big houses equal low density, and that means longer commutes.
Well ignoring the fact that no-one has to do anything, this doesn't matter. You don't seem to have noticed that more and more businesses are moving out of cities and into suburban and rural areas because the owners themselves don't like long commutes and move closer to where they live. Surburbs also often have lower taxes. I've had three full time jobs since graduation over 15 years ago and none of them has been in a large city. For my current job, before I moved, I was commuting from my home in the city to an industrial park in a semi-rural area and enjoyed an almost traffic-free commute as most traffic goes the other direction (now that we moved, my commute's even easier!).
In any event, people do what's in their own self-interest, so I doubt you'll see many Americans choosing smaller, denser housing when land is so plentiful here. If anything, the trend seems to be going the other way here in the Midwest.
Wow... for a second I was thinking your story was impossible.
It made me think, too, but for a different reason. If it was below freezing, it shouldn't matter that the can exploded, the contents are still frozen.
Maybe I should test it. The little weather applet on the Gnome toolbar tells me the temperature outside is a balmy -10F (it warmed up from -25F this morning:-)
What do you mean by independent path? Are you trying to avoid a degree, or just looking for a non traditional path to a degree? Go for the degree unless you just want to be another IT cubicle drone. With a background in medicine and a CS/EE degree you'd probably be a perfect fit for the technical side of the healthcare industry. Perhaps a program/project manager, or in technical marketing or sales. For a few friends of mine, the hot ticket was an undergraduate engineering degree (plus a few years experience) and an MBA. I could see a bright future for an MD with an MSEE/MSCS.
I develop software for medical instruments but I really don't see that a medical degree is really much help there. If anything, having been a lab technician would be more useful. Perhaps in a different area of the field, say medical imaging, your skills might be more applicable to software/hardware development.
But why the change? Do you expect to be bored with medicine in 5-10 years? I have seen the reverse scenario: an ex-classmate of mine (we both graduated as EEs) got tired of being an engineer after a few years and is now a pediatrician. Being an engineer simply wasn't challenging enough for her.
Software that takes 6 months for one guy to slap together, isn't going to impress anybody who has an IT background. They'll see it's obviously only 6 man months of work
This is insightful? The amount of time you spend on a product is irrelevant as long as it meets the needs of your customers. Most businesses aren't looking to be impressed; they're looking to get work done efficiently. I sold a product for around $100 that cost me $15 in parts and was designed and debugged in a week to companies that could just as easily have built it themselves. Why didn't they? It was just easier to buy 10-20 from me every month than to go through the whole product development process to end up with the same thing.
I think that the difficulty that faces a lot of people is seeing what is needed, what there is a market for.
Exactly. When I started my first company (I say "first" because even tho it is defunct, I will definitely do it again and again), I had daily contact with customers at my job so I knew quite well what they wanted and how I could produce it and get it to to them. I also had a valuable business contact that I learned a lot from. Now it's different. I have no customer contact in this job so I'm now figuring out how to meet people that may be future customers or may know future customers e.g., I'm thinking that finding markets that software is used in and going to trade shows for those markets may be a way to meet people. I'm also looking at some hobbies I have that I know people spend tons of money on to see what I can produce and sell there.
It's that lack of contacts that's killing most of us.
Is there any reason other than potential job opportunites that is making you think about switching? There will be many, many jobs in the foreseeable future for both CS and EE types. Decide which you find more interesting: your enthusiasm for the work will drive you to become better at it and that makes you more marketable. At the same time, there are no guarantees...
With your EE degree and CS experience a whole new set of fields open up for you. I've noticed even for programming work, my EE degree opens doors. Clued-in employers prefer developers who understand the low level aspects of computers and programming. And since my work is always embedded design, I get to do hardware integration as well. And that's a big part of it -- the type of work you want to do. The database/web/Enterprise workflow type stuff seems to be streaming overseas at warp speeds in large part because it's very easy to find people with that expertise. At the same time, I work with very bright people who have no idea what a 74LS00 is, but I'm amazed at the software constructs they come up with -- when you enjoy your work, you tend to be very good at it.
Look, I'm an EE who moved into software (BE EE -> MS SE) because I found that I really liked it. At the same time, I realized that fewer people were doing the kind of electrical engineering I had been doing (small-signal analog/mixed signal interfacing to microcontrollers and PCs) so finding a job doing that didn't seem like it would be too difficult, but it was getting boring. And who wants to do boring work for 40 years?
I work in the medical device industry and will probably stay there for a while because it's fun, I get to work with really smart people, and all those FDA requirements mean I get to work in a common-sense, ordered development environment. AND because medical device companies prefer to hire people with medical device backgrounds, there isn't as much of the HR nonsense I read about here. These companies are picky about who they hire; the domain knowledge is really important to them, so this kind of work is not likely to be sent overseas just yet.
What I'm getting at is that your question is a bit too broad: you really need to find a type of work you like to do within those fields of CS/EE and see if it's the kind of work that will be around 10 years from now.
Embedded developers don't even like using function pointers
Hmm????? What do you base this on? I'm a big believer in function pointers when polymorphism isn't appropriate and all my *professional* development is on embedded systems of one kind or another. I'm really curious why you think that's the case.
As such, I have to regard phrases like "even below zero (celsius)" with some amusement.
My sentiments exactly. I live in Minnesota, USA and the thought of wearing gloves at 32F (0C) seemed, well, odd. Around here I don't notice people wearing gloves until the temperature is in the teens, and then only if they're going to be outside for a while. Working outside with bare hands in around-freezing temps is quite normal and I was doing it recently, checking the brakes on my truck. It's just an acclimatization thing.
Today, with the air temp at -10F and the windchill around -30F, gloves are definitely required for anything longer than the 200 yard walk across the parking lot to the car. I have visited Edmonton in January (passed on the bungee jump in the West Ed mall tho:-) and I remember the -38F temperatures quite well
I have noticed that my hands stay warmer when I'm not moving much. Start walking and they get cold quickly.
These gloves would probably be very attractive to ice fishermen but could make it hard to hold your beer...
Give it a try and you'll probably be quite disgusted...
I guess it all depends what you like to watch. Easily 70% of what we watch is the Food Network (I like to cook), to the point where my 3 year-old can tell when the channel changes "that food network." The rest of the time if we're not watching either IFC (Independent Film Channel),Sundance or Cartoon network, it's tuned into Animal Planet. Discovery channel, TLC, Travel channel have all turned into one form of "extreme show" or the other and are now almost completely unwatchable anymore (tho Blue Planet or whatever that ocean show is can be good sometimes).
TV News? Don't make me laugh! I don't think I've seen a broadcast TV program in over a year and I gave up on the 4 networks long before that! All the local news I need comes from Minnesota Public Radio and national news from NPR or online.
Speaking of which, being the incessent hacker, I'd like to optimize the heck out of my energy systems' costs
I think about this kind of stuff from time to time and I wonder about the cost/benefit ratio. Unless your energy source costs are really high, does the extra cost of time/equipment really pay for itself? I was introduced to the timer thermostat concept when I automated heating and air conditioning in my apartment years ago using an old Tandy Model 100 and some homebrew hardware. Same concept can be bought off the shelf (with touchscreen!) for less than $50 these days.
If it's -20F outside and you want to use that to cool your refrigerator, you need insulated pipes to bring the air in, fans to blow the warmer air back out, a vent control system, and ensure that the holes in the wall don't add to the house heating problem. All that probably will take years to pay for itself. At the same time remember that the fridge is helping to heat your kitchen in winter!
Likewise, if it's -20F outside, is the ground temperature really high enough to heat your house?
Perhaps rearranging how you do things may work better. e.g., My basement here in MN was usually in the 50's-60's year round so it was good for a wine cellar and computer room with no air conditioning needed.
Likewise, instead of bring cold air into your refrigerator, wheel the entire thing outside for the winter and power it off, letting nature keep food cold. Inconvenient, but probably more cost effective than building a cold air piping system (tho the latter would be cool!).
Or motion detectors on some lights in the house. Like a thermostat that lowers heating when no one's home, turning off lights when the room's vacant will save lots over time at a relatively low investment.
Keep drapes on south side of house open to take advantage of greenhouse effect in winter, close in summer. Steve Ciarcia (Circuit Cellar, Home Control System) looked at automating this about 10 years ago and concluded that an automatic drapery control system would pay for itself in 20+ years of energy costs. But the convenience may be worth it to some people.
I'm kinda rambling with miscellaneous thoughts here so I'll stop. But check out Home Power magazine
Willing to bet dollars to donuts it's colder here in Minnesota (but probably wasn't when you wrote this. We had a warm weekend:-). Anyway, try improving your insulation before buying new heating. Our new house is 2x the size of the old one and the heating bill so far is running less than 1/2 what we're used to, just due to it being so much better insulated. And invest in a digital timer thermostat. They usually pay for themselves within one heating season!
You'd be surprised. When I moved to Minnesota from the East coast a few years ago, the locals asked me why I would come here, imagining it must be so much more glamourous in the NYC area. But it really is much nicer here. More and more people are moving to the Midwest because we're tired of the insane cost of housing (I came from S/W CT with a background in hardware & software design), the dog-eat-dog pace of life and just the overall busy-ness of it all. You also find employers offering generous relocation benefits since there is a perception that this area is "flyover country" and no one wants to move here. Since coming here I've met others who just liked the easy access to wilderness and outdoor life; not everyone wants to live in a big city. And like others, I've found the Twin Cities area as lively and artsy enough for me to want to continue living here. For me the draw was that people were nicer, there is so much outdoors stuff available, and I could own my own home and pay for it with a fairly small percentage of my salary.
You are partly right of course: tech centric cities will always have high concentrations of people with broad skill bases making it easier to find staff, but even outside those areas you will find a lot of intelligent, highly motivated people who just want what they perceive as a better quality of life in a more slow-paced area of the country.
but an older name for tracks on a tank is 'Caterpillar tyres'. Sort of gives away the idea of where they came from
Actually it's the other way around. The inventor of an early tracked vehicle showed the design to his young daughter and she thought the tracks looked like a caterpillar, hence the name.
Pens don't rely on gravity to work, they are all about surface tension
Try lying on your back with a notepad above you and writing on it with a ballpoint pen. How long before it stops? Surface tension will pull the ink out of the column, but you still have to provide a supply of ink to the ball. Gravity is the usual (but not only) method of doing this.
Have you talked to your guidance counselor? Mine was quite useful in telling me about scholarships no one (or at least me) had heard of. I didn't get any big ones (just missed out on national merit, bastards), but I got a few smaller scholarships that really helped for the first 2 years of school.
Also your parents' employers may offer scholarships to children of employees and certain organizations have scholarships for members (Society of Women Engineers comes to mind). Bottom line: stop focusing on "tech sector" scholarships; this is about college money. Get it where ever you can.
On unusual methods of funding education: I used to date a woman whose medical degree was paid for by the state ("Northern Exposure" style!) on the condition that she spend a certain number of years working in hospitals serving low-income neighborhoods. It worked out really well for her. Has anyone else ever encountered this?
Small businesses in North America (those turning less than $25 million/yr), are the next wave of companies that will find a need for outsourcing. This includes everything from clerical/backoffice support to injection molded components and on.
$25M/year? Try hobbyists!!! It's now much cheaper for the electronics hobbyist to buy small quantity circuit boards from Bulgaria of all places! Email your Gerber/Excellon files and a CC# and get a bunch of professionally made PC boards back in a few days. The writing's been on the wall for years. As a hobbyist and then small business owner, I used to outsource prototype PCB manufacture to Canada because the American companies either wouldn't deal with the little guy, or wanted way more money than I could afford in small quantities. A hobbyist-friendly company in Canada (thank you Alberta Printed Circuits) made tons of boards for me years ago at what were insanely low prices then. These days basement inventors are getting even better value by having circuit board made in Eastern Europe.
It's not just software -- that's the tip of the iceberg. Anything that can be FedExed can be outsourced and it's available to anyone with a credit card.
The real business power of the internet is the severe reduction in the cost of business communications including some forms of marketing. There are hobbyists and tiny garage manufacturers all over the place that would cheaply perform services that larger companies charge huge amounts for but they couldn't afford to advertise so no-one knew about them. Now anyone with a few bucks can put up a website or get on EBay and have a chance of being seen.
This was modded as funny; but it's pretty apt. Quite a few people are thinking the same thing. I was talking with a fellow developer a few days ago; he is Indian and used to work at one of the big Indian contract houses and now he's here in the US as (I think) a Resident Alien. His take is that even more work will be farmed out overseas: he told me of a small company he knows of (fewer than 15 employees) that is sending programming work to India because it's so much cheaper than anyone in the US quoted. Granted, that company is owned by Indian immigrants, so project management is probably easier. He's already seen the Indian contractors subcontracting out to even cheaper countries to keep their profit margins.
Oddly enough, he feels this will reduce the need for H1-Bs -- at least from India. Apparently a lot of programmers who thought they had to move to the US to get good programming jobs are now finding they can stay in their native countries and get the farmed-out programming jobs there! I think I read the same thing somewhere else recently also.
We both agreed that simply being a "coder" is no longer enough; domain knowledge is key, or at least general business knowledge
Not surprisingly, in addition to his CS degree, he just finished an MBA...
Funny; I've heard a related but different explanation for the exodus of programming jobs: We have to farm out most of the development to other countries, because most of the world doesn't speak English very well, and you can't develop software in the US that works in any language but English.
That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard (well today anyway). Our products sell all over the world and in multiple languages. What do we do? Design it with the expectation that it will be used by people in different countries and hire translation companies to do language translation. As far as I know there's never been a major issue with this, only once in a while someone reminding us to make the text fields large enough to handle German.
So, you can start out with the basics of databases using just Access' GUI tools, and then graduate to SQL without having to switch environments.
Not always. I took my databases course from a prof who specifically said we could not use Access for our projects because "it's a toy, not a real database." He was right.
Two years or so after taking this course I had to do a complex query at work on an Access database (let me add the caveat here that I am an embedded software developer, not a DBA). I can't recall the specifics of the query, but I do remember that I simply could not get it to work on Access. I knew what I was doing would work using Oracle (what I used for class projects), but all my ideas were just not supported by Access. I thought of nested queries, building views and querying the views, other things. Either Access barfed because the subqueries were creating huge amounts of data because of the way it was forcing me to do it, or it just didn't like my SQL (I think it didn't support views).
Now add to that experience the fact that we regularly run across problems with Access's lack of multiuser capability and I really wonder why it's called a relational database instead of a relational filing system. Real databases are ACID compliant and students should learn this. Microsoft Access is not. At least not the versions I have used.
For some reason, open source developers seem to like the technical challenges of replicating what already exists in closed form (Linux, OpenOffice, etc) instead of blazing new paths.
I think this is because those developers suffer from the same problem as most customers: they know what they want, but they can only express those wants in terms of what they already know about. True creativity is difficult. By that I mean the ability to take a leap to a completely different way of seeing your problem.
One of the neat things about the Ars Digita University idea was taking in people who were experts in other fields and educating them in computer science. I was really hoping for innovative things to come out of that.
Slashdot Mirror
Why do I always run out of mod points right after I see something that should be modded way the hell up?
Well ignoring the fact that no-one has to do anything, this doesn't matter. You don't seem to have noticed that more and more businesses are moving out of cities and into suburban and rural areas because the owners themselves don't like long commutes and move closer to where they live. Surburbs also often have lower taxes. I've had three full time jobs since graduation over 15 years ago and none of them has been in a large city. For my current job, before I moved, I was commuting from my home in the city to an industrial park in a semi-rural area and enjoyed an almost traffic-free commute as most traffic goes the other direction (now that we moved, my commute's even easier!).
In any event, people do what's in their own self-interest, so I doubt you'll see many Americans choosing smaller, denser housing when land is so plentiful here. If anything, the trend seems to be going the other way here in the Midwest.
Even if it was done by a rogue employee, doesn't matter. They're still responsible for his actions while he's working for them.
It made me think, too, but for a different reason. If it was below freezing, it shouldn't matter that the can exploded, the contents are still frozen.
Maybe I should test it. The little weather applet on the Gnome toolbar tells me the temperature outside is a balmy -10F (it warmed up from -25F this morning
What do you mean by independent path? Are you trying to avoid a degree, or just looking for a non traditional path to a degree? Go for the degree unless you just want to be another IT cubicle drone. With a background in medicine and a CS/EE degree you'd probably be a perfect fit for the technical side of the healthcare industry. Perhaps a program/project manager, or in technical marketing or sales. For a few friends of mine, the hot ticket was an undergraduate engineering degree (plus a few years experience) and an MBA. I could see a bright future for an MD with an MSEE/MSCS.
I develop software for medical instruments but I really don't see that a medical degree is really much help there. If anything, having been a lab technician would be more useful. Perhaps in a different area of the field, say medical imaging, your skills might be more applicable to software/hardware development.
But why the change? Do you expect to be bored with medicine in 5-10 years? I have seen the reverse scenario: an ex-classmate of mine (we both graduated as EEs) got tired of being an engineer after a few years and is now a pediatrician. Being an engineer simply wasn't challenging enough for her.
This is insightful? The amount of time you spend on a product is irrelevant as long as it meets the needs of your customers. Most businesses aren't looking to be impressed; they're looking to get work done efficiently. I sold a product for around $100 that cost me $15 in parts and was designed and debugged in a week to companies that could just as easily have built it themselves. Why didn't they? It was just easier to buy 10-20 from me every month than to go through the whole product development process to end up with the same thing.
Exactly. When I started my first company (I say "first" because even tho it is defunct, I will definitely do it again and again), I had daily contact with customers at my job so I knew quite well what they wanted and how I could produce it and get it to to them. I also had a valuable business contact that I learned a lot from.
Now it's different. I have no customer contact in this job so I'm now figuring out how to meet people that may be future customers or may know future customers e.g., I'm thinking that finding markets that software is used in and going to trade shows for those markets may be a way to meet people. I'm also looking at some hobbies I have that I know people spend tons of money on to see what I can produce and sell there.
It's that lack of contacts that's killing most of us.
Is there any reason other than potential job opportunites that is making you think about switching? There will be many, many jobs in the foreseeable future for both CS and EE types. Decide which you find more interesting: your enthusiasm for the work will drive you to become better at it and that makes you more marketable.
At the same time, there are no guarantees...
With your EE degree and CS experience a whole new set of fields open up for you. I've noticed even for programming work, my EE degree opens doors. Clued-in employers prefer developers who understand the low level aspects of computers and programming. And since my work is always embedded design, I get to do hardware integration as well. And that's a big part of it -- the type of work you want to do. The database/web/Enterprise workflow type stuff seems to be streaming overseas at warp speeds in large part because it's very easy to find people with that expertise.
At the same time, I work with very bright people who have no idea what a 74LS00 is, but I'm amazed at the software constructs they come up with -- when you enjoy your work, you tend to be very good at it.
Look, I'm an EE who moved into software (BE EE -> MS SE) because I found that I really liked it. At the same time, I realized that fewer people were doing the kind of electrical engineering I had been doing (small-signal analog/mixed signal interfacing to microcontrollers and PCs) so finding a job doing that didn't seem like it would be too difficult, but it was getting boring. And who wants to do boring work for 40 years?
I work in the medical device industry and will probably stay there for a while because it's fun, I get to work with really smart people, and all those FDA requirements mean I get to work in a common-sense, ordered development environment. AND because medical device companies prefer to hire people with medical device backgrounds, there isn't as much of the HR nonsense I read about here. These companies are picky about who they hire; the domain knowledge is really important to them, so this kind of work is not likely to be sent overseas just yet.
What I'm getting at is that your question is a bit too broad: you really need to find a type of work you like to do within those fields of CS/EE and see if it's the kind of work that will be around 10 years from now.
Hmm????? What do you base this on? I'm a big believer in function pointers when polymorphism isn't appropriate and all my *professional* development is on embedded systems of one kind or another.
I'm really curious why you think that's the case.
My sentiments exactly. I live in Minnesota, USA and the thought of wearing gloves at 32F (0C) seemed, well, odd. Around here I don't notice people wearing gloves until the temperature is in the teens, and then only if they're going to be outside for a while. Working outside with bare hands in around-freezing temps is quite normal and I was doing it recently, checking the brakes on my truck. It's just an acclimatization thing.
Today, with the air temp at -10F and the windchill around -30F, gloves are definitely required for anything longer than the 200 yard walk across the parking lot to the car. I have visited Edmonton in January (passed on the bungee jump in the West Ed mall tho
I have noticed that my hands stay warmer when I'm not moving much. Start walking and they get cold quickly.
These gloves would probably be very attractive to ice fishermen but could make it hard to hold your beer...
How good is she in bed?
I guess it all depends what you like to watch. Easily 70% of what we watch is the Food Network (I like to cook), to the point where my 3 year-old can tell when the channel changes "that food network." The rest of the time if we're not watching either IFC (Independent Film Channel),Sundance or Cartoon network, it's tuned into Animal Planet.
Discovery channel, TLC, Travel channel have all turned into one form of "extreme show" or the other and are now almost completely unwatchable anymore (tho Blue Planet or whatever that ocean show is can be good sometimes).
TV News? Don't make me laugh! I don't think I've seen a broadcast TV program in over a year and I gave up on the 4 networks long before that! All the local news I need comes from Minnesota Public Radio and national news from NPR or online.
What have you been using? I looked at the stuff at Home Depot, but they only had outdoor floodlights.
I think about this kind of stuff from time to time and I wonder about the cost/benefit ratio. Unless your energy source costs are really high, does the extra cost of time/equipment really pay for itself? I was introduced to the timer thermostat concept when I automated heating and air conditioning in my apartment years ago using an old Tandy Model 100 and some homebrew hardware. Same concept can be bought off the shelf (with touchscreen!) for less than $50 these days.
If it's -20F outside and you want to use that to cool your refrigerator, you need insulated pipes to bring the air in, fans to blow the warmer air back out, a vent control system, and ensure that the holes in the wall don't add to the house heating problem. All that probably will take years to pay for itself. At the same time remember that the fridge is helping to heat your kitchen in winter!
Likewise, if it's -20F outside, is the ground temperature really high enough to heat your house?
Perhaps rearranging how you do things may work better. e.g.,
My basement here in MN was usually in the 50's-60's year round so it was good for a wine cellar and computer room with no air conditioning needed.
Likewise, instead of bring cold air into your refrigerator, wheel the entire thing outside for the winter and power it off, letting nature keep food cold. Inconvenient, but probably more cost effective than building a cold air piping system (tho the latter would be cool!).
Or motion detectors on some lights in the house. Like a thermostat that lowers heating when no one's home, turning off lights when the room's vacant will save lots over time at a relatively low investment.
Keep drapes on south side of house open to take advantage of greenhouse effect in winter, close in summer. Steve Ciarcia (Circuit Cellar, Home Control System) looked at automating this about 10 years ago and concluded that an automatic drapery control system would pay for itself in 20+ years of energy costs. But the convenience may be worth it to some people.
I'm kinda rambling with miscellaneous thoughts here so I'll stop. But check out Home Power magazine
Willing to bet dollars to donuts it's colder here in Minnesota (but probably wasn't when you wrote this. We had a warm weekend :-).
Anyway, try improving your insulation before buying new heating. Our new house is 2x the size of the old one and the heating bill so far is running less than 1/2 what we're used to, just due to it being so much better insulated.
And invest in a digital timer thermostat. They usually pay for themselves within one heating season!
You mean like software development?
You'd be surprised. When I moved to Minnesota from the East coast a few years ago, the locals asked me why I would come here, imagining it must be so much more glamourous in the NYC area. But it really is much nicer here. More and more people are moving to the Midwest because we're tired of the insane cost of housing (I came from S/W CT with a background in hardware & software design), the dog-eat-dog pace of life and just the overall busy-ness of it all. You also find employers offering generous relocation benefits since there is a perception that this area is "flyover country" and no one wants to move here.
Since coming here I've met others who just liked the easy access to wilderness and outdoor life; not everyone wants to live in a big city. And like others, I've found the Twin Cities area as lively and artsy enough for me to want to continue living here.
For me the draw was that people were nicer, there is so much outdoors stuff available, and I could own my own home and pay for it with a fairly small percentage of my salary.
You are partly right of course: tech centric cities will always have high concentrations of people with broad skill bases making it easier to find staff, but even outside those areas you will find a lot of intelligent, highly motivated people who just want what they perceive as a better quality of life in a more slow-paced area of the country.
Actually it's the other way around. The inventor of an early tracked vehicle showed the design to his young daughter and she thought the tracks looked like a caterpillar, hence the name.
Try lying on your back with a notepad above you and writing on it with a ballpoint pen. How long before it stops?
Surface tension will pull the ink out of the column, but you still have to provide a supply of ink to the ball. Gravity is the usual (but not only) method of doing this.
Have you talked to your guidance counselor? Mine was quite useful in telling me about scholarships no one (or at least me) had heard of. I didn't get any big ones (just missed out on national merit, bastards), but I got a few smaller scholarships that really helped for the first 2 years of school.
Also your parents' employers may offer scholarships to children of employees and certain organizations have scholarships for members (Society of Women Engineers comes to mind).
Bottom line: stop focusing on "tech sector" scholarships; this is about college money. Get it where ever you can.
On unusual methods of funding education: I used to date a woman whose medical degree was paid for by the state ("Northern Exposure" style!) on the condition that she spend a certain number of years working in hospitals serving low-income neighborhoods. It worked out really well for her. Has anyone else ever encountered this?
$25M/year? Try hobbyists!!! It's now much cheaper for the electronics hobbyist to buy small quantity circuit boards from Bulgaria of all places! Email your Gerber/Excellon files and a CC# and get a bunch of professionally made PC boards back in a few days. The writing's been on the wall for years. As a hobbyist and then small business owner, I used to outsource prototype PCB manufacture to Canada because the American companies either wouldn't deal with the little guy, or wanted way more money than I could afford in small quantities. A hobbyist-friendly company in Canada (thank you Alberta Printed Circuits) made tons of boards for me years ago at what were insanely low prices then.
These days basement inventors are getting even better value by having circuit board made in Eastern Europe.
It's not just software -- that's the tip of the iceberg. Anything that can be FedExed can be outsourced and it's available to anyone with a credit card.
The real business power of the internet is the severe reduction in the cost of business communications including some forms of marketing. There are hobbyists and tiny garage manufacturers all over the place that would cheaply perform services that larger companies charge huge amounts for but they couldn't afford to advertise so no-one knew about them. Now anyone with a few bucks can put up a website or get on EBay and have a chance of being seen.
This was modded as funny; but it's pretty apt. Quite a few people are thinking the same thing. I was talking with a fellow developer a few days ago; he is Indian and used to work at one of the big Indian contract houses and now he's here in the US as (I think) a Resident Alien. His take is that even more work will be farmed out overseas: he told me of a small company he knows of (fewer than 15 employees) that is sending programming work to India because it's so much cheaper than anyone in the US quoted. Granted, that company is owned by Indian immigrants, so project management is probably easier. He's already seen the Indian contractors subcontracting out to even cheaper countries to keep their profit margins.
Oddly enough, he feels this will reduce the need for H1-Bs -- at least from India. Apparently a lot of programmers who thought they had to move to the US to get good programming jobs are now finding they can stay in their native countries and get the farmed-out programming jobs there! I think I read the same thing somewhere else recently also.
We both agreed that simply being a "coder" is no longer enough; domain knowledge is key, or at least general business knowledge
Not surprisingly, in addition to his CS degree, he just finished an MBA...
That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard (well today anyway). Our products sell all over the world and in multiple languages. What do we do? Design it with the expectation that it will be used by people in different countries and hire translation companies to do language translation. As far as I know there's never been a major issue with this, only once in a while someone reminding us to make the text fields large enough to handle German.
Not always. I took my databases course from a prof who specifically said we could not use Access for our projects because "it's a toy, not a real database." He was right.
Two years or so after taking this course I had to do a complex query at work on an Access database (let me add the caveat here that I am an embedded software developer, not a DBA). I can't recall the specifics of the query, but I do remember that I simply could not get it to work on Access. I knew what I was doing would work using Oracle (what I used for class projects), but all my ideas were just not supported by Access. I thought of nested queries, building views and querying the views, other things. Either Access barfed because the subqueries were creating huge amounts of data because of the way it was forcing me to do it, or it just didn't like my SQL (I think it didn't support views).
Now add to that experience the fact that we regularly run across problems with Access's lack of multiuser capability and I really wonder why it's called a relational database instead of a relational filing system. Real databases are ACID compliant and students should learn this. Microsoft Access is not. At least not the versions I have used.
I think this is because those developers suffer from the same problem as most customers: they know what they want, but they can only express those wants in terms of what they already know about.
True creativity is difficult. By that I mean the ability to take a leap to a completely different way of seeing your problem.
One of the neat things about the Ars Digita University idea was taking in people who were experts in other fields and educating them in computer science. I was really hoping for innovative things to come out of that.