And the nerd could use digital photography to get the girl- instead of vector graphics. Or would that be creepy instead of cute? I'm too much of a nerd to know. Hmm, could also use the ThinkGeek blimp to take picutres of the Beta Pis....
True- you have to read the parent to see the UK version, where apparently certs are earned for such things as primary grades and non-university schooling.
Ah, yet another UK-vs-US difference. Certs in the US are usually vendor-based (like the Microsoft Certs) or trade-school based (like the Certified Ethical Hacker). The study for them doesn't even cover theory at all- just somebody's idea of what is needed to be an "expert" in that tool- most of it is about memorizing top-of-screen menus, keyboard shortcuts, and wizards. This in comparison to say, a real Engineering degree, where a student has produced two real-world-if-public-domain products (one with a team, one individually), plus high-level major-specific courses, plus college coursework for 4 years. To me, one is vastly superior to the other- one is definately trainable to real world experience, and the other will be outdated with the next revision of the software.
It depends what you're looking for. If you're hiring based primarily on COST, go for the cert. If you're hiring based on PERFORMANCE- go for the degree holder. He'll cost you more per year- but less per project.
In other words, this is the cheap labor debate all over again. Those who are short sighted (looking only at the money-per-unit-of-time number) will go for the cert still.
We will NOT allow the entertainment industry to tell us that it is "ok", at any time, for a rape to occur. It does not "advance the story", it glorifies a horrible aggression upon another human being.
And yet- with the Abu Gharib pictures- we have a real-life administration telling us that rape is a valid military interrogation tool. In other words- this story line was predictable based on the role this show is trying to play in relation to "real life" 9-11 related events.
Asimov wrote it and the Diests were rigbt. Man built God, time is circular, and the Cosmic AC released it's consciousness after answering the question "How do we reverse the second law of thermodynamics?" with Let there be light.
So you're saying that if I took this phone [nokia.co.uk] to some part of deepest Africa or Wyoming where there are no cellphone masts in the vicinity, and I turned it on, then although I wouldn't get a phone signal, the phone would still know exactly where I was in the world (subject to usual GPS accuracy limits)?
And also subject to limits on the range of the radio and other firmware limits that may keep you from accessing the data. The phone would know; but you may have no way to access that data. Except for one rather famous mistake British Telecom made with their firmware (which offered a tracking service- if you could get to any phone for a few minutes and send a properly formated text message without the owner knowing, you'd then be able to track that phone on your account for 5GBP a month), I'm not aware of any way for the general consumer to access the data in any way other than calling 911 (IF the local service antenna supports CE911 anyway). In the forest- with no cell tower to read the data off the subchannel- well the GPS chip would know where you were, but NOTHING else would, likely not even the phone's operating system.
I do know of one company in The Netherlands which has capitalized on this- and offers restaurant reviews and a "take me home I'm drunk" button on their mobile website based on the technology.
I would suspect that this will be more like a scanner, in that the sensors will probably all be looking in the same direction.
So did Orwell's original telescreen- Winston Smith took advantage of the shape of his apartment (a rectangular shoe box) and put the telescreen on the long wall, so that he could put his writing desk beside it and not be spied upon while writing in his diary.
Unfortunately quicktime has taken ownership of whatever format the patent images are in, and is drawing only the top few percent of 'em, so I have no way to find out. The advantage is that it will have infinite depth of field, and not require focusing, which could only reasonably be done (as TFA suggests) by switching between sensor elements with different focal lengths.
Yep- that and the ironic nature of the Apple commercial during the 1984 Superbowl.....
Actually, in fact, many models do. All models sold in the United States and Great Britain have this "feature". I just wish motorola had exposed it to the bluetooth interface, saving me from carrying around a 2nd box for mapping.
What's with all the clandestine spying/big brother hype?
Some of us remember a very artsy Superbowl commercial in 1984, featuring a shapely young hammerthrower smashing an Orwellian telescreen with a Macintosh. It's just very ironic that the first company to come out with an Orwellian telescreen just 22 years later, happens to be Apple.
Paraphrasing from memory, and no, I didn't bother to actually look up the quote on the web even though I know it exists:
And the telescreen didn't only recieve, but also transmitted, so that anything within the view of the telescreen was being watched. Not all the time, but you never quite knew when a watcher would tune in to your screen.
I thought it was illegal to pay H1-Bs less than the equivalent permanent resident/citizen worker though, in order to deincentivize the hiring of foreigners to jobs for which there are Americans who can do the work. Am I wrong there?
That was part of the 1999 compromise bill that: 1. Increased the number of H-1b visas to 195,000 2. Required an Labor Condition Application to attest to paying prevailing wages and advertising the job, except for businesses that were not H-1b dependant (defined as more than 33% of the employees being H-1bs, including unskilled employees) 3. Required an additional $1000 fee to be placed into a fund for retraining Americans to do these jobs.
These provisions sunnseted in FFY 2003 when the number of H-1b visas returned automatically to 65,000. Even when they were in effect, though, employers found loopholes. We had a contracting company in Beaverton that never hired any American citizens, yet claimed on their LCAs to not be H-1b dependant. For a while it was also common to advertise jobs halfway across the country, to take advantage of lower standards of living and thus lower prevailing wages, as well as fullfill the advertising requirment without actually getting any American resumes. Another way to fullfill the advertising requirment was to require in the advert outlandish amounts of experience- that's when you saw all the adverts in 2001 for.NET programers with 10 years of experience, even though.NET beta had just come out. And finally- all of the retraining money was spent on people displaced from manufacturing jobs. Since Software Engineers did not produce a "real" product, they were denied access to the retraining money.
In many ways, the sunsetting of these provisions makes paying H-1bs less at least legitimate, no games involved. More honest somehow. But on the other hand, high tech is adding positions like crazy right now that American citizens have NO chance of even hearing about, let alone actually being hired for.
That's only true if you turn a blind eye to all but the largest and most institutional of publically traded corporations... And even some of those aren't that way. The assumption that corporations are profit driven is fairly accurate, but the assumption that cost cutting increases profits is not. Good, happy employees are essential to most corporations. Good public rapport is essental for many companies.
I've yet to meet any company of that form. After all, profit is the difference between what you can lie and soak your customers out of, and the costs of manufacturing or purchasing to begin with. If your customers cut out the middleman and just manufactured and purchased for themselves, you'd have no profit. If you paid your employees what they are truly worth to you, you'd have no profit. Thus profit must be based on a set of finely balanced lies. Yes, you need to keep your customers and employees relatively happy- but you must do it by not letting them know their true worth, ever, or they'll be likely to demand that worth.
Corporations only have the power of government over us because people are lazy and don't bother to learn about what is important, who is in who's pocket, and vote on those issues. They'd rather pick some stupid-assed 'moral' issue and vote on abortion or gays or some other nonsense with utter disregard to corporate law, etc. That allows every politician on the ticket to be in the pocket of some corporations. An uninformed, passionate electorate is the enemy.
Agreed- however it's now to the point that politicians who aren't in the pocket of corporations, simply never get their names on the ballot at all. But it wouldn't be that much different if we had honest politicians- we'd merely swing to the other protectionist side of the spectrum, like we did in the 1950s when the only income tax loophole was payroll, and capital gains tax rate was 93%. EVERYBODY in the United States used to make $8000/year- even those who earned $100,000/year- because of the tax rates. That was of course slowly destroyed by the Bacero legislation- letting in guest workers who were willing to work for only $4800/year. When that guest worker program ended, agricultural workers got a very sudden 40% increase in pay.
The way I see it, the modern corporation is an abberation- a monster we created. We can either kill the monster and return to distributionist cottage industries and strictly regulated and controled "fair profits"- in which case you'll be forced to buy locally and start rebuilding those local production centers- OR we can become slaves to the system and have to compete with the third world for jobs. Those are our ONLY choices left. We're 30 years to late to take any kind of "middle way".
There is no reason to have free trade with countries that are not on the same level with us human rights wise.
Tell it to the money- that is, the WTO. According to them, we have the choice between FREE trade, or NO trade.
You don't have to be isolationist to have standards.
As long as corporations exist, as long as there are artificial people in this world whose *only* moral is profit, then that is truly the choice- no standards or isolationism.
You're right that we can't let corporations have *everything* they want, but there is middle ground.
Not as long as corporations have the power of government over us there isn't. The only choice is between government and corporations- and government should rightly be isolationist, because their customer base is citizens. Corporations, whose customer base is profit-seeking stockholders, will go for cheap labor every time- they're pre-programmed to do so.
You don't have to run to the extremes.
I've yet to see any country successfully not run to the extremes- and 21st century America is no exception. Which leads us back to the original question- since we're getting our asses handed to us by groups of people who don't believe in basic human rights, what makes you think we can hold on to basic human rights and survive?
Ever hear the saying "Two wrongs don't make a right"?
A loser attitude in the 21st century.
We can afford them, but we won't be able to for long if we become isolationists... Unless, that is, you'd like to be a farmer. You and everybody else...
I grew up farming- I know that we only need 2% of our population to create enough food for everybody if we're not stupid enough to give it away to the third world below cost (which is what we're currently doing- which destroys THEIR farming market, encouraging their people to come here and take our jobs).
We MUST afford them. Otherwise we won't have them for ourselves.
We gave up having them for ourselves when we joined the global community and trade law became supreme over constitutional law.
The world isn't black and white. Perhaps trusting nobody is a reasonable default policy, but you have a brain and five senses that you can use to refine that outlook on a case by case basis. Not everybody is trying to steal from you. Corporations need employees just as much as citizens need corporations. Many corporations even realize that. You can't do *everything* for yourself and continue to live in a modern world.
We're no longer living in the modern world- that left 30 years ago when we stopped having a positive trade balance. Corporations need employees- but they've got 80 million new people *each and every year* elsewhere than the United States to find those employees, most of whom are willing to work for under $2/day because there are no "basic human rights" in those countries. If we're going to compete with them for employment, we will have to sink to the same level. That is the cost of not being isolationist.
quotes because computer science is more engineering than science, if you ask me
Any school that doesn't treat it as such, is one that I personally will not hire from. But then again- unless a company is willing to PAY for the education, they don't deserve to hire somebody with that education to begin with. I would not encourage any student to go for a CS degree today- and I certainly wouldn't advise anybody to pay $40,000 or more for an SET degree that is apparently only worth $10,000 a year from who they are hiring overseas.
What's it like off the deep end? It's not enough to have ideas you think will work. They have to take basic human rights into account too.
Why? The stock market obviously doesn't think we deserve basic human rights. The Chinese don't take basic human rights into account. Mexicans don't. The Hindus don't. The Moslems don't. Basic human rights are a LUXURY- one that we can't afford in a globalist economy. I may be off the deep end- but I've been pushed there by a bunch of free traitors. I have to compete with Chinese, Hindus, Mexicans, and Moslems for my right to exist- I can't afford basic human rights anymore. 9-11 taught me that once and for all, we have no allies in this world- only competitors that want to destroy the American Middle Class. And that was the fault of globalists too (if we had never imported a drop of oil from the Middle East, 9-11 would never have happened). The only safe way is to develop the technology needed to manufacture everything you need yourself- you can't depend on ANYBODY else to do it for you. Trust nobody- they're all trying to steal from you. Especially the ones wearing suits saying "Trust me".
You and I are going to have to agree to disagree. I've seen quite a few sorry cases cross my path in the past, and although it's possible to break some people of bad programming habits, it's impossible to teach some things if the student is simply incapable of learning them. You can cure someone of ignorance, but you can't cure stupidity.
The biggest cause of stupidity is instructors who fail to realize that there's more than one way to learn. I've run into a few of those myself in my career- and every time, by finding a way to break down their assignments to something they could handle, they excelled. Unfortuneately, I have had, at times, managers who did not support this idea- at which point I would give you some credit. You can't cure stupidity if your superiors are so infected with it that they thing any project that takes longer than four months is a failure.
I have a big problem with your definition of "incompetence." For example, in the above quoted passage, you speak initially of incompetence in the programming domain, then you speak more generally about "incompetence" in the social-intelligence domain. These are two separate domains which you are conflating. If someone lacks social skills, you don't put them in a customer-facing role.
Well, you don't unless you want to teach them social skills. I thought my Asperger's would forever be a barrier to working with customers- until I was placed in a role of having to examine 60,000 Access databases on 4,638 customer machines for an upgrade to Office 2002 from Office 97. Now I include that experience on my resume- along with some very nice e-mails from some of the later customers. (And yes, to a certain extent stupidity played a role there as well- about 40,000 of those MDBs were named db1.mdb and had nothing in them).
Depending, again, on what you call incompetence. The problem is, you don't seem to acknowledge that raw talent (which for programmers equates to general and mathematical intelligence) is a huge component of competency. You can't really teach someone to be smarter, although it seems to be true that people can "train up" various kinds of intelligence in their own brains.
Ah, you're coming at it from THAT angle. Well, you'd probably call my 11 year career only mediocre programming- I have almost *no* mathematical talent, but my talent is more poetical- I can read code and know when something doesn't feel right. There's more to talent than just mathematics- which I see as just another language with arbitrary axioms, which pretty much describes every computer language I've run across.
The primary factors in the development of intelligence are genetics and the early childhood development years -- two factors that you have no control over when evaluating a candidate.
A good instructor can take any combination of the two- and train a savant ability where none existed previous. I've even started with 50 year olds and taught them to code well enough to be on my team- I don't let them have a whole lot of creative control though.
Unfortunately, employers in the United States are prohibited from administering intelligence tests. And as previous studies have shown (sorry, don't have the Slashdot link-o-matic for this), incompetent people are usually too incompetent to realize that they're incompetent, yet they usually do well because they are overly-confident in their own skills. Because of this, employers have to resort to domain-specific aptitude tests, which discriminate against otherwise talented candidates who lack experience with a specific API or a specific coding style.
They could replace both of those with funding a good postgraduate ciriculum in what they need, then hiring the graduates of that ciriculum.
And what you've just described is a college Computer Science curriculum, more or less. (And a few of the things you mentioned have a kind of "buzzword" feel to them, which makes me think these are things you find specific
Um, if you paid attention to the section of the grandparent post (which I helpfully emphasized in boldface), you'd see that the grandparent poster was talking about incompetent people who should remain unemployed. Sorry, but if someone is incompetent, it usually isn't because of lack of training, but typically because of lack of raw talent. There are plenty of incompetent programmers out there, and I wouldn't want them on my team in the hopes that they might actually rise to the level of skill where they'd be useful.
At which point you've created a self-fullfilling prophecy, is my point. If no company is willing to put in the time/money to turn incompetant people into competant people, then how can they possibly expect to be able to hire competant people? I don't believe in ingrown talent for coding, aside from a few autistics (which other people would most certainly call incompetant due to their lack of ability to interact with customers). Give me 8 years, and I can train ANYBODY to code adequately. Of course, I'd start them out on an interpreter, and only slowly move them up to modern OOP programming....with stops at assembly, scripting, state machine theory, database normalization, database denormalization, procedural, RPN, SP, and multithreading along the way.
Yeah, a "good" programmer can be trained to do anything. I guess in my vocabulary, "incompetent" typically precludes an assessment of "good."
All good programmers start out as incompetent programmers.
As for why there is a glut of incompetence and mediocre talent out there, I suspect it has a lot to do with all the degree mills running full tilt during the dot-com boom.
I would agree with that. Most of them skipped some of the neccessary steps I mentioned above. But the important part is- so do most of the foreign degree mills, such as IIT. I'll bet that among H-1bs you'd be hard pressed to find somebody who can code MOD 2 in assembly in any less than five instructions.
Actually I'm in the Pacific Northwest- and I remember in MY undergraduate degree, which had almost nothing to do with what you're looking at (I'm a software engineer) we *still* used Tektronics osciloscopes...and Microsoft operating systems...and HP computers and calculators...Mentor Graphics chip programmers and ASIC designers...Orcad circuit designers...Microsoft UML and project managment tools. All of which had a huge influence on the cirriculum offered; if that's the only thing available in the lab that's what you are going to use. I'm absolutely certain all of these companies not only got good engineers out of the program- but also made quite a few sales to lesser companies that other graduates went to.
Which is why I brought it up- perhaps in 5-6 years you'll start seeing graduate students come out with that experience, if your company keeps going the way they have been. The more of this sort of thing your company does- the more experience the graduates will have and the less you'll have to rely on importing them from other states and other countries.
It just bugs me (being in an industry where the H-1b is much more commonly misused to reduce costs) hearing about these companies complaining that there is nobody trainable- and then to a large exent doing nothing to remedy the situation.
Slashdot Mirror
And the nerd could use digital photography to get the girl- instead of vector graphics. Or would that be creepy instead of cute? I'm too much of a nerd to know. Hmm, could also use the ThinkGeek blimp to take picutres of the Beta Pis....
Instead of vector graphics, the nerd could use animated digital pictures to get the girl! Or would that be too creepy?
True- you have to read the parent to see the UK version, where apparently certs are earned for such things as primary grades and non-university schooling.
Ah, yet another UK-vs-US difference. Certs in the US are usually vendor-based (like the Microsoft Certs) or trade-school based (like the Certified Ethical Hacker). The study for them doesn't even cover theory at all- just somebody's idea of what is needed to be an "expert" in that tool- most of it is about memorizing top-of-screen menus, keyboard shortcuts, and wizards. This in comparison to say, a real Engineering degree, where a student has produced two real-world-if-public-domain products (one with a team, one individually), plus high-level major-specific courses, plus college coursework for 4 years. To me, one is vastly superior to the other- one is definately trainable to real world experience, and the other will be outdated with the next revision of the software.
It depends what you're looking for. If you're hiring based primarily on COST, go for the cert. If you're hiring based on PERFORMANCE- go for the degree holder. He'll cost you more per year- but less per project.
In other words, this is the cheap labor debate all over again. Those who are short sighted (looking only at the money-per-unit-of-time number) will go for the cert still.
We will NOT allow the entertainment industry to tell us that it is "ok", at any time, for a rape to occur. It does not "advance the story", it glorifies a horrible aggression upon another human being.
And yet- with the Abu Gharib pictures- we have a real-life administration telling us that rape is a valid military interrogation tool. In other words- this story line was predictable based on the role this show is trying to play in relation to "real life" 9-11 related events.
"Daniel Jackson"'s piss-poor emoting
Since when are nerds supposed to EMOTE?
Asimov wrote it and the Diests were rigbt. Man built God, time is circular, and the Cosmic AC released it's consciousness after answering the question "How do we reverse the second law of thermodynamics?" with Let there be light.
Did you miss the episode where they revealed that the entire series is being taped by Cylon spies to keep track of the humans?
So you're saying that if I took this phone [nokia.co.uk] to some part of deepest Africa or Wyoming where there are no cellphone masts in the vicinity, and I turned it on, then although I wouldn't get a phone signal, the phone would still know exactly where I was in the world (subject to usual GPS accuracy limits)?
And also subject to limits on the range of the radio and other firmware limits that may keep you from accessing the data. The phone would know; but you may have no way to access that data. Except for one rather famous mistake British Telecom made with their firmware (which offered a tracking service- if you could get to any phone for a few minutes and send a properly formated text message without the owner knowing, you'd then be able to track that phone on your account for 5GBP a month), I'm not aware of any way for the general consumer to access the data in any way other than calling 911 (IF the local service antenna supports CE911 anyway). In the forest- with no cell tower to read the data off the subchannel- well the GPS chip would know where you were, but NOTHING else would, likely not even the phone's operating system.
I do know of one company in The Netherlands which has capitalized on this- and offers restaurant reviews and a "take me home I'm drunk" button on their mobile website based on the technology.
I would suspect that this will be more like a scanner, in that the sensors will probably all be looking in the same direction.
So did Orwell's original telescreen- Winston Smith took advantage of the shape of his apartment (a rectangular shoe box) and put the telescreen on the long wall, so that he could put his writing desk beside it and not be spied upon while writing in his diary.
Unfortunately quicktime has taken ownership of whatever format the patent images are in, and is drawing only the top few percent of 'em, so I have no way to find out. The advantage is that it will have infinite depth of field, and not require focusing, which could only reasonably be done (as TFA suggests) by switching between sensor elements with different focal lengths.
Yep- that and the ironic nature of the Apple commercial during the 1984 Superbowl.....
But then, they don't...do they?
Actually, in fact, many models do. All models sold in the United States and Great Britain have this "feature". I just wish motorola had exposed it to the bluetooth interface, saving me from carrying around a 2nd box for mapping.
What's with all the clandestine spying/big brother hype?
Some of us remember a very artsy Superbowl commercial in 1984, featuring a shapely young hammerthrower smashing an Orwellian telescreen with a Macintosh. It's just very ironic that the first company to come out with an Orwellian telescreen just 22 years later, happens to be Apple.
Same difference between a webcam and a teddy bear with a nanny cam in it's eye.
Paraphrasing from memory, and no, I didn't bother to actually look up the quote on the web even though I know it exists: And the telescreen didn't only recieve, but also transmitted, so that anything within the view of the telescreen was being watched. Not all the time, but you never quite knew when a watcher would tune in to your screen.
I thought it was illegal to pay H1-Bs less than the equivalent permanent resident/citizen worker though, in order to deincentivize the hiring of foreigners to jobs for which there are Americans who can do the work. Am I wrong there?
.NET programers with 10 years of experience, even though .NET beta had just come out. And finally- all of the retraining money was spent on people displaced from manufacturing jobs. Since Software Engineers did not produce a "real" product, they were denied access to the retraining money.
That was part of the 1999 compromise bill that:
1. Increased the number of H-1b visas to 195,000
2. Required an Labor Condition Application to attest to paying prevailing wages and advertising the job, except for businesses that were not H-1b dependant (defined as more than 33% of the employees being H-1bs, including unskilled employees)
3. Required an additional $1000 fee to be placed into a fund for retraining Americans to do these jobs.
These provisions sunnseted in FFY 2003 when the number of H-1b visas returned automatically to 65,000. Even when they were in effect, though, employers found loopholes. We had a contracting company in Beaverton that never hired any American citizens, yet claimed on their LCAs to not be H-1b dependant. For a while it was also common to advertise jobs halfway across the country, to take advantage of lower standards of living and thus lower prevailing wages, as well as fullfill the advertising requirment without actually getting any American resumes. Another way to fullfill the advertising requirment was to require in the advert outlandish amounts of experience- that's when you saw all the adverts in 2001 for
In many ways, the sunsetting of these provisions makes paying H-1bs less at least legitimate, no games involved. More honest somehow. But on the other hand, high tech is adding positions like crazy right now that American citizens have NO chance of even hearing about, let alone actually being hired for.
That's only true if you turn a blind eye to all but the largest and most institutional of publically traded corporations... And even some of those aren't that way. The assumption that corporations are profit driven is fairly accurate, but the assumption that cost cutting increases profits is not. Good, happy employees are essential to most corporations. Good public rapport is essental for many companies.
I've yet to meet any company of that form. After all, profit is the difference between what you can lie and soak your customers out of, and the costs of manufacturing or purchasing to begin with. If your customers cut out the middleman and just manufactured and purchased for themselves, you'd have no profit. If you paid your employees what they are truly worth to you, you'd have no profit. Thus profit must be based on a set of finely balanced lies. Yes, you need to keep your customers and employees relatively happy- but you must do it by not letting them know their true worth, ever, or they'll be likely to demand that worth.
Corporations only have the power of government over us because people are lazy and don't bother to learn about what is important, who is in who's pocket, and vote on those issues. They'd rather pick some stupid-assed 'moral' issue and vote on abortion or gays or some other nonsense with utter disregard to corporate law, etc. That allows every politician on the ticket to be in the pocket of some corporations. An uninformed, passionate electorate is the enemy.
Agreed- however it's now to the point that politicians who aren't in the pocket of corporations, simply never get their names on the ballot at all. But it wouldn't be that much different if we had honest politicians- we'd merely swing to the other protectionist side of the spectrum, like we did in the 1950s when the only income tax loophole was payroll, and capital gains tax rate was 93%. EVERYBODY in the United States used to make $8000/year- even those who earned $100,000/year- because of the tax rates. That was of course slowly destroyed by the Bacero legislation- letting in guest workers who were willing to work for only $4800/year. When that guest worker program ended, agricultural workers got a very sudden 40% increase in pay.
The way I see it, the modern corporation is an abberation- a monster we created. We can either kill the monster and return to distributionist cottage industries and strictly regulated and controled "fair profits"- in which case you'll be forced to buy locally and start rebuilding those local production centers- OR we can become slaves to the system and have to compete with the third world for jobs. Those are our ONLY choices left. We're 30 years to late to take any kind of "middle way".
There is no reason to have free trade with countries that are not on the same level with us human rights wise.
Tell it to the money- that is, the WTO. According to them, we have the choice between FREE trade, or NO trade.
You don't have to be isolationist to have standards.
As long as corporations exist, as long as there are artificial people in this world whose *only* moral is profit, then that is truly the choice- no standards or isolationism.
You're right that we can't let corporations have *everything* they want, but there is middle ground.
Not as long as corporations have the power of government over us there isn't. The only choice is between government and corporations- and government should rightly be isolationist, because their customer base is citizens. Corporations, whose customer base is profit-seeking stockholders, will go for cheap labor every time- they're pre-programmed to do so.
You don't have to run to the extremes.
I've yet to see any country successfully not run to the extremes- and 21st century America is no exception. Which leads us back to the original question- since we're getting our asses handed to us by groups of people who don't believe in basic human rights, what makes you think we can hold on to basic human rights and survive?
Ever hear the saying "Two wrongs don't make a right"?
A loser attitude in the 21st century.
We can afford them, but we won't be able to for long if we become isolationists... Unless, that is, you'd like to be a farmer. You and everybody else...
I grew up farming- I know that we only need 2% of our population to create enough food for everybody if we're not stupid enough to give it away to the third world below cost (which is what we're currently doing- which destroys THEIR farming market, encouraging their people to come here and take our jobs).
We MUST afford them. Otherwise we won't have them for ourselves.
We gave up having them for ourselves when we joined the global community and trade law became supreme over constitutional law.
The world isn't black and white. Perhaps trusting nobody is a reasonable default policy, but you have a brain and five senses that you can use to refine that outlook on a case by case basis. Not everybody is trying to steal from you. Corporations need employees just as much as citizens need corporations. Many corporations even realize that. You can't do *everything* for yourself and continue to live in a modern world.
We're no longer living in the modern world- that left 30 years ago when we stopped having a positive trade balance. Corporations need employees- but they've got 80 million new people *each and every year* elsewhere than the United States to find those employees, most of whom are willing to work for under $2/day because there are no "basic human rights" in those countries. If we're going to compete with them for employment, we will have to sink to the same level. That is the cost of not being isolationist.
quotes because computer science is more engineering than science, if you ask me
Any school that doesn't treat it as such, is one that I personally will not hire from. But then again- unless a company is willing to PAY for the education, they don't deserve to hire somebody with that education to begin with. I would not encourage any student to go for a CS degree today- and I certainly wouldn't advise anybody to pay $40,000 or more for an SET degree that is apparently only worth $10,000 a year from who they are hiring overseas.
What's it like off the deep end? It's not enough to have ideas you think will work. They have to take basic human rights into account too.
Why? The stock market obviously doesn't think we deserve basic human rights. The Chinese don't take basic human rights into account. Mexicans don't. The Hindus don't. The Moslems don't. Basic human rights are a LUXURY- one that we can't afford in a globalist economy. I may be off the deep end- but I've been pushed there by a bunch of free traitors. I have to compete with Chinese, Hindus, Mexicans, and Moslems for my right to exist- I can't afford basic human rights anymore. 9-11 taught me that once and for all, we have no allies in this world- only competitors that want to destroy the American Middle Class. And that was the fault of globalists too (if we had never imported a drop of oil from the Middle East, 9-11 would never have happened). The only safe way is to develop the technology needed to manufacture everything you need yourself- you can't depend on ANYBODY else to do it for you. Trust nobody- they're all trying to steal from you. Especially the ones wearing suits saying "Trust me".
And when your honest opinion is flamebait- you really know you're in trouble!
You and I are going to have to agree to disagree. I've seen quite a few sorry cases cross my path in the past, and although it's possible to break some people of bad programming habits, it's impossible to teach some things if the student is simply incapable of learning them. You can cure someone of ignorance, but you can't cure stupidity.
The biggest cause of stupidity is instructors who fail to realize that there's more than one way to learn. I've run into a few of those myself in my career- and every time, by finding a way to break down their assignments to something they could handle, they excelled. Unfortuneately, I have had, at times, managers who did not support this idea- at which point I would give you some credit. You can't cure stupidity if your superiors are so infected with it that they thing any project that takes longer than four months is a failure.
I have a big problem with your definition of "incompetence." For example, in the above quoted passage, you speak initially of incompetence in the programming domain, then you speak more generally about "incompetence" in the social-intelligence domain. These are two separate domains which you are conflating. If someone lacks social skills, you don't put them in a customer-facing role.
Well, you don't unless you want to teach them social skills. I thought my Asperger's would forever be a barrier to working with customers- until I was placed in a role of having to examine 60,000 Access databases on 4,638 customer machines for an upgrade to Office 2002 from Office 97. Now I include that experience on my resume- along with some very nice e-mails from some of the later customers. (And yes, to a certain extent stupidity played a role there as well- about 40,000 of those MDBs were named db1.mdb and had nothing in them).
Depending, again, on what you call incompetence. The problem is, you don't seem to acknowledge that raw talent (which for programmers equates to general and mathematical intelligence) is a huge component of competency. You can't really teach someone to be smarter, although it seems to be true that people can "train up" various kinds of intelligence in their own brains.
Ah, you're coming at it from THAT angle. Well, you'd probably call my 11 year career only mediocre programming- I have almost *no* mathematical talent, but my talent is more poetical- I can read code and know when something doesn't feel right. There's more to talent than just mathematics- which I see as just another language with arbitrary axioms, which pretty much describes every computer language I've run across.
The primary factors in the development of intelligence are genetics and the early childhood development years -- two factors that you have no control over when evaluating a candidate.
A good instructor can take any combination of the two- and train a savant ability where none existed previous. I've even started with 50 year olds and taught them to code well enough to be on my team- I don't let them have a whole lot of creative control though.
Unfortunately, employers in the United States are prohibited from administering intelligence tests. And as previous studies have shown (sorry, don't have the Slashdot link-o-matic for this), incompetent people are usually too incompetent to realize that they're incompetent, yet they usually do well because they are overly-confident in their own skills. Because of this, employers have to resort to domain-specific aptitude tests, which discriminate against otherwise talented candidates who lack experience with a specific API or a specific coding style.
They could replace both of those with funding a good postgraduate ciriculum in what they need, then hiring the graduates of that ciriculum.
And what you've just described is a college Computer Science curriculum, more or less. (And a few of the things you mentioned have a kind of "buzzword" feel to them, which makes me think these are things you find specific
Um, if you paid attention to the section of the grandparent post (which I helpfully emphasized in boldface), you'd see that the grandparent poster was talking about incompetent people who should remain unemployed. Sorry, but if someone is incompetent, it usually isn't because of lack of training, but typically because of lack of raw talent. There are plenty of incompetent programmers out there, and I wouldn't want them on my team in the hopes that they might actually rise to the level of skill where they'd be useful.
At which point you've created a self-fullfilling prophecy, is my point. If no company is willing to put in the time/money to turn incompetant people into competant people, then how can they possibly expect to be able to hire competant people? I don't believe in ingrown talent for coding, aside from a few autistics (which other people would most certainly call incompetant due to their lack of ability to interact with customers). Give me 8 years, and I can train ANYBODY to code adequately. Of course, I'd start them out on an interpreter, and only slowly move them up to modern OOP programming....with stops at assembly, scripting, state machine theory, database normalization, database denormalization, procedural, RPN, SP, and multithreading along the way.
Yeah, a "good" programmer can be trained to do anything. I guess in my vocabulary, "incompetent" typically precludes an assessment of "good."
All good programmers start out as incompetent programmers.
As for why there is a glut of incompetence and mediocre talent out there, I suspect it has a lot to do with all the degree mills running full tilt during the dot-com boom.
I would agree with that. Most of them skipped some of the neccessary steps I mentioned above. But the important part is- so do most of the foreign degree mills, such as IIT. I'll bet that among H-1bs you'd be hard pressed to find somebody who can code MOD 2 in assembly in any less than five instructions.
Actually I'm in the Pacific Northwest- and I remember in MY undergraduate degree, which had almost nothing to do with what you're looking at (I'm a software engineer) we *still* used Tektronics osciloscopes...and Microsoft operating systems...and HP computers and calculators...Mentor Graphics chip programmers and ASIC designers...Orcad circuit designers...Microsoft UML and project managment tools. All of which had a huge influence on the cirriculum offered; if that's the only thing available in the lab that's what you are going to use. I'm absolutely certain all of these companies not only got good engineers out of the program- but also made quite a few sales to lesser companies that other graduates went to.
Which is why I brought it up- perhaps in 5-6 years you'll start seeing graduate students come out with that experience, if your company keeps going the way they have been. The more of this sort of thing your company does- the more experience the graduates will have and the less you'll have to rely on importing them from other states and other countries.
It just bugs me (being in an industry where the H-1b is much more commonly misused to reduce costs) hearing about these companies complaining that there is nobody trainable- and then to a large exent doing nothing to remedy the situation.