You do have a point, but to play devil's advocate, Google's ad policies have been engineered from the start to keep advertisers (relatively) honest. Text ads, policies against misleading advertising, close attention to click fraud, etc. I don't mind seeing AdWords on a page, frankly.
He closed his app because he was unwilling to take responsibility for such a decision, yet was not comfortable with eliminating the revenue stream of all sites, regardless of their ad policies.
Are you asking me to be sympathetic to sites that post "Doctors hate him! One wierd trick! Singles in your area! Etc!" ads with irrelevant misleading pictures and popups galore? Because if you are, you can go fuck yourself.
Advertising should be innocuous, relevant, and useful. Until then, they can also go fuck themselves.
They get you past HR idiots who think "certification" = "good" and don't throw away your resume immediately before someone who actually knows things gets a look at it.
I wasn't clear about the training, you have a point. I was meaning to say, if you can find smart people that have a skill set close to what you're looking for, but may not have 100% of the laundry list, then they're viable hires, provided you can get the morons in management to accept that the purple unicorn isn't out there.
And of course the resumes lie. If you're not presenting the best possible picture of your skill set on your resume, you're not trying. Sometimes people stretch the truth past the breaking point. Just like job descriptions lie, like employers lie, like managers lie, etc etc. Finding a job is such a bullshit process involving half-truths and outright lies that it's no wonder you find bullshit everywhere.
I agree with you about the confusion over what universities are for. Twenty or thirty years ago (around the time that I went) college was still affordable enough so that "getting an education" was as or more important as acquiring directly relevant job skills that would enable you to get a job once you graduated, and employers still had 'no experience necessary' positions that you could get at job fairs, etc. Today, college is so expensive that "getting an education" is indulgent fluff that's a waste of time and money, and employers expect that new grads magically have 3 years' experience for the mailroom. Universities still insist that "getting an education" is the important part, because that's what supports their business model.
Everyone's hiring process is screwed up in one way or another. Interviewing and hiring is hard. Most of the interviews I've had (programming positions) require that you spend at least 4-5 hours on site talking to everyone from a VP down to the guy who sweeps up at night. Most insist that it's relevant to make a candidate solve a programming issue freehand on a whiteboard without any of the tools that make it possible for them to do the work, or solve some irrelevant obscure problem like "how would you determine the flow rate of the Amazon river" (no kidding, I had that one once). For some reason "I would look it up, because it's a solved problem, and looking it up would take about 30 seconds" isn't an acceptable answer, even though anyone that had a habit of wasting their time trying to solve problems themselves would be a shitty employee. From what I understand, Google doesn't do that bullshit as much, and also has realized that having a degree or having a good GPA does not correlate to ability to do the job well. Their problem is that for some reason they think eight rounds of interviews is a good idea...
That's not that surprising. From the bean-counter point of view, training costs money NOW, and the loss of an employee is hard to quantify, so it MIGHT not cost any money. In the absence of a quantifiable loss from not training, and a hard-number cost of training, the pinheads go with the thing that will DEFINITELY save money NOW, instead of something that MIGHT cost money in the future.
There is already a low barrier to entry for those who want it
There is a low barrier to entry for learning programming. The barrier to entry for getting someone to PAY you for programming is much higher.
What is so hard about getting into programming that we need a day to tell everyone to do it? If you want to learn, the internet is full of self-taught resources, many schools have it in the elective curriculum, and most universities have courses in it.
In many cases, especially the entry-level (read: you have 3 years of professional programming experience at some other company), "self-taught" will get your resume to the bottom of the trash barrel. Getting training for it at an institution of higher education is massively expensive, if you want the C students in HR to consider the training of value. Training at a community college is almost worse than self-taught, because if you had any brains at all, you'd have gone to a four-year college for that.
Where I work it's seeming to be very difficult to find good embedded C programmers. We get a lot of EE people but often they have little programming skills or programming as part of a team.
The problem there is that everyone who looks for people to hire rejects everyone that doesn't have everything on the laundry list. This is likely because the people who filter out resumes are not technical, and therefore don't know what a good tech employee looks like.
If you can find plenty of smart people, then you should hire them and TRAIN THEM ON THE STUFF THEY'RE MISSING. I know, why do I hate America, most companies would rather go out of business than invest anything in their new hires. Google has a strategy of hiring smart people and finding stuff for them to do; frequently this involves teaching them a specific language that they may not be fully up to speed on, but can get there in short order. Last I checked they were doing pretty well.
Another objection that I hear to training your people is "but but but they'll get the new skill and leave for another company!" If they're leaving, it's probably not because they want to screw you over. They're leaving because another company will treat them better. Treat your people better than the competition and they won't leave. Of course, that involves treating your people better, so nobody does it, because the sky will fall or something.
Kind of hard to make money if you don't give people jobs. Think about this: How long can a company function with an open C-level position? How long can a company function without the people who do actual work?
Do you think Walmart would continue to make unreasonable amounts of money if they didn't have cashiers?
GM and Ford have the largest market share at this point, and have for over a decade. I don't think the US automotive industry is struggling.
Of course, if you're an executive or a shareholder in one of those companies, you want the public to think you're struggling because of greedy lazy union workers.
That's some A-level revisionist history right there.
I bet you're just butthurt because the battle flag (NOT the flag of the Confederacy, the battle flag was directly representative of mass slaughter on the battlefield) no longer flies over many southern institutions.
Bullshit. Most jobs that require a degree could competently be done by a high school dropout with some additional job training.
Employers want people with degrees because it's harder to quit when you're staring six figures of student loan debt in the face, so they can work you harder, pay you less, and generally treat you like shit.
The difference is that you probably didn't spend six figures while you were getting that experience. I'm hoping you were paid for it.
My point is that the degree is useless, it matters if you have a marketable skill set. If you're leaving college without the ability to find a job in a reasonable amount of time (a couple months) then either you or your college is doing it wrong.
Then CS is a dead-end as far as immediate practical employment is concerned - which, when you're facing $100,000 in loans, is far more important than faffing about with theory.
Like I was saying, the days where the kind of education that most CS departments have been providing is useful are rapidly approaching zero. It's too expensive to waste your time like that. While a certain amount of theory makes your practical skills more useful, if you can't get a job the day you graduate, then it's a waste of time.
A little different than what you said, in that once you find what you ENJOY (which makes all the difference in the world on a job when you must work for others)? Learn about it ALL YOU CAN, all the way!
Then, after that, learn a skill which people will actually pay you to use. If you enjoy it, either there's something wrong with you or someone is taking advantage of you.
You did support work for ten years? Now you're actively employed dealing with script kiddie bullshit?
I wouldn't brag about your experience. If you're still doing that grunt work, there's something wrong with you; either you're shitty at your job, or you lack any ambition or self-esteem. Support is the ditch-digging of the 21st century; you get yelled at all day by stupid people who can't be bothered to learn about what would prevent the problem from happening in the first place. You have to sit there and take their abuse, because complaining gets you fired. Anyone else in the company is more credible and valuable than help desk/support, as far as management is concerned. Shit rolls downhill, and guess who's at the foot of said hill?
Or, you can tell them you don't do free tech support for anyone. Seriously, if people can't be bothered to learn the simplest things about computing, then fuck them, they're on their own.
Coddling the technically illiterate has led to our current situation of millions of idiots having compromised, unpatched Windows machines directly connected to the Internet, spewing spam into my mailbox.
Another problem is that education is conflated with training. US students look to college for training, when they should be looking for an education.
An education isn't marketable. Training is marketable. For most employers, a GPA of 3.8 and a pile of horse shit have the same value as the pile of horse shit by itself. Sure, it might help you slightly when you go to get your first job out of college, but most "entry level" jobs seem to require 2 years' experience in the role.
When a higher education didn't cost more than some peoples' first houses, having an "education" was meaningful. Nowadays any college that is graduating students with no directly marketable skills (but plenty of "education") is useless. BSCS holders should be able to take a computer apart and put it back together, program in at least three languages fluently, design an efficient and manageable database schema, and have contributed to or started at least one open source project. Knowing theory is useful in addition to those skills, but not valuable in and of itself. Every programming job description I see has the requirement "BSCS or equivalent experience". What that means to me is that it's the skills, not the theory, that they're most interested in.
"Education" is great, but at the end of the day, you need to eat.
Slashdot Mirror
You do have a point, but to play devil's advocate, Google's ad policies have been engineered from the start to keep advertisers (relatively) honest. Text ads, policies against misleading advertising, close attention to click fraud, etc. I don't mind seeing AdWords on a page, frankly.
No, they're not angels, but let's be fair.
Are you asking me to be sympathetic to sites that post "Doctors hate him! One wierd trick! Singles in your area! Etc!" ads with irrelevant misleading pictures and popups galore? Because if you are, you can go fuck yourself.
Advertising should be innocuous, relevant, and useful. Until then, they can also go fuck themselves.
They get you past HR idiots who think "certification" = "good" and don't throw away your resume immediately before someone who actually knows things gets a look at it.
By the time the loan is delinquent enough to be included in a bankruptcy, the college has long since been paid. Nice try, though.
(Numbers for my local public university.)
Tuition: $1700/year.
Total costs (fees/housing/food/tuition): $26,000/year.
They can offer "free tuition!!!!1!" and it would still cost more than most new graduates make per year on their first jobs.
Not impressed.
(And, yes, those are in-state numbers.)
I wasn't clear about the training, you have a point. I was meaning to say, if you can find smart people that have a skill set close to what you're looking for, but may not have 100% of the laundry list, then they're viable hires, provided you can get the morons in management to accept that the purple unicorn isn't out there.
And of course the resumes lie. If you're not presenting the best possible picture of your skill set on your resume, you're not trying. Sometimes people stretch the truth past the breaking point. Just like job descriptions lie, like employers lie, like managers lie, etc etc. Finding a job is such a bullshit process involving half-truths and outright lies that it's no wonder you find bullshit everywhere.
I agree with you about the confusion over what universities are for. Twenty or thirty years ago (around the time that I went) college was still affordable enough so that "getting an education" was as or more important as acquiring directly relevant job skills that would enable you to get a job once you graduated, and employers still had 'no experience necessary' positions that you could get at job fairs, etc. Today, college is so expensive that "getting an education" is indulgent fluff that's a waste of time and money, and employers expect that new grads magically have 3 years' experience for the mailroom. Universities still insist that "getting an education" is the important part, because that's what supports their business model.
Everyone's hiring process is screwed up in one way or another. Interviewing and hiring is hard. Most of the interviews I've had (programming positions) require that you spend at least 4-5 hours on site talking to everyone from a VP down to the guy who sweeps up at night. Most insist that it's relevant to make a candidate solve a programming issue freehand on a whiteboard without any of the tools that make it possible for them to do the work, or solve some irrelevant obscure problem like "how would you determine the flow rate of the Amazon river" (no kidding, I had that one once). For some reason "I would look it up, because it's a solved problem, and looking it up would take about 30 seconds" isn't an acceptable answer, even though anyone that had a habit of wasting their time trying to solve problems themselves would be a shitty employee. From what I understand, Google doesn't do that bullshit as much, and also has realized that having a degree or having a good GPA does not correlate to ability to do the job well. Their problem is that for some reason they think eight rounds of interviews is a good idea...
That's not that surprising. From the bean-counter point of view, training costs money NOW, and the loss of an employee is hard to quantify, so it MIGHT not cost any money. In the absence of a quantifiable loss from not training, and a hard-number cost of training, the pinheads go with the thing that will DEFINITELY save money NOW, instead of something that MIGHT cost money in the future.
OK, so that's not a great example. My point stands.
There is a low barrier to entry for learning programming. The barrier to entry for getting someone to PAY you for programming is much higher.
In many cases, especially the entry-level (read: you have 3 years of professional programming experience at some other company), "self-taught" will get your resume to the bottom of the trash barrel. Getting training for it at an institution of higher education is massively expensive, if you want the C students in HR to consider the training of value. Training at a community college is almost worse than self-taught, because if you had any brains at all, you'd have gone to a four-year college for that.
The problem there is that everyone who looks for people to hire rejects everyone that doesn't have everything on the laundry list. This is likely because the people who filter out resumes are not technical, and therefore don't know what a good tech employee looks like.
If you can find plenty of smart people, then you should hire them and TRAIN THEM ON THE STUFF THEY'RE MISSING. I know, why do I hate America, most companies would rather go out of business than invest anything in their new hires. Google has a strategy of hiring smart people and finding stuff for them to do; frequently this involves teaching them a specific language that they may not be fully up to speed on, but can get there in short order. Last I checked they were doing pretty well.
Another objection that I hear to training your people is "but but but they'll get the new skill and leave for another company!" If they're leaving, it's probably not because they want to screw you over. They're leaving because another company will treat them better. Treat your people better than the competition and they won't leave. Of course, that involves treating your people better, so nobody does it, because the sky will fall or something.
Kind of hard to make money if you don't give people jobs. Think about this: How long can a company function with an open C-level position? How long can a company function without the people who do actual work?
Do you think Walmart would continue to make unreasonable amounts of money if they didn't have cashiers?
GM and Ford have the largest market share at this point, and have for over a decade. I don't think the US automotive industry is struggling.
Of course, if you're an executive or a shareholder in one of those companies, you want the public to think you're struggling because of greedy lazy union workers.
You know, if you're going to post your revisionist slavery-apologist bullshit, at least have the balls to post under your own name.
That's some A-level revisionist history right there.
I bet you're just butthurt because the battle flag (NOT the flag of the Confederacy, the battle flag was directly representative of mass slaughter on the battlefield) no longer flies over many southern institutions.
Bullshit. Most jobs that require a degree could competently be done by a high school dropout with some additional job training.
Employers want people with degrees because it's harder to quit when you're staring six figures of student loan debt in the face, so they can work you harder, pay you less, and generally treat you like shit.
The difference is that you probably didn't spend six figures while you were getting that experience. I'm hoping you were paid for it.
My point is that the degree is useless, it matters if you have a marketable skill set. If you're leaving college without the ability to find a job in a reasonable amount of time (a couple months) then either you or your college is doing it wrong.
Then CS is a dead-end as far as immediate practical employment is concerned - which, when you're facing $100,000 in loans, is far more important than faffing about with theory.
Like I was saying, the days where the kind of education that most CS departments have been providing is useful are rapidly approaching zero. It's too expensive to waste your time like that. While a certain amount of theory makes your practical skills more useful, if you can't get a job the day you graduate, then it's a waste of time.
I have. She understood.
While you're not wrong, the problem there is this:
Joe went to a four-year "traditional" college for his training.
Bob went to a community college for his (identical) training.
Which one gets hired? (Hint: Not Bob.)
Then, after that, learn a skill which people will actually pay you to use. If you enjoy it, either there's something wrong with you or someone is taking advantage of you.
You did support work for ten years? Now you're actively employed dealing with script kiddie bullshit?
I wouldn't brag about your experience. If you're still doing that grunt work, there's something wrong with you; either you're shitty at your job, or you lack any ambition or self-esteem. Support is the ditch-digging of the 21st century; you get yelled at all day by stupid people who can't be bothered to learn about what would prevent the problem from happening in the first place. You have to sit there and take their abuse, because complaining gets you fired. Anyone else in the company is more credible and valuable than help desk/support, as far as management is concerned. Shit rolls downhill, and guess who's at the foot of said hill?
Hey, C-student English majors need jobs too! Without HR they'd starve!
Funny, the only thing I learned working at the Help Desk is that people are wicked fucking stupid and I hate them.
Or, you can tell them you don't do free tech support for anyone. Seriously, if people can't be bothered to learn the simplest things about computing, then fuck them, they're on their own.
Coddling the technically illiterate has led to our current situation of millions of idiots having compromised, unpatched Windows machines directly connected to the Internet, spewing spam into my mailbox.
An education isn't marketable. Training is marketable. For most employers, a GPA of 3.8 and a pile of horse shit have the same value as the pile of horse shit by itself. Sure, it might help you slightly when you go to get your first job out of college, but most "entry level" jobs seem to require 2 years' experience in the role.
When a higher education didn't cost more than some peoples' first houses, having an "education" was meaningful. Nowadays any college that is graduating students with no directly marketable skills (but plenty of "education") is useless. BSCS holders should be able to take a computer apart and put it back together, program in at least three languages fluently, design an efficient and manageable database schema, and have contributed to or started at least one open source project. Knowing theory is useful in addition to those skills, but not valuable in and of itself. Every programming job description I see has the requirement "BSCS or equivalent experience". What that means to me is that it's the skills, not the theory, that they're most interested in.
"Education" is great, but at the end of the day, you need to eat.