At my university, the real weed-out for EEs was freshman Intro to Programming. Went from packed lecture hall to 1/3 full lecture hall in a few weeks. At the time, the consensus among my friends ranged from "Prof. SoAndSo is a terrible teacher" to "why do we need to learn Java if we want to design ICs?". Now, some years later, I have had the good fortune of working with several people who hold bachelor's degrees in engineering and can't quite code to save their lives, and I think to myself: weeding out people from engineering programs is not that bad of an idea.
I know you guys up the street do things in 3 trimesters per academic year, but it's still a 4 year degree (not counting coop), right? So don't they just trim the classes around that schedule, or do they actually try to pack in 150% of the curriculum you'd see in a place that does semesters?
Here's the trick. If another IT bubble were to start today, and CS enrollment in the country tripled, the value of the degree would drop because suddenly for every hard-core computer nerd with a BS in CS, there would be two n00bz who can't tell a semicolon from their own colon but decided to go the CS route because it's where the bubble is. At the same time, the number of CS teaching faculty would have to expand to keep up with enrollment, which would drive up the cost of the degree. At least that's what my CS professor friend tells me.
So what's the moral? Right now, we're coming off the finance bubble, where the ideal graduate had a degree either in business or communications, or economics, or english, or something social. The bubble really burst about 2-3 years ago, so all the folks who went in before it burst who came in with an expectation that a fluff degree and the right social connections were all that was required (and who consequently glutted the B-schools and the aforementioned other departments with fad-chasing n00bz) are coming out now with little do show for their time.
It's the Cargo Cult creeping into Western civilization. There's this magic box, and if you learn the correct incantations and click in the right spots, a miracle happens and the knowledge of the world (that is, $TEEN_CELEBRITY photos/gossip) are at your fingertips. How does the magic happen? Well, you just have to recite the incantation, nevermind the damn thing's unplugged.
By that reasoning, the solution would be to weed out the dumb-dumbs earlier than trade school/college. The problem is that to do that, having vs not having a high school diploma should be a meaningful distinction. But hell, I went to a reasonably good (suburban) public high school and even they let everyone graduate eventually.
Same here. I was programming TI 83's in high school and dabbling in Javascript, but the first honest-to-God programming experience in a real programming language I had was first semester Intro to Programming in my EE curriculum. I can guess that I would have had more unpleasant surprises had I not gotten my toes wet.
I'll agree that good thinking is a must, but I'd still prefer my coders to have studied something related to software, science, engineering, or mathematics in undergrad. I wouldn't trust a 22 year old fresh out of school to have taught himself the finer points of not making spaghetti code, no matter how innately bright he may be if most of his mental energy was used up trying to become a Renaissance man instead of an engineer.
1. This was in comparison to Soviet Russia, where my grandfather who worked for 50 years as an engineer only to retire to the simple joys of waking up at 5AM to stand in the bread line.
2. I remember seeing that on the news from the other side. If memory serves, it was built as a nice sit-down restaurant or buffet, not like McDonald's here in the US.
I know! I know! Y2K, I mean, global warming will cause airplanes to fall from the sky, pacemakers to fail, and toasters to become sentient and kill us all!!!1!
In defense of stump the candidate questions, they can (if used correctly) discriminate against people whose opinion of their skill set is higher than their actual ability to execute.
Once, I interviewed a person for a hardware/software interfacing job who presented himself as a hardware guru who was the only sane man on his previous contract position. I drew a circuit diagram for him and asked him to identify its function, and it stumped him. I didn't feel too bad about doing that.
Will this magic power plant at the side of the ocean require new electrodes/new electrodes every few hours because of pitting and erosion, just like normal batteries?
Video processing can (depending on what you're doing) be very parallel. So can some kinds of data compression. The real question is gonna be in terms of power. Are 64 mostly-idle cores going to consume less power than one or two fully loaded cores multiplexing those same tasks.
Re: Gitmo. Too many people conflate military operations intended to collect information from uncooperative agents for the purpose of wider military objectives with criminal prosecution intended to prove guilt of one (1) person or a small number of people. If you believe there is a valid military objective to be obtained here, then you shouldn't talk about Gitmo. If you don't believe intelligence gathering of the kind that takes place at Gitmo is a valid military objective, then I don't want to hear the rest of your reasoning because from my perspective, you've crossed the line into either dangerous naivete, illogical pacifism, outright malevolence, or $INSULT, and thus "incoherent rant".
Re: TSA. 9/11 exposed a weak spot. Not THE weakspot, *a* weakspot. Do we ignore it and hope no one tries to take advantage of it? Sure, no one's going to get away with hijackings any more, but at least two or three nutjobs tried to blow up a plane in flight in the last decade. That exposes another weakspot. What do you do about it? Shrugging your shoulders and complaining counts as an incoherent rant.
Please state your country and city of residence, your age, whether you have lived in the US for an extended period of time if you are not American, and how exactly you arrive your assessment that those words have no meaning here. And please hold all incoherent rants about the TSA, Gitmo, and black helicopters to yourself.
This is the difference between engineering and masturbation. Engineering is about building something that will last with minimal headaches from you or 3rd party developers. Masturbation is changing working code because your attention span is measured in jiffies and if you break other people's code, who cares because they should be thanking you for your brilliance. That's the Microsoft approach. We shouldn't tolerate that kind of thinking in OSS.
No, it would be better to live in a representative democracy with checks, balances and a centuries-long tradition of government accountability, the rule of law, freedom of the press, and the accumulated cultural wisdom of all citizens which allows them to know when to publish a leaked document to expose corruption and when to sit on it. Oh wait, that's what we've got.
I understand that from much of Europe and Asia, "democracy" "freedom" and "accountability" are just words, but here in America, we've had it going in more or less working order for several hundred years, and when we grumble about idiots like Assange and Manning making trouble, we generally tend to know what we're talking about.
Amen. And not just in grad school. Even deep down in the bowels of the military industrial complex, fancy software is only ever as fancy as it needs to be, and the bug/feature line is sometimes just as blurry as it is at 11:58pm before the publication submission deadline.
Moral science isn't about publishing (peer-reviewed) papers for all to see. Moral science is about understanding the world For the Betterment of Mankind. That requires follow-through, and follow-through requires large amounts of money to turn a publication into a product*. The only way to attract that kind of money is either 1) get the Guv'mint decree that it be directed toward your pet project, or 2) entice Big Bigness and the Richest One Percent to fund it by promising them a cut of the revenue in a legally binding contract, enforceable in the legal framework set up by the same Guv'mint. Tell me why (2) is worse than (1), and show me an example of where the Public Option has succeeded on the same scale as the private option?
No. The solution is to give up the hallowed Truth that the world ends outside the door of the Ivory Tower, and to go get a real job at a drug company, and aerospace firm, a Defense lab, or any other number of tech jobs in the Dreaded Private Sector. Trained scientists are rare. In theory, they can do math without a panic attack, can form deductions and hypotheses from observations, and ought to be reasonably skilled at communicating their thoughts to other people. Individuals with this combination of skills are in great demand, and not just on Wall Street. So if you're an underappreciated, underpaid scientist working long hours with no job security, consider giving Academia the same finger they give you, and GET A REAL JOB.
My unscientific sample of two Chinese grad students at an elite engineering school on the east coast, that will remain nameless to protect the guilty, is that they' come in three types.
Either mentally on vacation because their families have money and a PhD is just another box to check off, like sailing lessons and polo used to be for the Old Boys.
Or if they don't come from money, they work very hard, but since Chinese culture is not particularly meritocratic, they work very hard to make it look like they're making progress, not to actually make progress. Sometimes I think they can't even tell the difference.
There's a third type, that works hard and does good work, but in my unscientific sampling, Chinese people of that variety are usually Americans who got their work ethic growing up in the States.
My estimation is that the dumb work, the kind that gets replaced by robots over here, is where the Chinese will wipe the floor with us for years and decades to come, but the engineering work, the design work, the kind that requires clear thinking and intellectual honesty (as opposed to putting melamine in baby formula so that it fools the chemical tests for nutrition content), that kind of work can't come out of a culture where it's more important to pad quarterly earnings and impress the Party bosses. That's what's eating away at America, and they've got a ton of it over there, and it'll take maybe a hundred years for their culture to catch up to ours.
Slashdot Mirror
At my university, the real weed-out for EEs was freshman Intro to Programming. Went from packed lecture hall to 1/3 full lecture hall in a few weeks. At the time, the consensus among my friends ranged from "Prof. SoAndSo is a terrible teacher" to "why do we need to learn Java if we want to design ICs?". Now, some years later, I have had the good fortune of working with several people who hold bachelor's degrees in engineering and can't quite code to save their lives, and I think to myself: weeding out people from engineering programs is not that bad of an idea.
I know you guys up the street do things in 3 trimesters per academic year, but it's still a 4 year degree (not counting coop), right? So don't they just trim the classes around that schedule, or do they actually try to pack in 150% of the curriculum you'd see in a place that does semesters?
Here's the trick. If another IT bubble were to start today, and CS enrollment in the country tripled, the value of the degree would drop because suddenly for every hard-core computer nerd with a BS in CS, there would be two n00bz who can't tell a semicolon from their own colon but decided to go the CS route because it's where the bubble is. At the same time, the number of CS teaching faculty would have to expand to keep up with enrollment, which would drive up the cost of the degree. At least that's what my CS professor friend tells me.
So what's the moral? Right now, we're coming off the finance bubble, where the ideal graduate had a degree either in business or communications, or economics, or english, or something social. The bubble really burst about 2-3 years ago, so all the folks who went in before it burst who came in with an expectation that a fluff degree and the right social connections were all that was required (and who consequently glutted the B-schools and the aforementioned other departments with fad-chasing n00bz) are coming out now with little do show for their time.
It's the Cargo Cult creeping into Western civilization. There's this magic box, and if you learn the correct incantations and click in the right spots, a miracle happens and the knowledge of the world (that is, $TEEN_CELEBRITY photos/gossip) are at your fingertips. How does the magic happen? Well, you just have to recite the incantation, nevermind the damn thing's unplugged.
By that reasoning, the solution would be to weed out the dumb-dumbs earlier than trade school/college. The problem is that to do that, having vs not having a high school diploma should be a meaningful distinction. But hell, I went to a reasonably good (suburban) public high school and even they let everyone graduate eventually.
Same here. I was programming TI 83's in high school and dabbling in Javascript, but the first honest-to-God programming experience in a real programming language I had was first semester Intro to Programming in my EE curriculum. I can guess that I would have had more unpleasant surprises had I not gotten my toes wet.
I'll agree that good thinking is a must, but I'd still prefer my coders to have studied something related to software, science, engineering, or mathematics in undergrad. I wouldn't trust a 22 year old fresh out of school to have taught himself the finer points of not making spaghetti code, no matter how innately bright he may be if most of his mental energy was used up trying to become a Renaissance man instead of an engineer.
1. This was in comparison to Soviet Russia, where my grandfather who worked for 50 years as an engineer only to retire to the simple joys of waking up at 5AM to stand in the bread line.
2. I remember seeing that on the news from the other side. If memory serves, it was built as a nice sit-down restaurant or buffet, not like McDonald's here in the US.
My guess is all your documents are encrypted with ExecuSpeak already. So you're good.
Didn't they catch the Air Force uplinking Predator/Global Hawk video in the clear a few years back?
I know! I know! Y2K, I mean, global warming will cause airplanes to fall from the sky, pacemakers to fail, and toasters to become sentient and kill us all!!!1!
In defense of stump the candidate questions, they can (if used correctly) discriminate against people whose opinion of their skill set is higher than their actual ability to execute.
Once, I interviewed a person for a hardware/software interfacing job who presented himself as a hardware guru who was the only sane man on his previous contract position. I drew a circuit diagram for him and asked him to identify its function, and it stumped him. I didn't feel too bad about doing that.
If you have to write any embedded assembly, thinking in RPN is more conventional than not.
Will this magic power plant at the side of the ocean require new electrodes/new electrodes every few hours because of pitting and erosion, just like normal batteries?
Video processing can (depending on what you're doing) be very parallel. So can some kinds of data compression. The real question is gonna be in terms of power. Are 64 mostly-idle cores going to consume less power than one or two fully loaded cores multiplexing those same tasks.
Re: Gitmo. Too many people conflate military operations intended to collect information from uncooperative agents for the purpose of wider military objectives with criminal prosecution intended to prove guilt of one (1) person or a small number of people. If you believe there is a valid military objective to be obtained here, then you shouldn't talk about Gitmo. If you don't believe intelligence gathering of the kind that takes place at Gitmo is a valid military objective, then I don't want to hear the rest of your reasoning because from my perspective, you've crossed the line into either dangerous naivete, illogical pacifism, outright malevolence, or $INSULT, and thus "incoherent rant".
Re: TSA. 9/11 exposed a weak spot. Not THE weakspot, *a* weakspot. Do we ignore it and hope no one tries to take advantage of it? Sure, no one's going to get away with hijackings any more, but at least two or three nutjobs tried to blow up a plane in flight in the last decade. That exposes another weakspot. What do you do about it? Shrugging your shoulders and complaining counts as an incoherent rant.
Please state your country and city of residence, your age, whether you have lived in the US for an extended period of time if you are not American, and how exactly you arrive your assessment that those words have no meaning here. And please hold all incoherent rants about the TSA, Gitmo, and black helicopters to yourself.
This is the difference between engineering and masturbation. Engineering is about building something that will last with minimal headaches from you or 3rd party developers. Masturbation is changing working code because your attention span is measured in jiffies and if you break other people's code, who cares because they should be thanking you for your brilliance. That's the Microsoft approach. We shouldn't tolerate that kind of thinking in OSS.
No, it would be better to live in a representative democracy with checks, balances and a centuries-long tradition of government accountability, the rule of law, freedom of the press, and the accumulated cultural wisdom of all citizens which allows them to know when to publish a leaked document to expose corruption and when to sit on it. Oh wait, that's what we've got.
I understand that from much of Europe and Asia, "democracy" "freedom" and "accountability" are just words, but here in America, we've had it going in more or less working order for several hundred years, and when we grumble about idiots like Assange and Manning making trouble, we generally tend to know what we're talking about.
Amen. And not just in grad school. Even deep down in the bowels of the military industrial complex, fancy software is only ever as fancy as it needs to be, and the bug/feature line is sometimes just as blurry as it is at 11:58pm before the publication submission deadline.
Moral science isn't about publishing (peer-reviewed) papers for all to see. Moral science is about understanding the world For the Betterment of Mankind. That requires follow-through, and follow-through requires large amounts of money to turn a publication into a product*. The only way to attract that kind of money is either 1) get the Guv'mint decree that it be directed toward your pet project, or 2) entice Big Bigness and the Richest One Percent to fund it by promising them a cut of the revenue in a legally binding contract, enforceable in the legal framework set up by the same Guv'mint. Tell me why (2) is worse than (1), and show me an example of where the Public Option has succeeded on the same scale as the private option?
No. The solution is to give up the hallowed Truth that the world ends outside the door of the Ivory Tower, and to go get a real job at a drug company, and aerospace firm, a Defense lab, or any other number of tech jobs in the Dreaded Private Sector. Trained scientists are rare. In theory, they can do math without a panic attack, can form deductions and hypotheses from observations, and ought to be reasonably skilled at communicating their thoughts to other people. Individuals with this combination of skills are in great demand, and not just on Wall Street. So if you're an underappreciated, underpaid scientist working long hours with no job security, consider giving Academia the same finger they give you, and GET A REAL JOB.
My unscientific sample of two Chinese grad students at an elite engineering school on the east coast, that will remain nameless to protect the guilty, is that they' come in three types.
Either mentally on vacation because their families have money and a PhD is just another box to check off, like sailing lessons and polo used to be for the Old Boys.
Or if they don't come from money, they work very hard, but since Chinese culture is not particularly meritocratic, they work very hard to make it look like they're making progress, not to actually make progress. Sometimes I think they can't even tell the difference.
There's a third type, that works hard and does good work, but in my unscientific sampling, Chinese people of that variety are usually Americans who got their work ethic growing up in the States.
My estimation is that the dumb work, the kind that gets replaced by robots over here, is where the Chinese will wipe the floor with us for years and decades to come, but the engineering work, the design work, the kind that requires clear thinking and intellectual honesty (as opposed to putting melamine in baby formula so that it fools the chemical tests for nutrition content), that kind of work can't come out of a culture where it's more important to pad quarterly earnings and impress the Party bosses. That's what's eating away at America, and they've got a ton of it over there, and it'll take maybe a hundred years for their culture to catch up to ours.
Except now the calculator is 8 inches across. Seems like a regression...
Why in my day, we had to buy our own graphing calculators — in the snow, both ways, uphill!
And we *wished* we had 64k of memory. But 8k was more than enough for anything we needed to do.