For a large city like NYC, this really amazes me. If there's one place where there's plenty of room for competition, it should be large cities like that.
I live in Amsterdam, and my lack of choice in broadband internet connections died with the '90s. Apart from the two old fashioned choices of cable and ADSL (from several providers), there's now fiber, which would be even better if the company laying the infrastructure didn't suck so much. But the cable company is also laying fiber, so maybe I'll end up going back to them if my current ADSL ISP (oldest and best one in the country) persists in not providing fiber.
I'm not saying anyone complaining about Google hitting robots.txt. It wasn't just about that, it was about Google grabbing a real page somewhere on the site, every two seconds. Some pages on sites really are intensive to generate, it's good to crawl and have it available, but not every two seconds. Once a day should have been fine.
Fix your cache. Google doesn't submit forms, so everything they crawl should be cachable.
First of all, the traffic a web site gets from Google's spider is dwarfed by the the traffic it gets from legit users.
Thirdly, you'll discover that there's no truth whatsoever in the assertion of your First of all.
Your first point is complete bullshit. I don't even want to guess how you made up the factual-sounding second point.
If your website gets more traffic from Google's spider than from real visitors, then your site is probably just not very interesting. Consider taking it offline, if attention bothers you so much.
His second point, by the way, is pretty much common sense. Most unknown websites these days are found through Google. Google's spider enables people to find your site. If people are unable to find your site, perhaps you should reconsider your design, so it shows up better in their search results.
The truth? So Comcast, Time-Warner, et al don't block google.com from sending bits to you. That's what is running in the back of their minds: "Google better pay for access to our users, or we will simply block google." Extortion.
But by doing so, they'd also be blocking their own users, and many of them will probably leave for a competing ISP.
If there is one. The last mile monopolies need to die.
Cheating is the AI using information that it wouldn't have if it was a human. Like looking through walls or dense foliage, and firing each shot with deadly accuracy because it knows the exact coordinates of its target. That's cheating. That used to be common in strategy games too, but nowadays people want strategy games to have a level playing field, and that means the AI loses big time, because no AI is capable of grasping complex strategic situations like a human can. Maybe that's easier on the tactical scale of FPS games, I don't know.
But then you end up with an AI that wins all the time
And we don't want that. We want an AI that wins some of the time, and that is beatable. That is, it should present us with a challenge, but the challenge can't be too great because then the game will be no fun.
So, we only want a smart-enough AI, not a god AI.
I'd love to see god AI, but then, I'm a strategy gamer. AI is really bad at strategy.
Article is pretty bang on. Adaptive AI is tough to do, as is balancing being a tunable-level of smart and being beatable.
Being beatable? I keep forgetting that in FPS games it's so easy to make near unbeatable bots. I'm a strategy gamer, and I'd love it if someone would make an unbeatable AI. Or at least a halfway decent one. Strategy is the area where some real advances in game AI are still needed.
And then there's CRPGs of course, but I suspect that's another order of magnitude harder.
If you're thinking of picking up Magic again I advise either getting a Tenth Edition
Tenth! Wow. I didn't think they'd keep reinventing the game so many times. I got out shortly after Fourth Edition was introduced. The majority of my cards are Revised.
Why does everyone assume this? Sites like Slashdot are worth precisely nothing to this type of company. Your average Dell buyer doesn't read Slashdot, and certainly wont be affected by any story posted there.
Slashdot is nothing, but the things we can do aren't. I've seen a couple of good ideas come by already that can do more than $1700 damage to Dell. I think they'd be better off fixing this now rather than waiting until it gets serious.
Not necessarily. When something is wrong in an IT system, the cause for the problem very seldom is something that has to do with math or CS.
Never had a problem with race conditions? Never had to deal with transactions? Those are CS issues.
The main thing you need, in my opinion, (after the ability to read and understand plain-language error messages, which a lot of people seem to be lacking ), is the ability to "see" in your mind how different system interact and depend on each other.
But a university education can help there. A good education teaches you to think differently.
I'm not saying that degrees matter more than experience. I don't have one, and several successful programmers I know don't have one either. But some awareness of the theoretical foundations of CS definitely helps.
Some people manage to escape university with a degree without any awareness whatsoever, unfortunately.
Exactly. There is a lot of programming work for which a good theoretical foundation is immensely useful. I'll probably never get to use the tons of modal logic I got at university. But while I know most languages have perfectly good support for threads nowadays, I wouldn't want to hire someone with just a lot of programming experience and no idea what race conditions are, to work on a web application.
Gah. I need to learn to actually read the preview before hitting submit. Those last two paragraphs are quoted and should have been removed. I do agree with parts of them, though.
Having gone to university and having seen the kind of people getting degrees I couldn't disagree with you much more. In fact I would have to say the average degree isn't worth the paper its written on.
I disagree. Unless the paper is inlaid with gold, a degree is definitely worth the paper it's written on, and probably even more than that.
A degree days something. It doesn't say everything, and tons of idiots and incompetents have degrees too, but at the very least, a degree means you've attended university, and people do learn stuff there. The better ones even take a lot of time to play with stuff, work on open source projects, read slashdot and other relevant stuff like that.
Personally I'd rather hire someone who dropped out for a good reason than someone who got a degree for a bad reason, but the degree does mean something. Just not everything.
Ok, on average you should expect more from people with a higher degree...but don't count on it. I would say the difference is that maybe you can trust 2% of university degrees versus 1% of other degrees. Nothing beats experience and feeling. Degrees are mostly for people along for a free ride.
In other words if a company highers based on degrees you don't want to work there. If they look past that you probably do. Unfortunately trying to find suitable candidates by actually getting to know them is hard and expensive. Which is why its usually not done.
If all you've got on your CV is 'I have a cool qualification' then yes, I'll assume that you're in it for the money and bin it.
If you have lots of experience out of work, have played with Linux, your first computer was a hand built ZX80 *and* you have a cool qualification then you might get as far as interview.
Of course just a degree with nothing else is meaningless. But anyone who does that is an idiot anyway. And your degree.
If you have no work experience, you should put absolutely everything you possibly can on your CV. On my first CV I put my sailing experience and quite possibly my GMing experience. Being in charge of a small sailing crew or a group of roleplayers doesn't mean much, but when it's all the experience you've got, you better mention it. Anything that gives an employer insight in who he's dealing with.
If you just sit indoors all the time, at least mention that overly elaborate home network you keep fiddling with.
However when she was recently looking for a new job a number of universities and companies wouldn't even look at her resume and experience because she didn't get a BS degree 20 years ago.
A number of companies not looking at your resume doesn't mean you can't get a job. It just means you can't get a job at some companies. Well duh. Nobody in the world qualifies for every possible job. But you need only one. (Or a few, so you can choose.)
Of course, the recruitment world may have changed now (there's far more young people with degrees in the UK now than there were 20 years ago), but if you're prepared to start at the bottom, then I suspect there's still a route in for the degree-challenged worker.
More people with degrees doesn't make a degree more valuable, but less.
If I could have it my way I would be writing Haskell or Python for a living.
Then look for vacancies asking for Haskell or Python. Some companies (the small and good ones) know that good programmers care about languages and have strong opinions on them. Some companies actively look for these programmers.
I don't think the job well is going to dry up any time soon, despite economic unrest.
I agree, but I also get the impression that the financial crisis has a much bigger impact on the American IT job market than on the Dutch one. Here it really looks like it's only the banks and the stock markets that are in trouble. Everybody else seems to be doing fine.
So if American programmers have trouble finding jobs, maybe they should come over here. Programmer salaries are unfortunately lower, but we have jobs, everybody speaks English, and pot is legal (just restrict it to the weekends, okay?).
A degree doesn't mean all that much. It means you've been to university and stuck around long enough that you got a degree, but I've seen lots of incompetents get degrees.
Work experience doesn't mean much either. There are plenty of idiots with over 10 years of work experience.
What really matters is if you're good, and if you can show that you're good. The economy doesn't matter. There is always a demand for people who are good (but only in real boom times is there a demand for crappy programmers, like in the late '90s).
So how do you show you're good? The easy one is to work on open source projects. You can show off your leet programming skills, and if you're really good, you may become a committer on that project. If you're a committer on Apache httpd, every recruiter with a brain will want you as his server administrator.
I'm not a sys admin, but my impression is that every single good sys admin has his own overly elaborate computer network at home with which they experiment and learn. Do it. Play. Run your own network, your own server, your own website, and do funny stuff with it. Start a blog about system administration. None of this will get you a big name, but it gives a prospective employer something to look at when he wants to know if you're good.
So is it hard to get a job without a degree? That depends. I don't have a degree (dropped out about a year before my MSc, and BSc didn't exist here back then), one of my more successful programmer friends dropped out years before that. At my previous job, several people (including a server admin) didn't have degrees. And despite my lack of degree, I successfully switched to a new (and more exciting) job two months ago.
Now a lot of companies do care about degrees, so you'd better not waste any energy on them. They're depressing, and you wouldn't want to work there anyway. Go for the small, exciting, innovative companies that are capable of telling if you're good. And, of course, you have to be good. If you're not, you'd better get a degree.
In the U.S., inexperience combined with education is valued more than experience, because the worker's initial pay can be low, and the worker can be trained easily due to the education.
Where experience is valued, it is because experienced programmers don't need to be trained or coached.
I think it depends more on the company than the nation, though. Netherland also has its share of companies that prefer inexperienced graduates for traineeships. But those are big hierarchical companies that I wouldn't want to work for.
Slashdot Mirror
For a large city like NYC, this really amazes me. If there's one place where there's plenty of room for competition, it should be large cities like that.
I live in Amsterdam, and my lack of choice in broadband internet connections died with the '90s. Apart from the two old fashioned choices of cable and ADSL (from several providers), there's now fiber, which would be even better if the company laying the infrastructure didn't suck so much. But the cable company is also laying fiber, so maybe I'll end up going back to them if my current ADSL ISP (oldest and best one in the country) persists in not providing fiber.
I'm not saying anyone complaining about Google hitting robots.txt. It wasn't just about that, it was about Google grabbing a real page somewhere on the site, every two seconds. Some pages on sites really are intensive to generate, it's good to crawl and have it available, but not every two seconds. Once a day should have been fine.
Fix your cache. Google doesn't submit forms, so everything they crawl should be cachable.
First of all, the traffic a web site gets from Google's spider is dwarfed by the the traffic it gets from legit users.
Thirdly, you'll discover that there's no truth whatsoever in the assertion of your First of all.
Your first point is complete bullshit. I don't even want to guess how you made up the factual-sounding second point.
If your website gets more traffic from Google's spider than from real visitors, then your site is probably just not very interesting. Consider taking it offline, if attention bothers you so much.
His second point, by the way, is pretty much common sense. Most unknown websites these days are found through Google. Google's spider enables people to find your site. If people are unable to find your site, perhaps you should reconsider your design, so it shows up better in their search results.
The truth? So Comcast, Time-Warner, et al don't block google.com from sending bits to you. That's what is running in the back of their minds: "Google better pay for access to our users, or we will simply block google." Extortion.
But by doing so, they'd also be blocking their own users, and many of them will probably leave for a competing ISP.
If there is one. The last mile monopolies need to die.
What are mod points? I haven't seen any in years (strange, my karma's at max. hmmf)
Really? I get them about every two weeks, and I don't know what to do with them, because I post in every discussion I read.
Cheating is the AI using information that it wouldn't have if it was a human. Like looking through walls or dense foliage, and firing each shot with deadly accuracy because it knows the exact coordinates of its target. That's cheating. That used to be common in strategy games too, but nowadays people want strategy games to have a level playing field, and that means the AI loses big time, because no AI is capable of grasping complex strategic situations like a human can. Maybe that's easier on the tactical scale of FPS games, I don't know.
But then you end up with an AI that wins all the time
And we don't want that. We want an AI that wins some of the time, and that is beatable. That is, it should present us with a challenge, but the challenge can't be too great because then the game will be no fun.
So, we only want a smart-enough AI, not a god AI.
I'd love to see god AI, but then, I'm a strategy gamer. AI is really bad at strategy.
Article is pretty bang on. Adaptive AI is tough to do, as is balancing being a tunable-level of smart and being beatable.
Being beatable? I keep forgetting that in FPS games it's so easy to make near unbeatable bots. I'm a strategy gamer, and I'd love it if someone would make an unbeatable AI. Or at least a halfway decent one. Strategy is the area where some real advances in game AI are still needed.
And then there's CRPGs of course, but I suspect that's another order of magnitude harder.
If you're thinking of picking up Magic again I advise either getting a Tenth Edition
Tenth! Wow. I didn't think they'd keep reinventing the game so many times. I got out shortly after Fourth Edition was introduced. The majority of my cards are Revised.
I'm old.
Why does everyone assume this? Sites like Slashdot are worth precisely nothing to this type of company. Your average Dell buyer doesn't read Slashdot, and certainly wont be affected by any story posted there.
Slashdot is nothing, but the things we can do aren't. I've seen a couple of good ideas come by already that can do more than $1700 damage to Dell. I think they'd be better off fixing this now rather than waiting until it gets serious.
Whatever you do when dealing with Dell tech support you're going to have to jump through all the hoops on their checklist. So just do it.
That's the idiot customer's solution, the smart customer's solution is to take your business elsewhere.
And lose $1700?
He said he's in Iraq...
No, he said he's in Afghanistan.
If you live in the United States, you need a degree.
If you live in Europe, for the most part, you don't for an IT job, but you will for a software development job.
Depends on where you work. Lots of companies do not require degrees for software development jobs.
No degree?
Shipping in a PhD is more cost effective than hiring you.
You mean cheaper. That's not always the same thing as more cost effective.
Not necessarily. When something is wrong in an IT system, the cause for the problem very seldom is something that has to do with math or CS.
Never had a problem with race conditions? Never had to deal with transactions? Those are CS issues.
The main thing you need, in my opinion, (after the ability to read and understand plain-language error messages, which a lot of people seem to be lacking ), is the ability to "see" in your mind how different system interact and depend on each other.
But a university education can help there. A good education teaches you to think differently.
I'm not saying that degrees matter more than experience. I don't have one, and several successful programmers I know don't have one either. But some awareness of the theoretical foundations of CS definitely helps.
Some people manage to escape university with a degree without any awareness whatsoever, unfortunately.
Exactly. There is a lot of programming work for which a good theoretical foundation is immensely useful. I'll probably never get to use the tons of modal logic I got at university. But while I know most languages have perfectly good support for threads nowadays, I wouldn't want to hire someone with just a lot of programming experience and no idea what race conditions are, to work on a web application.
Gah. I need to learn to actually read the preview before hitting submit. Those last two paragraphs are quoted and should have been removed. I do agree with parts of them, though.
Having gone to university and having seen the kind of people getting degrees I couldn't disagree with you much more. In fact I would have to say the average degree isn't worth the paper its written on.
I disagree. Unless the paper is inlaid with gold, a degree is definitely worth the paper it's written on, and probably even more than that.
A degree days something. It doesn't say everything, and tons of idiots and incompetents have degrees too, but at the very least, a degree means you've attended university, and people do learn stuff there. The better ones even take a lot of time to play with stuff, work on open source projects, read slashdot and other relevant stuff like that.
Personally I'd rather hire someone who dropped out for a good reason than someone who got a degree for a bad reason, but the degree does mean something. Just not everything.
Ok, on average you should expect more from people with a higher degree...but don't count on it. I would say the difference is that maybe you can trust 2% of university degrees versus 1% of other degrees. Nothing beats experience and feeling. Degrees are mostly for people along for a free ride.
In other words if a company highers based on degrees you don't want to work there. If they look past that you probably do. Unfortunately trying to find suitable candidates by actually getting to know them is hard and expensive. Which is why its usually not done.
I've never had any formal IT or computing training, I'm entirely self-taught. But I have a PhD in biology and that helped me to get hired in IT.
Sounds like my dad. He has a PhD in chemistry and was considered overqualified when he applied for an IT job in the '70s.
He got the job anyway, and still works there, and is one of their most valued employees.
If all you've got on your CV is 'I have a cool qualification' then yes, I'll assume that you're in it for the money and bin it.
If you have lots of experience out of work, have played with Linux, your first computer was a hand built ZX80 *and* you have a cool qualification then you might get as far as interview.
Of course just a degree with nothing else is meaningless. But anyone who does that is an idiot anyway. And your degree.
If you have no work experience, you should put absolutely everything you possibly can on your CV. On my first CV I put my sailing experience and quite possibly my GMing experience. Being in charge of a small sailing crew or a group of roleplayers doesn't mean much, but when it's all the experience you've got, you better mention it. Anything that gives an employer insight in who he's dealing with.
If you just sit indoors all the time, at least mention that overly elaborate home network you keep fiddling with.
However when she was recently looking for a new job a number of universities and companies wouldn't even look at her resume and experience because she didn't get a BS degree 20 years ago.
A number of companies not looking at your resume doesn't mean you can't get a job. It just means you can't get a job at some companies. Well duh. Nobody in the world qualifies for every possible job. But you need only one. (Or a few, so you can choose.)
Of course, the recruitment world may have changed now (there's far more young people with degrees in the UK now than there were 20 years ago), but if you're prepared to start at the bottom, then I suspect there's still a route in for the degree-challenged worker.
More people with degrees doesn't make a degree more valuable, but less.
If I could have it my way I would be writing Haskell or Python for a living.
Then look for vacancies asking for Haskell or Python. Some companies (the small and good ones) know that good programmers care about languages and have strong opinions on them. Some companies actively look for these programmers.
I don't think the job well is going to dry up any time soon, despite economic unrest.
I agree, but I also get the impression that the financial crisis has a much bigger impact on the American IT job market than on the Dutch one. Here it really looks like it's only the banks and the stock markets that are in trouble. Everybody else seems to be doing fine.
So if American programmers have trouble finding jobs, maybe they should come over here. Programmer salaries are unfortunately lower, but we have jobs, everybody speaks English, and pot is legal (just restrict it to the weekends, okay?).
A degree doesn't mean all that much. It means you've been to university and stuck around long enough that you got a degree, but I've seen lots of incompetents get degrees.
Work experience doesn't mean much either. There are plenty of idiots with over 10 years of work experience.
What really matters is if you're good, and if you can show that you're good. The economy doesn't matter. There is always a demand for people who are good (but only in real boom times is there a demand for crappy programmers, like in the late '90s).
So how do you show you're good? The easy one is to work on open source projects. You can show off your leet programming skills, and if you're really good, you may become a committer on that project. If you're a committer on Apache httpd, every recruiter with a brain will want you as his server administrator.
I'm not a sys admin, but my impression is that every single good sys admin has his own overly elaborate computer network at home with which they experiment and learn. Do it. Play. Run your own network, your own server, your own website, and do funny stuff with it. Start a blog about system administration. None of this will get you a big name, but it gives a prospective employer something to look at when he wants to know if you're good.
So is it hard to get a job without a degree? That depends. I don't have a degree (dropped out about a year before my MSc, and BSc didn't exist here back then), one of my more successful programmer friends dropped out years before that. At my previous job, several people (including a server admin) didn't have degrees. And despite my lack of degree, I successfully switched to a new (and more exciting) job two months ago.
Now a lot of companies do care about degrees, so you'd better not waste any energy on them. They're depressing, and you wouldn't want to work there anyway. Go for the small, exciting, innovative companies that are capable of telling if you're good. And, of course, you have to be good. If you're not, you'd better get a degree.
In the U.S., inexperience combined with education is valued more than experience, because the worker's initial pay can be low, and the worker can be trained easily due to the education.
Where experience is valued, it is because experienced programmers don't need to be trained or coached.
I think it depends more on the company than the nation, though. Netherland also has its share of companies that prefer inexperienced graduates for traineeships. But those are big hierarchical companies that I wouldn't want to work for.