tradeoffs. You want the people building the radio to understand RF, electrical engineering, etc. Those may be a minority of the jobs, but remember that the majority of the jobs are grunt level.
That has somehow strayed into being a political issue. The "honest hard working people" who don't go to school versus "evil liberal college grad elites". Seriously, people are now treating college as part of the cultural divide.
If someone wants their own small business, they very often need at least junior college and preferably more. If someone loves landscaping, do they want to actually do the design the landscaping or just use the shovel all their life while a boss orders them around? At the very very minimum, take accounting classes.
And algebra does help you understand the US budget. But that's ok, the congresscritters can hire aides who took math. I mean algebra is the basic foundation of mathematics! Sheesh, a bunch of whiners these days who want the jobs handed to them without them having to prepare and work at it. When someone complains that they're in a dead end job, ask them if they know algebra.
Knowing how a computer works was CS when I was in school. CE was too new, and also too low level. Ie, VLSI was very much a CS field, because so much of it involves routing and synthesis. But CE dealt with the various types of low level gate technology rather than the gates themselves.
Things have changed, I see people now with a straight up EE degree doing ASIC programming, and CS grads not knowing anything at all about even high level computer architecture.
Just throw a core dump at them, they'll learn eventually. Well hopefully. There are a few who scream Nooooo! when you remove all the printfs from production code because they won't know how to debug if there's a problem in the field.
Slashdot Mirror
Engineers. Silicon Valley is a lot more than programmers. And if they banks do hire programmers, they'll be at the corporate office and not in Dallas.
If you've got engineering skills then you normally want to go to a new engineering job. An engineer doesn't fit in well with a bank for instance. Sure, if the tech economy goes bust there then at least you can start over as an 50 year old underpaid junior employee.
Remember, San Francisco is not Silicon Valley, and it's not a tech hub unless you count web stuff.
Everyone in that campaign and the primaries was better than Clinton or Trump, it's not like it was a high bar to overcome.
Apps are those dumbed down things on smartphones. Bundle some pictures and URLs inside some XML, with zero code, and you've got an "app". Whereas Microsoft Paint was an "application"; people wrote code for it, it runs on the machine locally and not in the cloud.
Well, when Windows 8.0 was first out, I would have agreed. Microsoft was intentionally trying to kill the desktop version of Windows. They were turning a thousand dollar PC into a smartphone wannabe, because they were trying to get their own smartphone to take off. But fast forward and even Microsoft cannot deny that a Windows phone is never going to succeed, they keep sabotaging that product too. So killing the desktop can't be their plan, unless they're just so much more incompetent that we ever imagined.
Right now their money is from the business market only. The home market is tepid and are moving away from full blown PCs towards phones and tablets, or anything that can have a browser. Out of the business market, the enterprise is the real bread and butter, they're the ones that buy Microsoft products wholesale. The enterprise isn't going to give a damn about a stupid store, they don't even allow their users to install their own products. They want Office, and only Office. And yet the enterprise is starting to move away from Windows and Office in many ways; the servers are being replaced with Linux or cloud services, Macs are showing up more often in R&D, and once that door is cracked open there's going to be a lot of IT execs who start realizing they don't need to stay in bed with Microsoft. If Microsoft did have a brain they would see this and start acting a lot nicer to this market segment.
None of their "Metro" apps are worth the time it takes to open them. They're all dysfunctional, especially the ones written by Microsoft. Seriously, the browser based version of Bing is more useful than the Bing app, what does that say when Microsoft can't even be bothered to write a decent app for one of their top strategic plans to overtake Google?
If someone doesnt know what they're doing, they probably should not have purchased a highly overpriced Photoshop in the first place.
Yes, you need the account to get anything from the store, even if free.
You really don't have any idea that a CS graduate can program either.
As for a degree, any degree, they do seem to matter a lot of advancement opportunities. There is often a sturdy ceiling that limits promotions or raises for those without a degree. It might not be fair but I have seen this happen.
Right, but do you want to be an electrician, or the guy that designs electrical systems?
And, what do the members of that scientific field think about the journal? If you're in the field then you know what's a bullshit journal and what isn't.
No, the peer reviewer's job is not to replicate the experiment. Other people will do that *after* the paper is published. The peer reviewer is to decide if the paper is suitable, adheres to rigorous principles, that the experiment was well specified so that it could be reproduced by others, suggestions for missing tables that would explain things better, and so forth.
Nobody in science is going to change their mind over a single experiment in a paper, that's what fluffy press is for, to trumpet the news "chocolate binging shows correlation to better foot health". A scientist will wait for more experiments, try the experiments, work through the math to see if it holds up, suggest ways to experiment differently, and so forth.
Politics is fine though, feel free to use politics when arguing about science. It's all the fashion these days.
When I was in grad school, getting a paper in a journal was prestigious. Getting a paper in a conference proceedings not as much. That's because it the standards for the journal were very high, but there were a thousand conferences who needed to get more papers submitted. Of course, everyone knew what conferences were more prestigious than others, always the pecking order. Your career was going nowhere if you could only publish in the fluff conferences, and they certainly weren't gaining you any brownie points in your PhD committee.
What six figure starting salary? If they have to repeat the class then they're not going to be one of those getting the high paying job straight out of school.
This is not always the student's fault. I saw students in the past that were highly stressed out in intro classes because they knew they had no aptitude but it was what their parents demanded they do.
This has always happened, and will happen again. Parents push their children for the job needs of today, regardless of actual aptitude or interest. But in four years those jobs may not be as plentiful, the student may be totally uninterested in it, and so forth. When I started undergrad in early 80s, CS as the new "plastics". A couple years later the department was glutted, and the requirements to get into upper division classes were getting progressively more difficult just to weed out people. When I graduated, the economy wasn't so great and it was hard to get a job.
What you need are skills or experience that others don't have. With that CS degree, don't aim for the mass market. The more people who can do your job the easier it is to get replaced. That doesn't mean stay away from CS or programming, it means be the best you can and don't settle for average, look at other sorts of jobs at companies that aren't following the fads, and get enough skills that you can swap between programming jobs as needed and be the person considered for promotion.
So some places will be willing to hire programmers as long as they can program and have a degree in something. If they don't have the degree then everywhere is going to want to see a lot more experience on that resume and they're going to be checking with the references.
When the EE grad is a new hire, they are still doing grunt work. Everyone works their way up. So the CS person may not be doing CS as an entry level person, but they may be doing CS when they're a senior programmer, architect, manager.
I am totally dismayed by the lack of knowledge most cashiers have these days. They don't even know how to count back change properly. They're 100% dependent upon the numbers displayed on the machine. I counted out change to go with a $10 bill once, and the cashier handed back the coins to me along with additional coins as if I had only given $10.
The theoretical education pays off in the long run. You want your software designers to understand algorithms and complexity theory. You want your network designer to understand Markoff chains and queuing theory. You want the people programming on an embedded device to understand time/space tradeoffs. You want the people building the radio to understand RF, electrical engineering, etc. Those may be a minority of the jobs, but remember that the majority of the jobs are grunt level.
That has somehow strayed into being a political issue. The "honest hard working people" who don't go to school versus "evil liberal college grad elites". Seriously, people are now treating college as part of the cultural divide.
If someone wants their own small business, they very often need at least junior college and preferably more. If someone loves landscaping, do they want to actually do the design the landscaping or just use the shovel all their life while a boss orders them around? At the very very minimum, take accounting classes.
And algebra does help you understand the US budget. But that's ok, the congresscritters can hire aides who took math. I mean algebra is the basic foundation of mathematics! Sheesh, a bunch of whiners these days who want the jobs handed to them without them having to prepare and work at it. When someone complains that they're in a dead end job, ask them if they know algebra.
Knowing how a computer works was CS when I was in school. CE was too new, and also too low level. Ie, VLSI was very much a CS field, because so much of it involves routing and synthesis. But CE dealt with the various types of low level gate technology rather than the gates themselves.
Things have changed, I see people now with a straight up EE degree doing ASIC programming, and CS grads not knowing anything at all about even high level computer architecture.
Just throw a core dump at them, they'll learn eventually. Well hopefully. There are a few who scream Nooooo! when you remove all the printfs from production code because they won't know how to debug if there's a problem in the field.