First, from an employers point of view I would say that the vast majority of CS/CIS related jobs do not care if you have a degree in accounting, physics, art history, nor even if you have a degree at all.
At our company we grill the candidate on the technical subjects they will be dealing with and try to evaluate whether their personality fits in with our team. If they know their stuff, and they have a good personality, they get hired, period. If they really know their stuff, then we don't even look at personality that much (assuming they aren't such a bad fit personality wise that we wouldn't be able to work with them).
We don't even look at whether they have a degree, how long their work experience is, etc. etc. We also evaluate them and make their salary offer based solely on their technical knowledge, not their current position or years of experience, etc. As a specific example, we hired someone who had spent the last couple years as a pastry chef in France to do EJB programming, because he proved in the interviews that he could.
Sure this won't be the case everywhere, but it's fairly typical and the bottom line is that degrees in general tend to show only that you can stick with something and follow through till the end, rather than that you are an expert or even competent in any one subject.
As an aside on the subject -- I dropped out of college after 2 years. I now drive a 2000 benz with the license plate "DROPOUT". I saw a route to big bucks that I could take without "wasting my time" in college. Looking back on it, I think the only reason I was wasting my time is because I was working on a CS degree and I already knew most of what was being taught to me.
If I had it to do all over again I would have either taken a subject more interesting to me, or perhaps even gone for a general studies degree and taken a wide variety of classes from English to History to Theatre etc to try to broaden my own background and general knowledge... or I would've gone for a degree that would really be useful in proving I know something -- for example a business degree.
It only takes me a few minutes of talking to someone that understands computers to make it clear to them that I really know what I'm talking about on the subject of computers, however no matter how well I can expound on quantitative analysis theories, no one is going to take me seriously as an applicant for an MBA type of position unless I have an MBA. It's also a lot harder to pick up the fine points of accounting principals or market analysis at home in your basement when you're a teenager, whereas it's pretty easy to pick up the fine points of UNIX in the same situation.
One problem with this is that I never would've expected that I would care about any business subjects because I was always convinced I was going to be a full time computer nerd no matter what. While I never would have suspected it, the truth is that at every job I have I get progressively more involved with how my group, or department, or perhaps the whole company is utilizing technology in a business context -- are we marketing it well, are our development practices efficient, are we pricing it right, are we missing opportunities to monetize it, etc.
I never thought I would be interested in the business side of things because I always thought it was dry and boring stuff, but especially when you find yourself in a position where you have a substantial stock package and your net worth is drastically affected by how well the whole company is doing you start thinking about the bigger picture and getting more involved. And when you get more involved and you have more responsibilty and ability to affect change you start wishing you had more background in business so you could be more effective.
On the other hand, who knows, perhaps you know for sure you hate business and would never be interested in it. My point is still that you should either take classes you are interested in (to broaden your own knowledge -- it'll be easier anyway if it's a subject you are interested in) or in a subject you think will help you later on. A business degree just happens to be the best example I can think of where college is the only (or at least best) chance to attain the knowledge.
As a secondary aside, I always end up in debates with my roommate who has a CS degree with a minor in math about how useful college is. The general essence of his arguments never boils down to anything about field-related knowledge that he gained about CS or Math, but rather that he things he is a much more well rounded person for having gone to school and had the experiences he has had. Living in the dorms. Moving off campus. Spring break. Yadda yadda yadda. Despite the fact that I dropped out, and that I argue with him about it, I tend to agree. I know a lot of people who either never went to school or dropped out early that just don't really seem to have such a good grasp on life. They don't have the confidence, the social skills and so on that seem to come easily to even the bluntest of the college grads I know. Of course I like to think their are exceptions, like myself:), to every rule.
And last but not least, the one really important thing is just to get through college now while you're young because no matter what you tell yourself if you don't do it now you're not going to finish it up later. The only people that ever bother going back to school later are the ones that are already retired or independantly wealthy and are just doing it because it's interesting to them.
Wow. I didn't realize I had such a lengthy opinion on the subject. Anyway, I'm sure I could continue at great length about this subject or all sorts of other issues that are tangential to this subject (such as the "do whatever makes you happy RIGHT NOW (i.e. drop out and get a job like I did) versus investing time now for the future type of stuff) so feel free to e-mail me.
I don't think that having a domain name for this is useful. Bluetooth and other technologies will certainly evolve protocols for tackling all of these examples and more, and they probably won't have anything to do with domain names.
First, on porn, at our site (2wrongs) which, as I mentioned above, provides full text search with rankings based on bookmarks, we get a lot of porn links. People that enjoy pornography tend to be very quick to bookmark a site when they find a good one that is 1) free and 2) actually has high quality and/or interesting content. As a result, our "mature" vertical search finds some of what is probably the best (free) pornography out there.
Next, on the bias towards default bookmarks, any one that bases anything on the frequency of the occurence of URLs in bookmarks probably does as we do and filter out the default bookmarks so it's a non-issue.
If you get to the emergency room quickly they might still be able to get that huge pole out of your ass. Lighten up, who gives a damn about spelling? I'm not writing a book, for Christ's sake.
First Union has an online banking application that is entirely web based which lets me access all of my accounts (from checking to home equity line of credit) and has always been very reliable and worked on any browser with 128-bit encryption. It lets me write checks and do funds transfers online which is 99% of what I want to do. I've been very happy with it so far.
Tim O'Reilly stood up at the meeting and said exactly the same thing, something along the lines of 'Does anyone else find it ironic that Intel is trying to handle the formation of standards for a highly decentralized technology in such a centralized manner'... (sorry if I didn't get the quote quick right, but that's the jist of it)
You've also hit on a key issue with P2P computing -- defining just exactly what is and what is not "P2P". A large portion of what people are trying to bill as P2P is just distributed computing rewarmed...
I think one of the final results of the P2P rush may be that people realize that most of the "new P2P" ideas are just old DCE ideas, and that very few are actually distinctly P2P. I don't know if P2P specific apps will be overwhelmingly useful or interesting enough to create a huge market, but if nothing else, the P2P craze will create a resurgence of interest in Distributed Computing apps.
We (2wrongs.com) have paid Linux and Java internships year-round and we are also looking for recent graduates and/or seasoned veterans in Linux (or other UNIX) or Java. We're an all Linux/Java shop doing some great bleeding edge work pushing the envelope of both. We're located in Arlington, VA. Write to jobs@2wrongs.com if you are interested... mention you saw the post on slashdot for expedited service.
1. If you have your system configured so that all of the ram can be taken up by the RAM disks, that's just silly.
2. More importantly, if your machine crashes when it runs out of RAM, you must be running a horrible operating system. Are you sure you're not thinking of Windows, not UNIX?
Our search engine at http://www.2wrongs.com/ does exactly what you suggest - we drop at cookie on the users machine in order to track their searching habits and refine the results we provide based on the data accumulated in the users' profile.
Of course the search works even if you deny the cookie, it just doesn't work as well. If you are willing to upload your bookmarks as part of the registration process, we also analyze them and use them reinforce the user profile we use to custom tailor the results to you.
-
John
P.S. in reference to the idea of using regexs to search the internet -- the databases are many orders of magnitude too large for that, but it might be interesting to develop a mechanism to apply a regex to a specific page or set of pages in a result set once it's been narrowed down.
I can't imagine why you couldn't make a heatsink that would fit in a normal case but still be able to manage all the heatsinkery necessary. Of course it might not fit in some of the SMP cases where the CPUs are situated closely together, but it should be doable for most common cases.
Mostly I just wanted to use the word 'heatsinkery'.
There are a lot of seperate price factors besides up-front and bandwidth charges. What does it cost to get remote hands to do work in your cage? Do you have to pay for power? How do the bandwidth charges scale when you need to expand? What about how the bandwidth charages are calculated... are they based on average traffic, do they drop the 3 minutes of highest burst, etc. Speaking of which, what about burstable pricing, etc.
I've been employed in technology for 6 years now and my experience has been pretty simple, straight-forward and not very surprising.
To sum it up, I would say that in order to be employable in the technology industry you simply need to understand and master two things -- a relevant technology, and the art of getting a job.
The reason for the first is obvious -- if you don't have skills in a relevant technology, you won't last in a technological job very long. The only real corollary to this is that if you happen to have started out, or landed in, a lasting technology (UNIX, Databases, etc) then you're probably set for a long time. If on the other hand you wound up as a DOS tech or a Matlab specialist or something, sooner or later you will have to either switch to the hot technology of the day like VBScript or ActiveX or DHTML or whatever, or you'll have to move to one of the more stable long lasting specialties (UNIX/DBA/etc).
The second part may sound somewhat redundant ("in order to get a job, you have to know how to get a job") but what I mean is that you have to know how to interview well, you have to know how to network, make friends all over, keep on top of the goings on in the HR industry and figure out if you're getting a great deal or a bad one and figure out when to jump ship and when to stay. All of these choices are subjective, and it is technically possible to keep your career alive through luck and/or brute force interviewing etc, but learning how to play the game will make it a lot easier.
Right now it seems like people in the tech industry have it easier than in a lot of other fields. There may be some places that require degrees, some places where gender-bias is still rampant, etc. etc. but in general most of those typical discrimination problems either don't exist in the tech world or at least aren't as bad.
It seems to me that the biggest threat to the status quo of the tech community is that there are a lot of really bright CS graduates entering the job market. I think this probably means that a lot of the idiots that we all know that don't know dick about technology but still manage to pull down $70-$100k as a sys admin or a DBA are going to wind up getting bumped out in favor of the leaner meaner generation that's coming up the pike. I think they'll still be able to survive, but it wont be as easy for them to command the ridiculous salaries they do now.
If you have half a brain you should be able to stay gainfully employeed in technology for the next century or so.
I did some programming with logo and basic in elementary school, and early in high school I got into UNIX and VMS on x.25 because I had pretty much made the most of what I had at home, but the first thing that got me *REALLY* into programming was when I was in high school and on lots of acid and I realized that I could make some wicked trippy programs in Turbo Pascal on DOS...
I think maybe that's the trick, get your kid dosed early.
(The run on sentance above was entierly my fault and should not be blamed on drug use).
Would I like to see something like Napster make it easier for me to make a living? Yes. But I'd like them to do it by *ASKING MY PERMISSION* before letting people distribute my work.
Napster doesn't distribute anything. They simply provide software which allows users to distribute files directly to each other. What you really mean is "it would be nice if the users asked permission before trading my music."
Good luck. As was pointed out in the interview, Napster is a drastically different paradigm (largely because of the drastically different scale) than taping your friends Iron Maiden albumns, but the individuals doing it still view it the same basic way, they're not going to ask permission.
People keep trying to make different variations on the point 'artists could use napster as a tool to get people acquainted with their music and then people would by more'.
While this is true, if the artists do not willingly take that step and make their music available on Napster, and instead someone else posts a pirated copy of a copyrighted song, then that's illegal plain and simple. Who cares what you think the artists SHOULD do, it's still illegal until they do it.
On the other hand, people are complaining that Napster is this big haven for pirated MP3s. Guess what, so is the internet. You can shut down Napster and every tool like it and guess what, all the MP3 piracy will not stop... it'll just be on Usenet or FTP or web sites instead of Napster.
Napster is just a tool like an FTP client or a Web browser. The whole idea behind Napster is that it's a tool that users can do what they wish with, and users are connecting directly to other users to do transfers. Why don't people stop pointing their fingers at Napster and start pointing them at the individuals? Or better yet, stop wasting your time pointing fingers at all, and instead realize that the exchange of pirated MP3s over the internet is no more serious than people taping their CDs (or burning them) and giving them to friends.
Under 5k web pages... that load slowly...
on
Hump Day Quickies
·
· Score: 4
I guess the fact that the under 5k HTML site is getting slashdotted and running dog ass slow just goes to show that HTML size is not the only thing that makes a site slow.
If I played this game, I'd like to see a Vampire plug-in. It could be modelled after Buffy and have cute slayers and anti-slayers running around in tiny leather outfits...
Slashdot Mirror
First, from an employers point of view I would say that the vast majority of CS/CIS related jobs do not care if you have a degree in accounting, physics, art history, nor even if you have a degree at all.
:), to every rule.
At our company we grill the candidate on the technical subjects they will be dealing with and try to evaluate whether their personality fits in with our team. If they know their stuff, and they have a good personality, they get hired, period. If they really know their stuff, then we don't even look at personality that much (assuming they aren't such a bad fit personality wise that we wouldn't be able to work with them).
We don't even look at whether they have a degree, how long their work experience is, etc. etc. We also evaluate them and make their salary offer based solely on their technical knowledge, not their current position or years of experience, etc. As a specific example, we hired someone who had spent the last couple years as a pastry chef in France to do EJB programming, because he proved in the interviews that he could.
Sure this won't be the case everywhere, but it's fairly typical and the bottom line is that degrees in general tend to show only that you can stick with something and follow through till the end, rather than that you are an expert or even competent in any one subject.
As an aside on the subject -- I dropped out of college after 2 years. I now drive a 2000 benz with the license plate "DROPOUT". I saw a route to big bucks that I could take without "wasting my time" in college. Looking back on it, I think the only reason I was wasting my time is because I was working on a CS degree and I already knew most of what was being taught to me.
If I had it to do all over again I would have either taken a subject more interesting to me, or perhaps even gone for a general studies degree and taken a wide variety of classes from English to History to Theatre etc to try to broaden my own background and general knowledge... or I would've gone for a degree that would really be useful in proving I know something -- for example a business degree.
It only takes me a few minutes of talking to someone that understands computers to make it clear to them that I really know what I'm talking about on the subject of computers, however no matter how well I can expound on quantitative analysis theories, no one is going to take me seriously as an applicant for an MBA type of position unless I have an MBA. It's also a lot harder to pick up the fine points of accounting principals or market analysis at home in your basement when you're a teenager, whereas it's pretty easy to pick up the fine points of UNIX in the same situation.
One problem with this is that I never would've expected that I would care about any business subjects because I was always convinced I was going to be a full time computer nerd no matter what. While I never would have suspected it, the truth is that at every job I have I get progressively more involved with how my group, or department, or perhaps the whole company is utilizing technology in a business context -- are we marketing it well, are our development practices efficient, are we pricing it right, are we missing opportunities to monetize it, etc.
I never thought I would be interested in the business side of things because I always thought it was dry and boring stuff, but especially when you find yourself in a position where you have a substantial stock package and your net worth is drastically affected by how well the whole company is doing you start thinking about the bigger picture and getting more involved. And when you get more involved and you have more responsibilty and ability to affect change you start wishing you had more background in business so you could be more effective.
On the other hand, who knows, perhaps you know for sure you hate business and would never be interested in it. My point is still that you should either take classes you are interested in (to broaden your own knowledge -- it'll be easier anyway if it's a subject you are interested in) or in a subject you think will help you later on. A business degree just happens to be the best example I can think of where college is the only (or at least best) chance to attain the knowledge.
As a secondary aside, I always end up in debates with my roommate who has a CS degree with a minor in math about how useful college is. The general essence of his arguments never boils down to anything about field-related knowledge that he gained about CS or Math, but rather that he things he is a much more well rounded person for having gone to school and had the experiences he has had. Living in the dorms. Moving off campus. Spring break. Yadda yadda yadda. Despite the fact that I dropped out, and that I argue with him about it, I tend to agree. I know a lot of people who either never went to school or dropped out early that just don't really seem to have such a good grasp on life. They don't have the confidence, the social skills and so on that seem to come easily to even the bluntest of the college grads I know. Of course I like to think their are exceptions, like myself
And last but not least, the one really important thing is just to get through college now while you're young because no matter what you tell yourself if you don't do it now you're not going to finish it up later. The only people that ever bother going back to school later are the ones that are already retired or independantly wealthy and are just doing it because it's interesting to them.
Wow. I didn't realize I had such a lengthy opinion on the subject. Anyway, I'm sure I could continue at great length about this subject or all sorts of other issues that are tangential to this subject (such as the "do whatever makes you happy RIGHT NOW (i.e. drop out and get a job like I did) versus investing time now for the future type of stuff) so feel free to e-mail me.
Why don't you suggest some good movies to check out then?
I don't think that having a domain name for this is useful. Bluetooth and other technologies will certainly evolve protocols for tackling all of these examples and more, and they probably won't have anything to do with domain names.
actually, one doesn't.
Next, on the bias towards default bookmarks, any one that bases anything on the frequency of the occurence of URLs in bookmarks probably does as we do and filter out the default bookmarks so it's a non-issue.
FWIW, we are entirely Linux based too.
If you get to the emergency room quickly they might still be able to get that huge pole out of your ass. Lighten up, who gives a damn about spelling? I'm not writing a book, for Christ's sake.
First Union has an online banking application that is entirely web based which lets me access all of my accounts (from checking to home equity line of credit) and has always been very reliable and worked on any browser with 128-bit encryption. It lets me write checks and do funds transfers online which is 99% of what I want to do. I've been very happy with it so far.
Tim O'Reilly stood up at the meeting and said exactly the same thing, something along the lines of 'Does anyone else find it ironic that Intel is trying to handle the formation of standards for a highly decentralized technology in such a centralized manner'... (sorry if I didn't get the quote quick right, but that's the jist of it)
You've also hit on a key issue with P2P computing -- defining just exactly what is and what is not "P2P". A large portion of what people are trying to bill as P2P is just distributed computing rewarmed...
I think one of the final results of the P2P rush may be that people realize that most of the "new P2P" ideas are just old DCE ideas, and that very few are actually distinctly P2P. I don't know if P2P specific apps will be overwhelmingly useful or interesting enough to create a huge market, but if nothing else, the P2P craze will create a resurgence of interest in Distributed Computing apps.
We (2wrongs.com) have paid Linux and Java internships year-round and we are also looking for recent graduates and/or seasoned veterans in Linux (or other UNIX) or Java. We're an all Linux/Java shop doing some great bleeding edge work pushing the envelope of both. We're located in Arlington, VA. Write to jobs@2wrongs.com if you are interested... mention you saw the post on slashdot for expedited service.
1. If you have your system configured so that all of the ram can be taken up by the RAM disks, that's just silly.
2. More importantly, if your machine crashes when it runs out of RAM, you must be running a horrible operating system. Are you sure you're not thinking of Windows, not UNIX?
Of course the search works even if you deny the cookie, it just doesn't work as well. If you are willing to upload your bookmarks as part of the registration process, we also analyze them and use them reinforce the user profile we use to custom tailor the results to you.
-
John
P.S. in reference to the idea of using regexs to search the internet -- the databases are many orders of magnitude too large for that, but it might be interesting to develop a mechanism to apply a regex to a specific page or set of pages in a result set once it's been narrowed down.
Mostly I just wanted to use the word 'heatsinkery'.
Well, it affects Microsoft too, so that would be pretty hypocritical.
There are a lot of seperate price factors besides up-front and bandwidth charges. What does it cost to get remote hands to do work in your cage? Do you have to pay for power? How do the bandwidth charges scale when you need to expand? What about how the bandwidth charages are calculated... are they based on average traffic, do they drop the 3 minutes of highest burst, etc. Speaking of which, what about burstable pricing, etc.
...would be Lensman. I don't know if it's a "traditional" Anime, but it's definately a good movie.
To sum it up, I would say that in order to be employable in the technology industry you simply need to understand and master two things -- a relevant technology, and the art of getting a job.
The reason for the first is obvious -- if you don't have skills in a relevant technology, you won't last in a technological job very long. The only real corollary to this is that if you happen to have started out, or landed in, a lasting technology (UNIX, Databases, etc) then you're probably set for a long time. If on the other hand you wound up as a DOS tech or a Matlab specialist or something, sooner or later you will have to either switch to the hot technology of the day like VBScript or ActiveX or DHTML or whatever, or you'll have to move to one of the more stable long lasting specialties (UNIX/DBA/etc).
The second part may sound somewhat redundant ("in order to get a job, you have to know how to get a job") but what I mean is that you have to know how to interview well, you have to know how to network, make friends all over, keep on top of the goings on in the HR industry and figure out if you're getting a great deal or a bad one and figure out when to jump ship and when to stay. All of these choices are subjective, and it is technically possible to keep your career alive through luck and/or brute force interviewing etc, but learning how to play the game will make it a lot easier.
Right now it seems like people in the tech industry have it easier than in a lot of other fields. There may be some places that require degrees, some places where gender-bias is still rampant, etc. etc. but in general most of those typical discrimination problems either don't exist in the tech world or at least aren't as bad.
It seems to me that the biggest threat to the status quo of the tech community is that there are a lot of really bright CS graduates entering the job market. I think this probably means that a lot of the idiots that we all know that don't know dick about technology but still manage to pull down $70-$100k as a sys admin or a DBA are going to wind up getting bumped out in favor of the leaner meaner generation that's coming up the pike. I think they'll still be able to survive, but it wont be as easy for them to command the ridiculous salaries they do now.
If you have half a brain you should be able to stay gainfully employeed in technology for the next century or so.
I think maybe that's the trick, get your kid dosed early.
(The run on sentance above was entierly my fault and should not be blamed on drug use).
Napster doesn't distribute anything. They simply provide software which allows users to distribute files directly to each other. What you really mean is "it would be nice if the users asked permission before trading my music."
Good luck. As was pointed out in the interview, Napster is a drastically different paradigm (largely because of the drastically different scale) than taping your friends Iron Maiden albumns, but the individuals doing it still view it the same basic way, they're not going to ask permission.
...is to make a 7 digit salary for doing what I would be doing anyway.
People keep trying to make different variations on the point 'artists could use napster as a tool to get people acquainted with their music and then people would by more'.
While this is true, if the artists do not willingly take that step and make their music available on Napster, and instead someone else posts a pirated copy of a copyrighted song, then that's illegal plain and simple. Who cares what you think the artists SHOULD do, it's still illegal until they do it.
On the other hand, people are complaining that Napster is this big haven for pirated MP3s. Guess what, so is the internet. You can shut down Napster and every tool like it and guess what, all the MP3 piracy will not stop... it'll just be on Usenet or FTP or web sites instead of Napster.
Napster is just a tool like an FTP client or a Web browser. The whole idea behind Napster is that it's a tool that users can do what they wish with, and users are connecting directly to other users to do transfers. Why don't people stop pointing their fingers at Napster and start pointing them at the individuals? Or better yet, stop wasting your time pointing fingers at all, and instead realize that the exchange of pirated MP3s over the internet is no more serious than people taping their CDs (or burning them) and giving them to friends.
I guess the fact that the under 5k HTML site is getting slashdotted and running dog ass slow just goes to show that HTML size is not the only thing that makes a site slow.
I would agree with most of your comment except that I would say that OSS suffers from all three problems, not just the first two.
If I played this game, I'd like to see a Vampire plug-in. It could be modelled after Buffy and have cute slayers and anti-slayers running around in tiny leather outfits...
Did they bury him in a coffin that was half the size of a normal coffin?