I'm convinced that the single most important factor in defining your relationship with another person is shared experiences. The intensity and timeliness of those experiences determine how good a friend that person is at a particular moment in time. I think this explains why your High School friends are so vitally important to you in High School, but so meaningless ten years later. Or why war buddies from Vietnam or Korea still feel incredibly strong friendships for people they haven't seen or talked to in twenty five years.
The point of this is that the experiment is flawed. The way you build a friendship with someone is by doing the things you do. That shared experience is what the friendship is based on. Attempting to use conversation to build a relationship with someone else is a fundamentally flawed. You can never have a real friendship because you haven't had any shared experience that carries any significance or weight. The shared experience in this case is "I'm stuck in a room talking with this person that I don't know." Hardly the stuff of a meaningful friendship.
I had a nice little Motorla StarTac awhile ago. It went from vibrate to ring after three rings. Then it sounded like an electronic phone. I was happy. With my new phone, I can't take it off vibrate because all of the ringers suck.
All I want is a cell phone! I don't want to take pictures or read email or chat or surf the web or play games. I can do all of that at home (or at work for that matter). I want my phone to be a phone.
Even with the post above, I'm still not sure that anyone has articulated the real problem as I see it. For me, it's about the quality of the software that is produced and the costs required to achieve that quality.
I've worked with about 30 Indian programmers during my career, and as a rule, I found them to be less skilled than the average Western programmers I worked with. There were several outstanding individuals - one was a Technical Architect, one was an Oracle DBA, and one was a System Administrator but for the most part the others kept their seats warm and dutifully cranked out subpar code. If the majority of the individuals I've worked with are representative of the majority of Indian programmers in India, eventually companies will bring their applications back so that they can be rewritten. Along with that, one of the things that I found was that the Indians I worked with ended up being bound by the technologies they were trained in. These programmers did not consider themselves to be Software Engineers, or Programmers, but Java Programmers or VB Programmers. As our team moved from a Java to Perl and PHP (to decrease the time it took to develop our applications), our Indian team members were unwilling or unable to make the transition. They knew what they knew, and they would not, or could not learn something that fell outside their niche. I'm certain that this isn't a blanket condition that affects all Indian programmers, but if it affects the average Indian programmer, that might say something about how the Indian educational system trains their IT workers. Perhaps that more time is spent on the syntax of particular languages and less time on the fundamentals of software engineering or on the theory of computer science.
The other thing that keeps nagging at me is the reference to CMM level. To maintain a CMM Level 5 rating would require a huge amount of overhead. Things like process documentation, enforcement, feedback, training, evalutation, etc. These tasks would have to be performed in addition to the job of actually generating the product. To me, it seems likely that you'd incur at least a 50% overhead simply with process. With that in mind, Indian developers would half as productive as they could or should be. Which means that companies are paying for alot more than just the product. And the real kicker is that CMM at any level has very little to say about the quality of the product or the quality of the code that goes into the product - just that the process that was used to generate the code is consistent and constantly improving.
Finally, I'd like to talk a little about the quality of the individual programmer. Given that the US software industry has been around for about 20 years and that there has been relatively little hiring in the last three years, I'd suggest that the average IT worker in the US has about 10 years experience. Also given that the Indian outsourcing trend started roughly five years ago and has been accelerating rapidly over the last year or two, I'd suggest that the average IT worker in India has about 2 years of experience. Assuming that the levels of intelligence and innate skills are similar, how many average Indian programmers would it take produce the same quality of output as an average US programmer? Following along with that, we know that as you throw more programmers at a problem the quality of the solution degrades. So the real question is even more fundamental - CAN you replace the average US programmer with any number of average Indian programmers?
I got my bachelor's degree in Chemical Engineering. I never did get a job as a ChemE, but eventually found something as an Environmental Engineer doing ground and surface water sampling. When I wasn't out in the field, I was putting together reports and presentations in Excel. My boss noticed that I had a knack for doing that kind of stuff and encouraged me to pursue it more.
I eventually made my way back to college to pick my Master's in EE/CS.
I believe that it's easier to get into CS by non-traditionaly methods because the field is young and the culture is such that almost everything you need can be found on the net. With a little bit of interest and effort anyone can learn the syntax of a language and the incantations for compilation. However I don't think that just anyone can become a solid Computer Scientist without time spent in the classroom learning the stuff that makes your head hurt - algorithms and discrete math. Without that background, it would be very difficult to really progress as a developer.
As with everything else, a degree is what you make of it. While I was getting my degree, I saw ALOT people coast through, taking the courses that required the least amount of work. Not coincidently, those courses were the ones that provided the least benefit to the students, but they were the ones with the highest attendence.
So I don't think that anyone can say with absolute conviction that a coder with a degree is better than one without - simply because there are a lot of slackers and guys who see that CS is going to pay them $40k/yr out of college.
On the other hand, I believe that taking the courses required for a degree is important. Computer science theory, although boring in general, is almost a necessity to achieve a thorough understanding of what you're doing. With the background in theory, you can quickly and easily apply techniques in any language, because you know why the techniques exist. I think you'll find that one common attribute of the authors of the most common computer languages - higher education.
To say that you don't need formal training is arrogant and short sighted.
Some people have stated that owning a degree shows that you make a good parrot - being able to recite word for word what was shoved down your throat. I would suggest that the lack of a formal education makes it very difficult to truly learn and utilize differing techniques. I think that you'll that alot of people without the benefit of a degree fall into the trap of seeking out someone else's solution to a problem they have, but never fully understanding the solution. If they don't understand the solution, they attempt to apply that solution everywhere they can, because that solution is "in their toolbox". These people expand their abilities by acquiring more and more code from other people, filling their toolbox but never fully understanding these new tools.
With the formal training and the expose to the theory, a person is more able to develop their own solutions and to fully understand someone else's solutions. This, I believe, would make that person a better programmer.
It distresses me that the lawyers have taken the wheel a vehicle that was designed to protect the rights of inventors and will not steer where the inventors wish to go. It would seem to me that in patent law, the lawyers are providing the service of protecting the interests of their clients. If the clients decide that their interests don't need as much protection as the lawyers believe, wouldn't it seem reasonable that the lawyers would allow the rules to be changed to support the desires of their clients?
I believe that almost everyone in the software industry understands that the rate of innovation is such that 20 years from now any patent they hold will have been rendered obselete. If the entire industry agrees to a reduced duration for sotfware patents, then shouldn't the patent office allow this? It would certainly seem that the patent office and the lawyers have allowed this to take a life of its own, forgetting the original purpose.
It seems to me that trying to group CBRN weapons with cracking requires a huge leap.
For CBRN, aquisition of the materials required to implement these weapons is a significant issue. As mentioned in the article, people get arrested for simply trying to buy the materials needed. The acquisition of materials for a cyber attack is a much simpler task.
The level of knowledge required to implement a CBRN weapon is orders of magnitude higher than to implement a cyber attack. Additionally, the CBRN agents must be stored, transported, and potentially disposed of. These are risks to the developer, not the victim.
There are countermeasures for some kinds of CBRN attacks, but in general they are impossible to implement to ensure 100% safety. For other kinds there are no countermeasures. For cyber attacks there are almost always defenses. More often than not these defenses are disabled for the sake of convenience, or due to ignorance.
I have no doubt that crackers can cause significant damage, but to group crackers in with CBRN agents is blowing their capabilities way out of proportion. In order to implement a cyber attack it takes a $500 computer and an internet connection - essentially it can be done by anyone who wants to learn how. It's impossible to prevent because the threshhold is so low and the materials required can server legitimate purposes as well. But the effects can be neutralized if a small portion of the population - the system admins - are kept up to date and are willing to do what's necessary to keep their systems secure.
It seems like the problems the students had were that they were not prepared for an on-line learnign experience. As another comment stated, 35 emails in one week is hardly an overwhelming amount of email. I get more spam than that each week.
The one comment that I thought really explemplified the lack of preparation by the students was the comment about the chat room going too fast. I've been mudding for a long time now - going on five years. At first, being in that environment was confusing and frustrating. After awhile however, it became almost second nature. Messages were seen and remembered, and responses were made quickly and accurately - AFTER having been acclimated to the environment.
I'm not really sure how you (as a university) would provide a means for students to get acclimated... but perhaps the professor could log all conversations from the chatroom and post them on the web page.
I just seems to me like the students in the class expected a cake walk and got a class that had some real content that they weren't expecting.
I actually kind of agree with this. But instead of simply letting them walk out of school, you give them a choice: school or work. There's plenty of menial labor that needs to be done. We've got all those thousands of miles of highway that needs the trash picked up. Millions of miles of city streets that need to be swept. And I think you should allow them to go back to school at the beginning of the next school year (or semester - might make more sense that way) than to just kick em out forever.
I think alot of people need time to really appreciate an education. Now we have people who are forced to sit though twelve years of school and get nothing or almost nothing out of it. This way, they have a choice. I'm sure most people would spend that year pushing a damn broom and get the idea really quickly that school is for them.
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I'm convinced that the single most important factor in defining your relationship with another person is shared experiences. The intensity and timeliness of those experiences determine how good a friend that person is at a particular moment in time. I think this explains why your High School friends are so vitally important to you in High School, but so meaningless ten years later. Or why war buddies from Vietnam or Korea still feel incredibly strong friendships for people they haven't seen or talked to in twenty five years.
The point of this is that the experiment is flawed. The way you build a friendship with someone is by doing the things you do. That shared experience is what the friendship is based on. Attempting to use conversation to build a relationship with someone else is a fundamentally flawed. You can never have a real friendship because you haven't had any shared experience that carries any significance or weight. The shared experience in this case is "I'm stuck in a room talking with this person that I don't know." Hardly the stuff of a meaningful friendship.
I had a nice little Motorla StarTac awhile ago. It went from vibrate to ring after three rings. Then it sounded like an electronic phone. I was happy. With my new phone, I can't take it off vibrate because all of the ringers suck.
All I want is a cell phone! I don't want to take pictures or read email or chat or surf the web or play games. I can do all of that at home (or at work for that matter). I want my phone to be a phone.
Even with the post above, I'm still not sure that anyone has articulated the real problem as I see it. For me, it's about the quality of the software that is produced and the costs required to achieve that quality.
I've worked with about 30 Indian programmers during my career, and as a rule, I found them to be less skilled than the average Western programmers I worked with. There were several outstanding individuals - one was a Technical Architect, one was an Oracle DBA, and one was a System Administrator but for the most part the others kept their seats warm and dutifully cranked out subpar code. If the majority of the individuals I've worked with are representative of the majority of Indian programmers in India, eventually companies will bring their applications back so that they can be rewritten. Along with that, one of the things that I found was that the Indians I worked with ended up being bound by the technologies they were trained in. These programmers did not consider themselves to be Software Engineers, or Programmers, but Java Programmers or VB Programmers. As our team moved from a Java to Perl and PHP (to decrease the time it took to develop our applications), our Indian team members were unwilling or unable to make the transition. They knew what they knew, and they would not, or could not learn something that fell outside their niche. I'm certain that this isn't a blanket condition that affects all Indian programmers, but if it affects the average Indian programmer, that might say something about how the Indian educational system trains their IT workers. Perhaps that more time is spent on the syntax of particular languages and less time on the fundamentals of software engineering or on the theory of computer science.
The other thing that keeps nagging at me is the reference to CMM level. To maintain a CMM Level 5 rating would require a huge amount of overhead. Things like process documentation, enforcement, feedback, training, evalutation, etc. These tasks would have to be performed in addition to the job of actually generating the product. To me, it seems likely that you'd incur at least a 50% overhead simply with process. With that in mind, Indian developers would half as productive as they could or should be. Which means that companies are paying for alot more than just the product. And the real kicker is that CMM at any level has very little to say about the quality of the product or the quality of the code that goes into the product - just that the process that was used to generate the code is consistent and constantly improving.
Finally, I'd like to talk a little about the quality of the individual programmer. Given that the US software industry has been around for about 20 years and that there has been relatively little hiring in the last three years, I'd suggest that the average IT worker in the US has about 10 years experience. Also given that the Indian outsourcing trend started roughly five years ago and has been accelerating rapidly over the last year or two, I'd suggest that the average IT worker in India has about 2 years of experience. Assuming that the levels of intelligence and innate skills are similar, how many average Indian programmers would it take produce the same quality of output as an average US programmer? Following along with that, we know that as you throw more programmers at a problem the quality of the solution degrades. So the real question is even more fundamental - CAN you replace the average US programmer with any number of average Indian programmers?
I got my bachelor's degree in Chemical Engineering. I never did get a job as a ChemE, but eventually found something as an Environmental Engineer doing ground and surface water sampling. When I wasn't out in the field, I was putting together reports and presentations in Excel. My boss noticed that I had a knack for doing that kind of stuff and encouraged me to pursue it more.
I eventually made my way back to college to pick my Master's in EE/CS.
I believe that it's easier to get into CS by non-traditionaly methods because the field is young and the culture is such that almost everything you need can be found on the net. With a little bit of interest and effort anyone can learn the syntax of a language and the incantations for compilation. However I don't think that just anyone can become a solid Computer Scientist without time spent in the classroom learning the stuff that makes your head hurt - algorithms and discrete math. Without that background, it would be very difficult to really progress as a developer.
As with everything else, a degree is what you make of it. While I was getting my degree, I saw ALOT people coast through, taking the courses that required the least amount of work. Not coincidently, those courses were the ones that provided the least benefit to the students, but they were the ones with the highest attendence.
So I don't think that anyone can say with absolute conviction that a coder with a degree is better than one without - simply because there are a lot of slackers and guys who see that CS is going to pay them $40k/yr out of college.
On the other hand, I believe that taking the courses required for a degree is important. Computer science theory, although boring in general, is almost a necessity to achieve a thorough understanding of what you're doing. With the background in theory, you can quickly and easily apply techniques in any language, because you know why the techniques exist. I think you'll find that one common attribute of the authors of the most common computer languages - higher education.
To say that you don't need formal training is arrogant and short sighted.
Some people have stated that owning a degree shows that you make a good parrot - being able to recite word for word what was shoved down your throat. I would suggest that the lack of a formal education makes it very difficult to truly learn and utilize differing techniques. I think that you'll that alot of people without the benefit of a degree fall into the trap of seeking out someone else's solution to a problem they have, but never fully understanding the solution. If they don't understand the solution, they attempt to apply that solution everywhere they can, because that solution is "in their toolbox". These people expand their abilities by acquiring more and more code from other people, filling their toolbox but never fully understanding these new tools.
With the formal training and the expose to the theory, a person is more able to develop their own solutions and to fully understand someone else's solutions. This, I believe, would make that person a better programmer.
It distresses me that the lawyers have taken the wheel a vehicle that was designed to protect the rights of inventors and will not steer where the inventors wish to go. It would seem to me that in patent law, the lawyers are providing the service of protecting the interests of their clients. If the clients decide that their interests don't need as much protection as the lawyers believe, wouldn't it seem reasonable that the lawyers would allow the rules to be changed to support the desires of their clients?
I believe that almost everyone in the software industry understands that the rate of innovation is such that 20 years from now any patent they hold will have been rendered obselete. If the entire industry agrees to a reduced duration for sotfware patents, then shouldn't the patent office allow this? It would certainly seem that the patent office and the lawyers have allowed this to take a life of its own, forgetting the original purpose.
This arrogrance is very disheartening.
It seems to me that trying to group CBRN weapons with cracking requires a huge leap.
For CBRN, aquisition of the materials required to implement these weapons is a significant issue. As mentioned in the article, people get arrested for simply trying to buy the materials needed. The acquisition of materials for a cyber attack is a much simpler task.
The level of knowledge required to implement a CBRN weapon is orders of magnitude higher than to implement a cyber attack. Additionally, the CBRN agents must be stored, transported, and potentially disposed of. These are risks to the developer, not the victim.
There are countermeasures for some kinds of CBRN attacks, but in general they are impossible to implement to ensure 100% safety. For other kinds there are no countermeasures. For cyber attacks there are almost always defenses. More often than not these defenses are disabled for the sake of convenience, or due to ignorance.
I have no doubt that crackers can cause significant damage, but to group crackers in with CBRN agents is blowing their capabilities way out of proportion. In order to implement a cyber attack it takes a $500 computer and an internet connection - essentially it can be done by anyone who wants to learn how. It's impossible to prevent because the threshhold is so low and the materials required can server legitimate purposes as well. But the effects can be neutralized if a small portion of the population - the system admins - are kept up to date and are willing to do what's necessary to keep their systems secure.
It seems like the problems the students had were that they were not prepared for an on-line learnign experience. As another comment stated, 35 emails in one week is hardly an overwhelming amount of email. I get more spam than that each week.
The one comment that I thought really explemplified the lack of preparation by the students was the comment about the chat room going too fast. I've been mudding for a long time now - going on five years. At first, being in that environment was confusing and frustrating. After awhile however, it became almost second nature. Messages were seen and remembered, and responses were made quickly and accurately - AFTER having been acclimated to the environment.
I'm not really sure how you (as a university) would provide a means for students to get acclimated... but perhaps the professor could log all conversations from the chatroom and post them on the web page.
I just seems to me like the students in the class expected a cake walk and got a class that had some real content that they weren't expecting.
I actually kind of agree with this. But instead of simply letting them walk out of school, you give them a choice: school or work. There's plenty of menial labor that needs to be done. We've got all those thousands of miles of highway that needs the trash picked up. Millions of miles of city streets that need to be swept. And I think you should allow them to go back to school at the beginning of the next school year (or semester - might make more sense that way) than to just kick em out forever.
I think alot of people need time to really appreciate an education. Now we have people who are forced to sit though twelve years of school and get nothing or almost nothing out of it. This way, they have a choice. I'm sure most people would spend that year pushing a damn broom and get the idea really quickly that school is for them.