But the less than ideal teachers that can turn a intro physics course into something that makes people say they hate physics the rest of their life isn't going to do too well with short survey courses either... It would be kind of a gamble, either the teacher is passionate and concise doing a good job of showing off the subject in that short course, or the survey course would be even more useless fluff ignored by students
At least with the short survey courses you have wasted less of the students' time. It would actually be less useless fluff, not more (as you mention in your post).
But did your exposure to Physics in High School.influence your decision to take it in college?
Not at all. And I really mean that, it didn't affect it at all.
I didn't switch to Physics until after my Engineering Physics classes in college. Once the foundation of calculus was set, everyone in the class was at least smart enough to pass Calc II (not true even in honors classes in high school), and the teacher wasn't afraid to make the class hard enough that even half of those students would fail, the class could actually cover the material well enough to be interesting.
Before jumping to some assumption that he is a bible thumping moron (I made the same assumption at first), you should read the article. He doing make very valid points. He actually says he would like to replace full classes on topics like chemistry with several survey classes that expose students to many subjects before they choose the ones they are interested in. This sounds like a great idea. I was a physics major in college, and even I found my high school Physics class hardly useful at all. Not nearly enough depth to gain useful knowledge, and those who will never use it weren't paying attention anyway.
The story we are posting under is talking about work done while doing graduate work. If you are doing a graduate thesis on something you are not passionate about, you need to re-think your decision. I am using the same definition of work used in this story. They don't mean grading papers 80 hours per week. They mean doing research towards your thesis. The paper even mentions that they know some of the work is going to be done at home.
I have said in many of my posts that I do not mean work under the constraints, requirements, and deadlines found in an office environment. Including in the post you are responding to.
That is the standard defense mechanism that many use when other people talk about loving their job. They make the false dichotomy that if people love their job enough for it to be a hobby, they must not have a life. I like to think I have made it clear there is nothing wrong with liking boating or sports (I love football and basketball) or any other hobby more than their job. I only have a problem when people say that those who consider their job their primary hobby somehow have no life (or that people with more leisure hobbies have more of a life).
And that's all well and good, but the problem is that it comes to be expected that everyone else needs to put in those hours, too.
No, the problem is those who don't want to put in that extra work, but put up with it anyway. Or those who expect the same level of pay as those who put more time in.
Let's say you are hired at a great rate of pay (I'll just use 100k for this example). That's your pay when you work 40 hours. If you are working 80 hours without overtime, you are effectively cutting your rate in half.
I never said anything about my hourly rate. I was talking about how much I am paid. My salary is far too high for someone who is only working 40 hours per week (meaning I am not worth my weekly salary / 40 per hour). That is what I meant when I implied that I am not being underpaid.
Indefinetly. I am not talking about 60-80 hours fixing bug tickets. I agree that working much more than 50 hours at my job where I am mostly told what to do would make me burn out fast.
But programming is one of my hobbies, and has been for the last 20 years. I almost always have something I am curious about, and most questions that can't easily be answered with a Google search take actual work to figure out. Whether I am writing an app to help me draft my next fantasy team, downloading census data to see how much wealth from the middle class is going to the upper middle class vs the wealthy, writing a custom DBMS to test some theories on polyglot distributed database storage, or any other number of personal projects, I am often programming in my spare time.
And these projects over the years have made me a much better software engineer than I would be if I spent most of my time watching movies and boating. Most of what I know about design patterns, compiler design, algorithms, etc. was learned from books read in my free time (most of the time learning how weak my university's coverage of these topics was).
I really do feel sorry for people who have never found a field where work and leisure are almost the same thing.
Who said anything about lower pay? When I was hired it was because of the knowledge and capabilities that I have because of the effort I put in. I would be a good developer if I never studied or worked on personal projects outside of work, but I wouldn't be as good. And based on discussions I have had with friends in the field about their pay, I am well paid for the extra skillsets I bring to the table.
Employees should get paid less than me if all they do in their free time is go boating. They are less valuable (unless their natural skill is great enough that it trumps my extra work).
I guess most people just don't like to hear that some of us enjoy our careers enough that it is one of our primary hobbies. I easily spend 60-80 hours working on some software development related task (even if it is just reading a book), and I don't consider myself overworked.
And Henry Ford was an anti-semite, Walt Disney was at least accused of being one too.
That is the best you got? You must also think that every slave owner throughout history was a horrible person too.
Morallity always has to be looked at in the context of the era in which someone lived. Throughout most of human history very few societies thought it was wrong to own slaves, treat women as property of men, hate those from cultures different than your own, etc.
My great grandfather was a bigot, but he was just a poor farmer who didn't know any better. That doesn't excuse his behavior, but it should be taken into consideration when deciding whether he was a bad person.
Conversely, I've never seen a programming cert that impressed me, because an industrial-grade real-world software system isn't something you can whip up in a 2-hour test session - anything realistic would take weeks or longer (despite what the boss/users think). The only "cert" I'd accept for that would be experience. And people have been known to fudge on the experience.
I have started to notice that some programming certifications are based on actual software development projects. Both Java and Salesforce come to mind. They give you a project that you should be able to complete in 4-6 months part time, and then you have to write an essay about how and why you did what you did. Although I have no idea how high their standards are.
The more certifications you have, usually the less qualified you are with a few exceptions.
The primary exception to this statement is anyone who has worked as a consultant. The company I work for now is crazy about their consultants getting certifications, because it helps them convince clients that they are putting experts on their project. We know they are almost worthless, but clients like them.
[quote] that's because the scarcity of talent[/quote] Hogwash, no such scarcity exists. There is a scarcity of talented programmers that will work for minimum wage (inside the U.S.). But that's not really the same thing now, is it?
Whenever someone claims there is no talent scarcity in the software development industry, I am reminded of the poker proverb: If after ten minutes at the poker table you do know know who the sucker is, you are the sucker.
If you work as a developer and you do not notice the severe level of talent scarcity, you are probably not talented enough to notice. I don't know you at all so I could be way off base in this one case, but I have never met a skilled developer who wasn't frustrated with the lack of talent in the industry.
I slightly disagree with you about point #1. The majority of tasks that have to be done for most projects do not need great developers. When I pass off work to junior developers, it is usually because I know they will do it just as fast as me. If we need code to map data between persistent storage and DTOs, I am not going to write that any faster than a fresh college grad. And my company pays them about half as much. They would rather me be working on something where my experience and ability provides them far more than twice the productivity as junior developers.
If you only have "rockstar" developers, you are overspending for much of the work they are doing.
I have to disagree, especially at only 10 years of experience. A good masters program should be exposing you to a variety of development methods, techniques, and theory. Far more that most people with 10, or even 20 years experience could have learned in the course of a normal career.
(I am the OP, didn't realize I was posting Anonymously)
Since when is 10 years not that much experience? Once you have been working for 10 years, you should be familiar with most of the industry. At least as much familiarity as you would get from a single course. I just finished with a required course on software testing, and it was teaching what white box testing and unit testing is, what branch coverage is, etc. Last semester I was "learning" what the factory and command pattern are. If you haven't picked those up in 10 years, you are a code monkey (and you shouldn't be a code monkey after 10 years). I did learn what Modified Condition / Decision Coverage is, so I guess my time wasn't a complete waste (unless I could learn that on my own for less than $3k and about 80 hours of time).
Almost all good programmers I know had moved to a senior developer, software architect, or consultant position by their early 30s. The only exceptions I can think of changed career paths in their 20s or 30s, so it took them longer (not longer than 10 years experience, they just started their experience later in life).
I guess the real point of my post was that getting a graduate degree in computer science / software engineering / etc. is usually only good for credentials padding or for switching careers (great schools like Stanford or MIT may differ). It can also help make a mediocre developer a little less mediocre, as long as the experience jump starts the student into actually working on their career in the future. That is unless you take extreme effort to push yourself and do challenging and interesting research projects, as I mentioned in my post.
While there are plenty of stories out there about huge companies that got their start from angel investors and venture capitalists, the reality is that most businesses still start from a combination of owners' cash injections and bank credit.
Most people who start their own businesses are not 22 year olds with an idea they can sell to a VC. They are quite often 40 year olds with decades of experience and decades of savings, who combine their assets with additional funding from banks to get their business of the ground.
It looks like it is too soon to know exactly why some trades were cancelled. The official word from the NYSE is that companies whose stock rose over 30% today's start price had their trades cancelled. But the NYSE also launched their Retail Liquidity Program (RLP) today, so it may not just be a coincidence that this problem happened today.
Whether anyone likes it or not, the stock exchanges do take steps to help ensure that the markets function rationally. When things get out of whack, no matter who does it, they step in try and maintain some level of order. If you did something on your own that swung the markets by hundreds of millions of dollars, then they would step in to stop you too.
It isn't like the Knight Capital Group was given a get out of jail free card. They lost $440 million. They also lost over 50% of their worth in the stock market, for a loss of about $385 million.
On the other hand, those accidental sells significantly affected the price of certain stocks. If you are an average investor holding onto one of those stocks, wouldn't you rather the trades were canceled so you didn't take a bath due to someone else's error?
If you just randomly bought a stock whose price went up over 30% in 45 minutes (the criteria they used to determine which trades to cancel), then it your own dumb fault that you lost money. Anyone who was holding onto these stocks were not greatly affected, because the prices already returned to normal after Knight Capital Group had to sell those inflated stocks back.
As an overall percentage, it's down. In the 1970s, 36% of US families stayed in the same income quintile. In the 1980s, 37%, and in the 1990s, 40%. That's reduced class mobility. How significant this is debatable, but it's not "unsubstantiated opinion and bordering on pure fiction".
Measuring economic mobility by using quintiles is incredibly misleading. It punishes more powerful economies where there is more room between quintiles.
In 1971, there was a $25,200 gap between the average income of the 2nd and 4th quintiles in the US (in 2005 dollars). In 2005, there was a $36,600 gap between the average income of the 2nd and 4th quintiles in the US. This means the 3rd quintile grew by $5700, or 45%. Average Income By Quintile
Considering the increased size of each quintile, it is obvious that mobility between quintiles would reduce. Someone at the middle of the 3rd quintile in 1971 would have to increase his income by 15.7% to reach the 4th quintile. In 2005, a similar individual would have to raise his income by 21.8%
That means it takes a 40% greater income increase for the middle quintile to move up in 2005 than it did in 1979. Considering the percentage of people who stayed in the middle quintile only rose by 8%, I would say income mobility is growing rapidly.
You are assuming that people sold all, or most of, their shares. This is not the case. MZ clearly held on to most of his shares and therefore did not make money off the initial, higher pricing.
If MZ sold some of his shares, then he made money at the initial, higher price. He sold 30.2 million shares at $37.58, netting him over a billion dollars. Even if Facebook goes bankrupt tomorrow, Zuckerberg is a billionare (not just a "paper billionare").
Obviously no one was going to sell all of their shares, or it would be too obvious that they had no faith in the $38 initial price.
So let me get this straight? According to you then the housing market was not overvalued 6 years ago? Pets.com and isellyoucrap.com were also valued fairly and accurately because the IPO for these companies were like $70 a share?
I never said that Facebook was worth that amount. I don't remember using the words value or worth at all. I just said it was not priced too high. Pets.com or AnyNumberOfOtherOverpricedCompanies.com were not overpriced either if they found buyers, even if they were never worth what they were priced at.
All of those houses that sold for $400k were not overpriced, even if they are worth $300k now. They were never worth $400k, but they were correctly priced at $400k if they found a buyer. Setting a price only has to do with how much money you can make selling something, not what the actual value of the product is.
How can you possibly say it was priced too high? If all of the shares Facebook was selling were bought by someone at $38, then that was the correct price. If they set it at $25 then the price would still be exactly where it is today but Zuckerberg and his friends would have made a lot less money.
The price the stock started at was set to make the current stakeholders the most money possible, not to help make early investors the most money possible.
While fully autonomous cars may be the more desirable future, computer backup systems like this are a more likely first step. Once people start getting used to cars making good decisions on the road, they will be more willing to give the computers even more control.
I say it's awfully childish. Do we really want the Internet to be an unstable place?
It is far more childish to think that if we just play nice, everyone else will follow suit. The Internet will not be made secure by covering our eyes, crossing our fingers, and praying. It will only be more secure by making sure that those interested in its security have bigger "guns" than those interested in its instability.
Slashdot Mirror
But the less than ideal teachers that can turn a intro physics course into something that makes people say they hate physics the rest of their life isn't going to do too well with short survey courses either ... It would be kind of a gamble, either the teacher is passionate and concise doing a good job of showing off the subject in that short course, or the survey course would be even more useless fluff ignored by students
At least with the short survey courses you have wasted less of the students' time. It would actually be less useless fluff, not more (as you mention in your post).
But did your exposure to Physics in High School.influence your decision to take it in college?
Not at all. And I really mean that, it didn't affect it at all.
I didn't switch to Physics until after my Engineering Physics classes in college. Once the foundation of calculus was set, everyone in the class was at least smart enough to pass Calc II (not true even in honors classes in high school), and the teacher wasn't afraid to make the class hard enough that even half of those students would fail, the class could actually cover the material well enough to be interesting.
Before jumping to some assumption that he is a bible thumping moron (I made the same assumption at first), you should read the article. He doing make very valid points. He actually says he would like to replace full classes on topics like chemistry with several survey classes that expose students to many subjects before they choose the ones they are interested in. This sounds like a great idea. I was a physics major in college, and even I found my high school Physics class hardly useful at all. Not nearly enough depth to gain useful knowledge, and those who will never use it weren't paying attention anyway.
The story we are posting under is talking about work done while doing graduate work. If you are doing a graduate thesis on something you are not passionate about, you need to re-think your decision. I am using the same definition of work used in this story. They don't mean grading papers 80 hours per week. They mean doing research towards your thesis. The paper even mentions that they know some of the work is going to be done at home.
I have said in many of my posts that I do not mean work under the constraints, requirements, and deadlines found in an office environment. Including in the post you are responding to.
I'll take a life instead.
That is the standard defense mechanism that many use when other people talk about loving their job. They make the false dichotomy that if people love their job enough for it to be a hobby, they must not have a life. I like to think I have made it clear there is nothing wrong with liking boating or sports (I love football and basketball) or any other hobby more than their job. I only have a problem when people say that those who consider their job their primary hobby somehow have no life (or that people with more leisure hobbies have more of a life).
And that's all well and good, but the problem is that it comes to be expected that everyone else needs to put in those hours, too.
No, the problem is those who don't want to put in that extra work, but put up with it anyway. Or those who expect the same level of pay as those who put more time in.
Let's say you are hired at a great rate of pay (I'll just use 100k for this example). That's your pay when you work 40 hours. If you are working 80 hours without overtime, you are effectively cutting your rate in half.
I never said anything about my hourly rate. I was talking about how much I am paid. My salary is far too high for someone who is only working 40 hours per week (meaning I am not worth my weekly salary / 40 per hour). That is what I meant when I implied that I am not being underpaid.
Yeah? For how long? A month? Year? Lifetime?
Indefinetly. I am not talking about 60-80 hours fixing bug tickets. I agree that working much more than 50 hours at my job where I am mostly told what to do would make me burn out fast.
But programming is one of my hobbies, and has been for the last 20 years. I almost always have something I am curious about, and most questions that can't easily be answered with a Google search take actual work to figure out. Whether I am writing an app to help me draft my next fantasy team, downloading census data to see how much wealth from the middle class is going to the upper middle class vs the wealthy, writing a custom DBMS to test some theories on polyglot distributed database storage, or any other number of personal projects, I am often programming in my spare time.
And these projects over the years have made me a much better software engineer than I would be if I spent most of my time watching movies and boating. Most of what I know about design patterns, compiler design, algorithms, etc. was learned from books read in my free time (most of the time learning how weak my university's coverage of these topics was).
I really do feel sorry for people who have never found a field where work and leisure are almost the same thing.
Who said anything about lower pay? When I was hired it was because of the knowledge and capabilities that I have because of the effort I put in. I would be a good developer if I never studied or worked on personal projects outside of work, but I wouldn't be as good. And based on discussions I have had with friends in the field about their pay, I am well paid for the extra skillsets I bring to the table.
Employees should get paid less than me if all they do in their free time is go boating. They are less valuable (unless their natural skill is great enough that it trumps my extra work).
I guess most people just don't like to hear that some of us enjoy our careers enough that it is one of our primary hobbies. I easily spend 60-80 hours working on some software development related task (even if it is just reading a book), and I don't consider myself overworked.
And Henry Ford was an anti-semite, Walt Disney was at least accused of being one too.
That is the best you got? You must also think that every slave owner throughout history was a horrible person too.
Morallity always has to be looked at in the context of the era in which someone lived. Throughout most of human history very few societies thought it was wrong to own slaves, treat women as property of men, hate those from cultures different than your own, etc.
My great grandfather was a bigot, but he was just a poor farmer who didn't know any better. That doesn't excuse his behavior, but it should be taken into consideration when deciding whether he was a bad person.
Conversely, I've never seen a programming cert that impressed me, because an industrial-grade real-world software system isn't something you can whip up in a 2-hour test session - anything realistic would take weeks or longer (despite what the boss/users think). The only "cert" I'd accept for that would be experience. And people have been known to fudge on the experience.
I have started to notice that some programming certifications are based on actual software development projects. Both Java and Salesforce come to mind. They give you a project that you should be able to complete in 4-6 months part time, and then you have to write an essay about how and why you did what you did. Although I have no idea how high their standards are.
The more certifications you have, usually the less qualified you are with a few exceptions.
The primary exception to this statement is anyone who has worked as a consultant. The company I work for now is crazy about their consultants getting certifications, because it helps them convince clients that they are putting experts on their project. We know they are almost worthless, but clients like them.
[quote] that's because the scarcity of talent[/quote]
Hogwash, no such scarcity exists. There is a scarcity of talented programmers that will work for minimum wage (inside the U.S.). But that's not really the same thing now, is it?
Whenever someone claims there is no talent scarcity in the software development industry, I am reminded of the poker proverb: If after ten minutes at the poker table you do know know who the sucker is, you are the sucker.
If you work as a developer and you do not notice the severe level of talent scarcity, you are probably not talented enough to notice. I don't know you at all so I could be way off base in this one case, but I have never met a skilled developer who wasn't frustrated with the lack of talent in the industry.
I slightly disagree with you about point #1. The majority of tasks that have to be done for most projects do not need great developers. When I pass off work to junior developers, it is usually because I know they will do it just as fast as me. If we need code to map data between persistent storage and DTOs, I am not going to write that any faster than a fresh college grad. And my company pays them about half as much. They would rather me be working on something where my experience and ability provides them far more than twice the productivity as junior developers.
If you only have "rockstar" developers, you are overspending for much of the work they are doing.
I have to disagree, especially at only 10 years of experience. A good masters program should be exposing you to a variety of development methods, techniques, and theory. Far more that most people with 10, or even 20 years experience could have learned in the course of a normal career.
(I am the OP, didn't realize I was posting Anonymously)
Since when is 10 years not that much experience? Once you have been working for 10 years, you should be familiar with most of the industry. At least as much familiarity as you would get from a single course. I just finished with a required course on software testing, and it was teaching what white box testing and unit testing is, what branch coverage is, etc. Last semester I was "learning" what the factory and command pattern are. If you haven't picked those up in 10 years, you are a code monkey (and you shouldn't be a code monkey after 10 years). I did learn what Modified Condition / Decision Coverage is, so I guess my time wasn't a complete waste (unless I could learn that on my own for less than $3k and about 80 hours of time).
Almost all good programmers I know had moved to a senior developer, software architect, or consultant position by their early 30s. The only exceptions I can think of changed career paths in their 20s or 30s, so it took them longer (not longer than 10 years experience, they just started their experience later in life).
I guess the real point of my post was that getting a graduate degree in computer science / software engineering / etc. is usually only good for credentials padding or for switching careers (great schools like Stanford or MIT may differ). It can also help make a mediocre developer a little less mediocre, as long as the experience jump starts the student into actually working on their career in the future. That is unless you take extreme effort to push yourself and do challenging and interesting research projects, as I mentioned in my post.
While there are plenty of stories out there about huge companies that got their start from angel investors and venture capitalists, the reality is that most businesses still start from a combination of owners' cash injections and bank credit.
Most people who start their own businesses are not 22 year olds with an idea they can sell to a VC. They are quite often 40 year olds with decades of experience and decades of savings, who combine their assets with additional funding from banks to get their business of the ground.
It looks like it is too soon to know exactly why some trades were cancelled. The official word from the NYSE is that companies whose stock rose over 30% today's start price had their trades cancelled. But the NYSE also launched their Retail Liquidity Program (RLP) today, so it may not just be a coincidence that this problem happened today.
Whether anyone likes it or not, the stock exchanges do take steps to help ensure that the markets function rationally. When things get out of whack, no matter who does it, they step in try and maintain some level of order. If you did something on your own that swung the markets by hundreds of millions of dollars, then they would step in to stop you too.
It isn't like the Knight Capital Group was given a get out of jail free card. They lost $440 million. They also lost over 50% of their worth in the stock market, for a loss of about $385 million.
On the other hand, those accidental sells significantly affected the price of certain stocks. If you are an average investor holding onto one of those stocks, wouldn't you rather the trades were canceled so you didn't take a bath due to someone else's error?
If you just randomly bought a stock whose price went up over 30% in 45 minutes (the criteria they used to determine which trades to cancel), then it your own dumb fault that you lost money. Anyone who was holding onto these stocks were not greatly affected, because the prices already returned to normal after Knight Capital Group had to sell those inflated stocks back.
As an overall percentage, it's down. In the 1970s, 36% of US families stayed in the same income quintile. In the 1980s, 37%, and in the 1990s, 40%. That's reduced class mobility. How significant this is debatable, but it's not "unsubstantiated opinion and bordering on pure fiction".
Measuring economic mobility by using quintiles is incredibly misleading. It punishes more powerful economies where there is more room between quintiles.
In 1971, there was a $25,200 gap between the average income of the 2nd and 4th quintiles in the US (in 2005 dollars).
In 2005, there was a $36,600 gap between the average income of the 2nd and 4th quintiles in the US.
This means the 3rd quintile grew by $5700, or 45%.
Average Income By Quintile
Considering the increased size of each quintile, it is obvious that mobility between quintiles would reduce. Someone at the middle of the 3rd quintile in 1971 would have to increase his income by 15.7% to reach the 4th quintile. In 2005, a similar individual would have to raise his income by 21.8%
That means it takes a 40% greater income increase for the middle quintile to move up in 2005 than it did in 1979. Considering the percentage of people who stayed in the middle quintile only rose by 8%, I would say income mobility is growing rapidly.
You are assuming that people sold all, or most of, their shares. This is not the case. MZ clearly held on to most of his shares and therefore did not make money off the initial, higher pricing.
If MZ sold some of his shares, then he made money at the initial, higher price. He sold 30.2 million shares at $37.58, netting him over a billion dollars. Even if Facebook goes bankrupt tomorrow, Zuckerberg is a billionare (not just a "paper billionare").
Obviously no one was going to sell all of their shares, or it would be too obvious that they had no faith in the $38 initial price.
So let me get this straight? According to you then the housing market was not overvalued 6 years ago? Pets.com and isellyoucrap.com were also valued fairly and accurately because the IPO for these companies were like $70 a share?
I never said that Facebook was worth that amount. I don't remember using the words value or worth at all. I just said it was not priced too high. Pets.com or AnyNumberOfOtherOverpricedCompanies.com were not overpriced either if they found buyers, even if they were never worth what they were priced at.
All of those houses that sold for $400k were not overpriced, even if they are worth $300k now. They were never worth $400k, but they were correctly priced at $400k if they found a buyer. Setting a price only has to do with how much money you can make selling something, not what the actual value of the product is.
They priced it too high.
How can you possibly say it was priced too high? If all of the shares Facebook was selling were bought by someone at $38, then that was the correct price. If they set it at $25 then the price would still be exactly where it is today but Zuckerberg and his friends would have made a lot less money.
The price the stock started at was set to make the current stakeholders the most money possible, not to help make early investors the most money possible.
While fully autonomous cars may be the more desirable future, computer backup systems like this are a more likely first step. Once people start getting used to cars making good decisions on the road, they will be more willing to give the computers even more control.
I say it's awfully childish. Do we really want the Internet to be an unstable place?
It is far more childish to think that if we just play nice, everyone else will follow suit. The Internet will not be made secure by covering our eyes, crossing our fingers, and praying. It will only be more secure by making sure that those interested in its security have bigger "guns" than those interested in its instability.