The eng. school pulls in some huge grant money, and there are people (like myself) who bury themselves in that concrete monster of a building and rarely venture into the outdoors.
It was a public teaching university; research was considered a nice "extra" that my dept didn't support financially. The decision for me to choose that job over others was largely based on my family living nearby.
Good luck. Research can be fun. Most people who like it aren't in it for the money. I'm leaving a job making $95K/yr because I know I will like the work and the people I'll be working with. I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out the working environment, personalities, politics, etc. and I'm only going because it all looks very good so far:
http://www.ihmc.us
I may not be visiting this site much after my new job starts next month.
That's an oversimplified view. Plenty of professors have joint appointments in CS and some engineering discipline. Plenty of engineers do nothing but study simulation codes or prediction algorithms for their thesis.
CS is a broad field, and there is sometimes no clear line between hardware and software algorithms. I, for instance, am going to develop new robot learning algorithms with researchers from the MIT robotics lab. Some from there are engineers, some are CS.
In many schools, the CS department falls within the school of engineering. This was true at both schools I attended.
Right. Tons of people are sitting pretty without a CS degree.
You may want a BS just to "diversify your portfolio", to use finance speak. Some jobs, such as web dev, may eventually get automated out of existence. But if you can keep pushing yourself in your job into new areas, then you're probably set for life.
I got my CS Phd in 1996 and haven't found a job that uses my research skills until just a few weeks ago. Read that again. I've waited seven years. BTW, I graduated from some of the top engineering schools in the country (Stanford and CU at Boulder).
Short story version of my post: employers don't typically need research skills, so they won't pay for them, and those that do are very hard to find.
Don't expect the jobs to come after you graduate unless you're already well-connected in the research community. Is your mom or dad a PhD? Then maybe you'll have a chance to stay out of the slow lane I found myself in.
Here's some free advice on whether to get a PhD after I spent 6 years getting mine.
Don't expect industry to find your research experience valuable unless they're hiring you as a researcher. You'll probably get paid the same as a MS candidate if you're a normal developer.
Even smart people don't make it through a Ph.D. program because either they don't have good chemistry with their advisor, or they can't sustain interest in their thesis topic. You've probably never had to study one thing for more than a year. Imagine studying it for 4-8 years.
If you don't hit it off with your advisor, you're probably sunk, so spend a lot of time networking and getting to know your potential advisor before starting.
Be fired up about a topic before you apply! It's not like BS or MS where you show up, read a lot, remember a lot, and get through. If you're not passionate about your subject, then after two years, getting through your thesis will feel like pulling your own teeth out.
In case you're interested, here's what happened when I left school. I didn't have connections or serious prospects for research jobs. As it turned out, my first job out of school was writing numerical C++ libraries for an internationally recognized software company. I got paid $50K/yr for creating two libraries that made the company some serious bank. After two years of working there, I was making $54K/yr. I only got offered a 20% raise when I threatened to leave, which I did anyway.
Then I taught at a university for two years but hated the fact that most students were only interested in the diploma, not the actual subject matter. So I had to deal with lots of cheating and poor performance. Remember, this was 1998 when someone with a 2.0 GPA could get hired as a network admin. I lasted two years there. My pay finished at $44K/yr as a full-time, tenure track professor.
I've slowly jumped around to government contracting and private consulting, which have paid better, but I probably would have gotten paid the same with an MS degree.
Now, I've finally found a job as a researcher in an industry setting. I waited seven years to find it. It will pay around $85K/yr with benefits.
The point is that companies should be spending more time on testing and less on pushing out poorly tested releases every quarter.
This is called a short-sighted strategy designed to create temporary stock price raises. It works until enough users get pissed off and never want to buy from that company again.
Nice troll. I guess MS doesn't have much to worry about, does it? I'll bet that linux has really fallen off the radar screen. I'll double check and see if that's happened in the past few hours...
Linux newbies probably need a hand-hold on how to get where they want to go. Here's a suggestion I made, but I don't know how hard it would be to standardize. I think it would boil down to creating a makefile with a GUI front-end: user clicks on targets to build/install them. Online database is accessed on errors to come up with specific suggestions in case of error.
Here's an idea targeted for newbies that goes beyond Windows:
Have users identify how they want to use the system at install time, then provide a clickable checklist, available from the desktop after install, of additional things to install/configure. Make the checklist as automated as possible. I.E. first get drivers installed, then then security lockdown, then get the online connection going, then specific user apps, etc.
Linux newbies need a way to get over the technical learning curve easily and get on with productive work.
Linux is so powerful--the potential is there to have "configure; make; make install" happen with a single mouse-click, just like InstallShield.
But it could get better, too: have errors automatically compared to an online database where people have suggested fixes.
I can't tell if you're trolling or have a sheltered view of how people relate to their governments.
Funny you should bring up Russians, since I do have some friends from there. According to them, jokes about the idiocy of Soviet rule were the daily, and quite human, response to their situation. And they are still very proud of having Russian cultural origins. So I still call troll on the second post.
Your grammar and spelling errors are strangely American for a non-American. I congratulate you on learning how to emulate the results of our poor educational system so well.
The CIA did to the "Afghan freedom fighters": see this post. They did a great job at turning those radical Islamic groups into well-organized, sophisticated terrorists.
Supposedly, the book "Charlie Wilson's War" is quite an eye-opener.
It was the greatest CIA covert success in history, but the CIA then forgot about all those weapons and training and the ideologies controlling them. They can most certainly be blamed for that.
Please don't overgeneralize the slashdot politic. Both views are plausibly trolls or not, I agree with you there. But I don't know very many people who would say "I'm ashamed of my origins". That has a fishy smell, don't you think?
I'm a research programmer working as a contractor for the government, and govt engineers in my research lab are sick of patching their Windows machines. They all have to be poked and prodded to make sure the automatic patches got installed right. It happens on at least a weekly basis.
We're very close to doing away with Windows and switching to Linux with OpenOffice. We'll also need some solution for talking with the USAF Exchange Server.
UNIX is spoken here because we've got a lot of EE's/ME's employed to perform heavy number crunching on physical simulations. Most long runs are performed on SGI and Linux boxen.
The bartender may still benefit from knowing when to bring over the next one. Though it smacks a little of nonvocal drinking, doesn't it? Noone has the excuse to yell over the crowd, "Bartender, I'll have another of your fine Janx Spirit!"
I would consider the extra chatting part of the fun.
Note, however, that the statistical method doesn't employ grammars, whereas UNL does and doesn't go any further.
It may seem at first that grammars would greatly aid translation, but the article implies that grammars are statistically derivable, and strange quirks in phraseology are better described by mapping idioms straight across, instead of going through a some kind of grammatical parser.
The proof will come when we can compare the two methods on the same text and see which is generally more readable.
I like your analysis. An estimate would have to rely on some "objective" function of poem quality, whose specification is the very problem this GA approach is trying to circumvent.
It might be possible, however, to approximate the percentage of grammatically correct phrases out of the space of all possible phrases, given a formal grammar. I would expect this percentage to be small, perhaps on the order of one percent. But that is just a guess.
While we can quibble about whether there will be more jobs in the future or not, nobody disputes that the speed of technology change is increasing. This spells "unhappiness" for society.
I like to think about the simple changes that could make a huge difference. What if everyone's salary were public? It's true in many gov't sectors already.
I would love to know how much bonus money my manager awarded himself while I got a nice $100 check and a pat on the back last Christmas. We could then shame these people off the social map.
I'm a programmer contracting for the miltary right now, and although the pay is good, the work is boring as hell, and I have managers who don't have a clue and keep the incentives for good work (bonuses) to themselves.
If you hate having managers a la Dilbert who don't have a clue, you'll hate working in defense.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I had to teach some of those students.
The eng. school pulls in some huge grant money, and there are people (like myself) who bury themselves in that concrete monster of a building and rarely venture into the outdoors.
It was a public teaching university; research was considered a nice "extra" that my dept didn't support financially. The decision for me to choose that job over others was largely based on my family living nearby.
I agree with you on all points.
Good luck. Research can be fun. Most people who like it aren't in it for the money. I'm leaving a job making $95K/yr because I know I will like the work and the people I'll be working with. I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out the working environment, personalities, politics, etc. and I'm only going because it all looks very good so far: http://www.ihmc.us I may not be visiting this site much after my new job starts next month.
Stories can be fun...not being from an academic family, it'd be fun to see your side.
That's an oversimplified view. Plenty of professors have joint appointments in CS and some engineering discipline. Plenty of engineers do nothing but study simulation codes or prediction algorithms for their thesis.
CS is a broad field, and there is sometimes no clear line between hardware and software algorithms. I, for instance, am going to develop new robot learning algorithms with researchers from the MIT robotics lab. Some from there are engineers, some are CS.
In many schools, the CS department falls within the school of engineering. This was true at both schools I attended.
Right. Tons of people are sitting pretty without a CS degree.
You may want a BS just to "diversify your portfolio", to use finance speak. Some jobs, such as web dev, may eventually get automated out of existence. But if you can keep pushing yourself in your job into new areas, then you're probably set for life.
I got my CS Phd in 1996 and haven't found a job that uses my research skills until just a few weeks ago. Read that again. I've waited seven years. BTW, I graduated from some of the top engineering schools in the country (Stanford and CU at Boulder).
Short story version of my post: employers don't typically need research skills, so they won't pay for them, and those that do are very hard to find.
Don't expect the jobs to come after you graduate unless you're already well-connected in the research community. Is your mom or dad a PhD? Then maybe you'll have a chance to stay out of the slow lane I found myself in.
Here's some free advice on whether to get a PhD after I spent 6 years getting mine.
Don't expect industry to find your research experience valuable unless they're hiring you as a researcher. You'll probably get paid the same as a MS candidate if you're a normal developer.
Even smart people don't make it through a Ph.D. program because either they don't have good chemistry with their advisor, or they can't sustain interest in their thesis topic. You've probably never had to study one thing for more than a year. Imagine studying it for 4-8 years.
If you don't hit it off with your advisor, you're probably sunk, so spend a lot of time networking and getting to know your potential advisor before starting.
Be fired up about a topic before you apply! It's not like BS or MS where you show up, read a lot, remember a lot, and get through. If you're not passionate about your subject, then after two years, getting through your thesis will feel like pulling your own teeth out.
In case you're interested, here's what happened when I left school. I didn't have connections or serious prospects for research jobs. As it turned out, my first job out of school was writing numerical C++ libraries for an internationally recognized software company. I got paid $50K/yr for creating two libraries that made the company some serious bank. After two years of working there, I was making $54K/yr. I only got offered a 20% raise when I threatened to leave, which I did anyway.
Then I taught at a university for two years but hated the fact that most students were only interested in the diploma, not the actual subject matter. So I had to deal with lots of cheating and poor performance. Remember, this was 1998 when someone with a 2.0 GPA could get hired as a network admin. I lasted two years there. My pay finished at $44K/yr as a full-time, tenure track professor.
I've slowly jumped around to government contracting and private consulting, which have paid better, but I probably would have gotten paid the same with an MS degree.
Now, I've finally found a job as a researcher in an industry setting. I waited seven years to find it. It will pay around $85K/yr with benefits.
The point is that companies should be spending more time on testing and less on pushing out poorly tested releases every quarter.
This is called a short-sighted strategy designed to create temporary stock price raises. It works until enough users get pissed off and never want to buy from that company again.
Nice troll. I guess MS doesn't have much to worry about, does it? I'll bet that linux has really fallen off the radar screen. I'll double check and see if that's happened in the past few hours...
What do you think?
Here's an idea targeted for newbies that goes beyond Windows:
Have users identify how they want to use the system at install time, then provide a clickable checklist, available from the desktop after install, of additional things to install/configure. Make the checklist as automated as possible. I.E. first get drivers installed, then then security lockdown, then get the online connection going, then specific user apps, etc.
Linux newbies need a way to get over the technical learning curve easily and get on with productive work.
Linux is so powerful--the potential is there to have "configure; make; make install" happen with a single mouse-click, just like InstallShield.
But it could get better, too: have errors automatically compared to an online database where people have suggested fixes.
I can't tell if you're trolling or have a sheltered view of how people relate to their governments.
Funny you should bring up Russians, since I do have some friends from there. According to them, jokes about the idiocy of Soviet rule were the daily, and quite human, response to their situation. And they are still very proud of having Russian cultural origins. So I still call troll on the second post.
Your grammar and spelling errors are strangely American for a non-American. I congratulate you on learning how to emulate the results of our poor educational system so well.
The CIA did to the "Afghan freedom fighters": see this post. They did a great job at turning those radical Islamic groups into well-organized, sophisticated terrorists.
Supposedly, the book "Charlie Wilson's War" is quite an eye-opener.Actually, the CIA can be blamed for not thinking about what would happen after they secretly supplied hundreds of millions of dollars in arms and training to the radically Islamic groups in Afghanistan.
It was the greatest CIA covert success in history, but the CIA then forgot about all those weapons and training and the ideologies controlling them. They can most certainly be blamed for that.Please don't overgeneralize the slashdot politic. Both views are plausibly trolls or not, I agree with you there. But I don't know very many people who would say "I'm ashamed of my origins". That has a fishy smell, don't you think?
I'm a research programmer working as a contractor for the government, and govt engineers in my research lab are sick of patching their Windows machines. They all have to be poked and prodded to make sure the automatic patches got installed right. It happens on at least a weekly basis.
We're very close to doing away with Windows and switching to Linux with OpenOffice. We'll also need some solution for talking with the USAF Exchange Server.
UNIX is spoken here because we've got a lot of EE's/ME's employed to perform heavy number crunching on physical simulations. Most long runs are performed on SGI and Linux boxen.
I believe I saw that joke for the first time on Futurama. The old professor says it.
...were written on the studio wall. # # # CONCERT HALL! # # # (play Rush lick featured on South Park w/ Timmy)
The bartender may still benefit from knowing when to bring over the next one. Though it smacks a little of nonvocal drinking, doesn't it? Noone has the excuse to yell over the crowd, "Bartender, I'll have another of your fine Janx Spirit!"
I would consider the extra chatting part of the fun.
Note, however, that the statistical method doesn't employ grammars, whereas UNL does and doesn't go any further.
It may seem at first that grammars would greatly aid translation, but the article implies that grammars are statistically derivable, and strange quirks in phraseology are better described by mapping idioms straight across, instead of going through a some kind of grammatical parser.
The proof will come when we can compare the two methods on the same text and see which is generally more readable.
I like your analysis. An estimate would have to rely on some "objective" function of poem quality, whose specification is the very problem this GA approach is trying to circumvent.
It might be possible, however, to approximate the percentage of grammatically correct phrases out of the space of all possible phrases, given a formal grammar. I would expect this percentage to be small, perhaps on the order of one percent. But that is just a guess.
What's your guess?
Big news item now: More retirees losing health care
While we can quibble about whether there will be more jobs in the future or not, nobody disputes that the speed of technology change is increasing. This spells "unhappiness" for society.
America's new slogan: "Freedom for the Lucky".
I like to think about the simple changes that could make a huge difference. What if everyone's salary were public? It's true in many gov't sectors already.
I would love to know how much bonus money my manager awarded himself while I got a nice $100 check and a pat on the back last Christmas. We could then shame these people off the social map.
This is not a troll, it's what the Greens actually worry about, instead of what the original poster claims.
I hope some moderators out there are watching.
I'm a programmer contracting for the miltary right now, and although the pay is good, the work is boring as hell, and I have managers who don't have a clue and keep the incentives for good work (bonuses) to themselves.
If you hate having managers a la Dilbert who don't have a clue, you'll hate working in defense.