Home equity loans. Those are usually used for cars, bling, and cosmetic surgery, and on very rare occasion are used for home improvement. I got a roof and air conditioner with one in the early 00s.
Usually these "moralizing human interest stories" have a much more complicated and detailed real story behind them.
When it comes to he said / "she" said like this, if he was dumb enough to be out $20K, but smart enough to report it as $200K and theres no paperwork to prove it either way, he may as well go for the gold and strike back at "her". Worst case he's busted for filing a false report, although how they'd pin it on him is a mystery. Best case is he makes a nice profit. He's probably pissed off and looking for revenge....
Another possible situation is someone turned 200K into coke, snorted it, doesn't want to admit it, and weirdly enough this utterly pitiful story sounds "better", or at least doesn't violate someones parole terms, divorce settlement, custody requirement, etc.
Then there's the money laundering mule whom got burned. His handler got him used to sloppy handling procedures (yeah I know I told you to keep the last $20K for yourself, but I'm in a hurry and you can just keep $40K of the next shipment). Next thing you know "his" share of the money is gone and he's left holding the bag for laundering, errrr, I mean now he's a unfortunate victim going to the police, how sad.
Sometimes these stories are people whom did NOT get burned, if you know what I mean. Sure, they withdrew $200K of their money and wired it to Mr Kingpin in another country whom now has $200K with a valid receipt proving it is his. The untold story is Mr Kingpin handed him a bag of $300K cash as the first step. Sometimes the IRS catches these guys if they're dumb enough at cash handling (buys a Ferrari, in cash, the week after reporting his "loss", etc). Generally the less the guy helps the cops the more likely this is the situation. He's probably not making that much on a risk free carefully choreographed transaction like that. Probably more like 10% or maybe he's having a favor taken care of for him or being forgiven of a certain mistake toward a powerful person.
The IRS situation is very complicated. If you withdraw the cash, stash it, or wire it to your brother in another state, suddenly you have quite a capital loss there to report. Of course you can only do this about once per lifetime, but, maybe he had a windfall inheritance and this is how he, uh, "lost" it...
Sometimes you see this "behavior" when a genuine, although illegal, deal goes bad and at least you'd like to deduct it from your taxes. So, your "co worker" promised you a 25% rate of return, and he just needs a little cash to get him thru a tight time, but he skipped town instead... Well, at least you can write it off, and/or explain where the money disappeared to, even if thats not exactly where it went. Look thru the local papers for a grow up that got busted a couple weeks ago that had about $200K of expenses, etc.
Shockingly enough, it might be true as reported. Historically unlikely, sure, but possibly true. Maybe. Its a heck of a story anyway.
I'd bet that they are going to use it to host a website of some kind.
Lets say you convinced half of the 826 registered Debian Linux consultants to get a vanity email address at that domain name for $10/yr. Multiplied by all the other open source consultants in the world equals a handy bit of cash per year...
Now something new to the ecosystem, would be a talent agency that handled all aspects of these relationships for a very modest fee. Maybe that already exists, very quietly.
And I may be in the minority, but I would pay X amount of money for open source and free apps that were compiled and packaged. (X being reasonably small.)
We have had this for decades. No kidding.
You could hire one of these guys to produce the exact free app that you want, to the exact packaging specs you want, with the exact compile time options you want. You can't lose, and everyone wins. Kind of the opposite of the banking system where heads they win or tails you lose.
Republicans like Reagan and Palin and Beck are the flag-bearers for anti-intellectualism in our times.
I'm not disagreeing that they are a tiny little itty bitty subset of the flag bearers, but they seem kinda outnumbered and outgunned by the sports-fans, jocks, sportscasters, religious preachers, Christian creationism activists, intelligent design authors, romance novel writers, tv newsreaders, pretty much the entire pop culture industry from hip hop musicians to movie actors, the entire freaking population of California Lousiana and Mississippi, and american idol viewers.
After all, wasn't Little Wayne and Eminem hard core right wingers? Oh wait...
But other than them folks, us slashdotters are like a brilliant beacon of light on the American Renaissance, yeah.
TL;DR - No encryption schemes will be broken if it is proved that P=NP.
Also there is no guarantee that a P=NP solution must be feasible. There may exist a polynomial solution to cracking AES, BUT that specific problem may result in polynomial coefficients that are so unimaginably large as to require lots of Knuths uparrow notation to express numerically, making it a meaningless victory.
Sample dialogue: "The good news is its poly, in fact not only poly, but linear, in fact not only linear but coefficient of one, so if we double the key length then we only double the search time. The bad news is we're talking about doubling a trillion times the lifetime of the universe assuming every atom in the universe did an op every Planck time. Other than that, no problemo, because P = NP."
They're not unsolvable, they're infeasible. There's an important difference.
You can solve TSP for 1 million cities if you're willing to wait a few billion years, but the fact that you're waiting a few billion years makes it infeasible.
And, critically, they're infeasible because the effort scales at higher than polynomial rates as the problem space increases.
Perfectly feasible in 100 ms at 32 bits scales to 100 trillion years at 1024 bits. That kind of thing.
Now its perfectly possible to find a poly solution, that scales polynomially, that is none the less completely infeasible and "has no application". Looking above, a poly solution might exist that cracks 32 bits in a mere 100 trillion trillion years, and scales linear so 1024 bits takes a mere (32 * 100) = 3200 trillion trillion years. That is mathematically fascinating and probably results in a Fields medal, but by no means feasible or has any impact on anyones daily life..
The problem is its both simple enough and high profile enough that it attracts cranks like moths to a flame, and stereotypically none of them have the ability to operate in an "answer space" even as large as high school algebra or maybe high school geometry.
Very much like the drunk whom loses their car keys in the dark alley, but decides to search under the streetlamp for the keys, "because the light is better under the lamp". It tends to be a bit of a waste of time. Having a billion drunks search under the streetlamp in parallel for the keys isn't going to help.
If someone solves P = NP, like most big problems its going to be solved by someone applying some recently discovered, or at least never before applied technique that only a specialist in that odd field would know, and without even expecting it'll happen the answer falls out of a related calculation. Its not going to be from a million monkeys randomly trying modifications of the quadratic formula.
I read a car example somewhere, probably slashdot. OK so if you have misplaced your car keys, this is a P!=NP problem. It's easy to confirm whether or not you have found your keys at any point in the search, but finding the keys themselves likely will require looking through all possible locations where they could be.
Terrible example because your "NP" example is inherently a polynomial time problem, so you've got it exactly backwards. Doesn't matter how many dimensions your universe has, if it takes one time unit to search one unit cell, then inherently the total time required to search any given region can only increase as a polynomial as the region scales linearly. So searching for car keys is very strictly a polynomial time problem and scales somewhere between power of 2 and power of 3.
Want a NP problem for an old person, whip out ye olden times interstate road atlas (or if the interstate is too modern for them, try railroad timetable). Ask them to find the fastest route to visit all their friends and relatives and note how the effort required is pretty easy at low digits and gets terrifyingly difficult once you have a couple hundred, to the point where whim or guess -n- check is the best solution. Now thats something that does not scale polynomially.
One widely held, and completely wrong, belief about P != NP is that if a poly solution exists for currently non-poly problems, it'll be a simple click of a mouse to instantly solve all poly problems, which is pretty ignorant. What if the poly time solution has a constant C factor that is a multiple of the age of the universe? Or if the "easy" squared coefficient numerically equals a mere google to the power of a google to the power of a google? Its very interesting mathematically, and as the answer to a trivia contest type question, but it does not necessarily have to have any real world impact at all.
Seriously, what is with people thinking "if I can not understand it fuck it" these days? How arrogant have we become?
1 word: Reagan. He's the one who started all this nonsense about how it's a bad thing to be educated and intelligent. It made his hick supporters "feel bad" so now they lash out at the "intelligencia".
Not bad for a troll.
Anti-intellectualism in American Life, by Richard Hofstadter published in... 1963. Not 1988. In fact Hofstadter was dead by '70.
"‘the more learned and witty you bee, the more fit to act for Satan will you bee" John Cotton 1642 in Boston USA
Its across the political spectrum, not just a republican thing.
People still use email? Or are they talking about usenet spam, which unfortunately still blasts out? Hold on while I check my gopher server.
From talking to "non techies" email is pretty near dead outside the corporate world. Person to person text is now conducted exclusively via SMS or facebook wall postings. Personal to business transactions (site registrations, etc) are done with gmail and email is otherwise not used anymore.
Thats just a technical skills list. No big deal? How about non-technical issues:
1) The environmental laws relating to septic tanks change occasionally and are different for every municipality you work in.
2) The plumbing code rules / laws change constantly for each municipality for appliances. So... your dishwasher now needs a vacuum breaker on the waste side. No, it needs a new, different type of vacuum breaker. Now you must hardwire the AC. No, it must connect to a GFCI plug fed by a lightswitch under the sink within 3 feet of the outlet. And now it needs to be fed off a dedicated 15 amp circuit from the electrical panel. And its all different at the city down the road. Ditto the icemaker in the fridge, which must, or must not, or can possibly have a needle shutoff valve or a ball valve or it depends. You need a building permit to add an outdoor faucet fixture, err wait thats just in the city to the east, here you need dedicated copper bond grounding conductors to hook up a hot tub, but not a pool, unless its grandfathered in.
Tradesmen actually make pretty good lawyers in their specific area of expertise.
Not because it's hard to teach SQL, but because they should know basic database theory and practice - and how could they have possibly learned that without having learned SQL?
You might be surprised. After the first week of intro to database class, we spent one week focused very intently on each Codd normal form, including multiple homework assignments, basically case studies that needed to be worked around and/or redesigned. This was probably my first CS class that had more lines of essays written than lines of code. And ER diagrams, and UML, and flowcharts, and other graphics arts. Thats like what, eight weeks plus the first week, equals nine weeks, and the semester is only around twelve weeks long. They should have called it "database normalization class" not a general intro, whatever. Then there was about one week of "everything you need to know about generic SQL in two lectures" (ultra glossed over) and then a week of optimization theory (this is why you want indexes! this is why full text search is slow! this is why you avoid regex in SQL if at all possible! This is why you want lots of fast disk and lots of RAM!). Add a week or two for reviews, midterms, final, thats it.
Everyone had MS Access and mysql / postgresql at home but actually writing SQL did not happen very much in the first semester class. To give you an idea, the final had multiple choice questions of about this level:
Circle the statement that does NOT exist in sql: SELECT UPDATE REBOOT DELETE
The final was all essay questions about a rather complicated and detailed payroll database that was ridiculously poorly designed, how we would work around it in its broken state to accomplish various tasks, and exactly how we'd re-implement portions of it in a completely normalized form if only we could do so.
This was at a fairly typical midwestern liberal arts, college computer science department, less than a decade ago.
You don't hire a waste management engineer to drive a garbage truck, do you?
and the argument you'll hear in response:
"In a 25% unemployment situation, whats wrong with going for a phd to do a high school grad's job, maybe he will do it better?".
"It's bad sportsmanship to complain when they jump ship to a real job, or your requirements were too tight so you couldn't find one, but a display of bad sportsmanship doesn't mean it was overall a bad game plan".
I'm just repeating stuff I heard, not necessarily agree with.
My current employer would flip out if I did, we hired pure Database people for a reason.
To create willful ignorance and a huge impedance bump, with the result that the algorithms and procedures you design, will not smoothly and quickly mesh with the database hardware and software configuration they maintain, while not implementing important new technologies that bridge both areas? As long as your competitors make the same mistake, you're safe, probably, but it can be a pretty tedious working environment if you're doing anything unusual or complicated or interesting.
There are IT degrees out there now and they will prepare you pretty well, but they are basically vocational degrees that the course material will have changed every 5 years. Today's CS degree has mostly the same theory it did 20 years ago.
The quality of IT degrees is highly variable, in comparison to CS degrees. The tiny liberal arts college I attended in the early 00s had both CS and IT attend the same discrete math, data structures, and systems analysis classes, but while us CS guys were in calculus, OO-programming, and a really strange compiler class, the IT guys were chilling in intro to accounting and other business school classes. If I recall they were required to take "intro to management" with the theory that later on, they would be hiring us CS guys, even if we had the "harder" "higher level" course load.
The place to run away from, is the IT degrees with courses like "Excel 2003". Pretty much any class with an individual software product in the title is no good. "Database design using Codd normal forms" is probably a pretty good I.T. class (and my experience in the working world shows its very obviously not well attended). "How to click and drool in MS Access" is probably not a good I.T. class.
Ugh. I've tried recruiting employees from the local 2 year colleges, but what do they teach? Game programming. What the hell?
That must mean game programming has now crashed. After the "multimedia cdrom" crash in the 90s, they set up a program for that. Then after the dot com crash they set up the "web designer" program. I suspect in a couple years we'll be seeing a "myspace social media technician" program.
I went into the article expecting the usual bone-headed incompetent management drivel, but the last item on the list of jobs that are hard to fill still blew me away:
10. Active Federal Government Security Clearance
Seriously, any hiring manager that thinks it's the universities' responsibility to get security clearances for students as part of a degree, wow, that's a hiring manager that somebody should drag out back and shoot.
The company not willing to pay for it is "code words" for the boss wants to hire military vets or reservists. I got my "secret" clearance years and years before I graduated, for free... Well, it actually took years of service in the USAR... The school financial aid office was instrumental in helping me get my GI Bill benefits (took months) so I'm not surprised they'd try to embrace and extend into helping get clearances.
I'm currently looking to hire (NYC, relatively junior position, general unix skills strongly preferred, perl also preferred but not required, what we really want is someone who has a little bit of general programming experience and demonstrated problem solving skills).
I'm not interested in moving and I have about two decades too much experience for you, but it sounds none the less interesting. You forgot to mention by far the most important determinant of the class of personnel whom apply, that being PAY. SALARY. BENEFITS. Just a tiny little thing like that. Unless you're a all-volunteer organization or "work in this startup for equity shares" or whatever.
To get around cost of living disparities, lets just say that where I live, what you're asking for would require as a pretty middle of the road offer, "annual salary about 1/2 the cost of an equally very entry level suburban 'raising a family'-style house". So if your typical entry level starter house in NYC area goes for $600K, you're offering $300K per year for this job, correct? I'm guessing you're offering about a tenth of that, and are not too happy with the results. You get what you pay for... On the surface, sure I'd like an auto mechanic whom charges only $10/hr, then again, I've heard of the damage jiffy lube guys can do, and maybe I want to pay a little more after all...
If by bricked you mean you locked yourself out, confreg foolishness while booting, clear the password line, reboot, and 9600 8n1 but anyone whom can't figure out the right RS232 settings while plugged in, probably should not be plugged into a RS232 port. Actually the correct answer is "google.com" and anyone whom can't handle that, can't be a tech. If by bricked you mean the somewhat more common "dead as a brick doesn't even boot no lights" then welcome to the finer details of smartnet (uh, you did renew your smartnet contract, right?)
Humorously, the proper analogy is mechanical engineer is to auto mechanic as computer scientist is to I.T. tradesman. Its the designer vs implementer/repairer analogy. If you can redefine "profession" weirdly enough, perhaps under that weird definition then I.T. is a profession as opposed to a skilled trade. Most people making that mistake assume that at least socially profession is greater than skilled trade, IT is cool, therefore IT must be a profession. Not so.
... Except that HR/other people will ask for 1/2/5 years experience in each one..... Because in reality there is a learning curve but if you learn one scripting language, it doesn't take that much longer to learn another...
HR claims they can't find someone else with the precise work history of any individual worker, and that's unfortunately the only way they know how to hire.
Boss sees article in PC magazine on buzzword of the week, next week everyone's stuck implementing it, and everyone figures it out on the fly, without having to replace the entire departments employees (unless buzzword of the week was outsource...). HR doesn't even know thats theoretically possible for a human whom is a resource to accomplish, its conceptually like alchemy, they cannot believe its possible.
The other funny scenario is where they "can't afford the delay of weeks of training" but they can apparently afford the delay of months of searching for the perfect applicant.
Slashdot Mirror
A doctor!!!
Doctors are legendary for not being able to handle money. Right up there with dentists, pro sports athletes, and lottery winners.
And yes, my first thought was "I don't want him operating on me".
An accountant or a cop, yeah be scared. Docs get a free pass on money handling. It doesn't really have much to do with their job.
Home equity loans. Those are usually used for cars, bling, and cosmetic surgery, and on very rare occasion are used for home improvement. I got a roof and air conditioner with one in the early 00s.
Usually these "moralizing human interest stories" have a much more complicated and detailed real story behind them.
When it comes to he said / "she" said like this, if he was dumb enough to be out $20K, but smart enough to report it as $200K and theres no paperwork to prove it either way, he may as well go for the gold and strike back at "her". Worst case he's busted for filing a false report, although how they'd pin it on him is a mystery. Best case is he makes a nice profit. He's probably pissed off and looking for revenge....
Another possible situation is someone turned 200K into coke, snorted it, doesn't want to admit it, and weirdly enough this utterly pitiful story sounds "better", or at least doesn't violate someones parole terms, divorce settlement, custody requirement, etc.
Then there's the money laundering mule whom got burned. His handler got him used to sloppy handling procedures (yeah I know I told you to keep the last $20K for yourself, but I'm in a hurry and you can just keep $40K of the next shipment). Next thing you know "his" share of the money is gone and he's left holding the bag for laundering, errrr, I mean now he's a unfortunate victim going to the police, how sad.
Sometimes these stories are people whom did NOT get burned, if you know what I mean. Sure, they withdrew $200K of their money and wired it to Mr Kingpin in another country whom now has $200K with a valid receipt proving it is his. The untold story is Mr Kingpin handed him a bag of $300K cash as the first step. Sometimes the IRS catches these guys if they're dumb enough at cash handling (buys a Ferrari, in cash, the week after reporting his "loss", etc). Generally the less the guy helps the cops the more likely this is the situation. He's probably not making that much on a risk free carefully choreographed transaction like that. Probably more like 10% or maybe he's having a favor taken care of for him or being forgiven of a certain mistake toward a powerful person.
The IRS situation is very complicated. If you withdraw the cash, stash it, or wire it to your brother in another state, suddenly you have quite a capital loss there to report. Of course you can only do this about once per lifetime, but, maybe he had a windfall inheritance and this is how he, uh, "lost" it...
Sometimes you see this "behavior" when a genuine, although illegal, deal goes bad and at least you'd like to deduct it from your taxes. So, your "co worker" promised you a 25% rate of return, and he just needs a little cash to get him thru a tight time, but he skipped town instead... Well, at least you can write it off, and/or explain where the money disappeared to, even if thats not exactly where it went. Look thru the local papers for a grow up that got busted a couple weeks ago that had about $200K of expenses, etc.
Shockingly enough, it might be true as reported. Historically unlikely, sure, but possibly true. Maybe. Its a heck of a story anyway.
What matters to me, is does it run on Linux under WINE?
I'd bet that they are going to use it to host a website of some kind.
Lets say you convinced half of the 826 registered Debian Linux consultants to get a vanity email address at that domain name for $10/yr. Multiplied by all the other open source consultants in the world equals a handy bit of cash per year...
Something like the Mac App Store, but cross platform and accepting only open source submissions.
Then that's absolutely nothing like the Mac App Store.
They mean, it would be shiny.
Better. Supply open source support for sourceforge/open source projects.
Probably a hell of a lot simpler to contact one of these 826 people and arrange terms.
http://www.debian.org/consultants
Now something new to the ecosystem, would be a talent agency that handled all aspects of these relationships for a very modest fee. Maybe that already exists, very quietly.
And I may be in the minority, but I would pay X amount of money for open source and free apps that were compiled and packaged. (X being reasonably small.)
We have had this for decades. No kidding.
You could hire one of these guys to produce the exact free app that you want, to the exact packaging specs you want, with the exact compile time options you want. You can't lose, and everyone wins. Kind of the opposite of the banking system where heads they win or tails you lose.
http://www.debian.org/consultants
Republicans like Reagan and Palin and Beck are the flag-bearers for anti-intellectualism in our times.
I'm not disagreeing that they are a tiny little itty bitty subset of the flag bearers, but they seem kinda outnumbered and outgunned by the sports-fans, jocks, sportscasters, religious preachers, Christian creationism activists, intelligent design authors, romance novel writers, tv newsreaders, pretty much the entire pop culture industry from hip hop musicians to movie actors, the entire freaking population of California Lousiana and Mississippi, and american idol viewers.
After all, wasn't Little Wayne and Eminem hard core right wingers? Oh wait...
But other than them folks, us slashdotters are like a brilliant beacon of light on the American Renaissance, yeah.
TL;DR - No encryption schemes will be broken if it is proved that P=NP.
Also there is no guarantee that a P=NP solution must be feasible. There may exist a polynomial solution to cracking AES, BUT that specific problem may result in polynomial coefficients that are so unimaginably large as to require lots of Knuths uparrow notation to express numerically, making it a meaningless victory.
Sample dialogue: "The good news is its poly, in fact not only poly, but linear, in fact not only linear but coefficient of one, so if we double the key length then we only double the search time. The bad news is we're talking about doubling a trillion times the lifetime of the universe assuming every atom in the universe did an op every Planck time. Other than that, no problemo, because P = NP."
"unsolvable with conventional computers"
They're not unsolvable, they're infeasible. There's an important difference.
You can solve TSP for 1 million cities if you're willing to wait a few billion years, but the fact that you're waiting a few billion years makes it infeasible.
And, critically, they're infeasible because the effort scales at higher than polynomial rates as the problem space increases.
Perfectly feasible in 100 ms at 32 bits scales to 100 trillion years at 1024 bits. That kind of thing.
Now its perfectly possible to find a poly solution, that scales polynomially, that is none the less completely infeasible and "has no application". Looking above, a poly solution might exist that cracks 32 bits in a mere 100 trillion trillion years, and scales linear so 1024 bits takes a mere (32 * 100) = 3200 trillion trillion years. That is mathematically fascinating and probably results in a Fields medal, but by no means feasible or has any impact on anyones daily life..
truly test the answer space
The problem is its both simple enough and high profile enough that it attracts cranks like moths to a flame, and stereotypically none of them have the ability to operate in an "answer space" even as large as high school algebra or maybe high school geometry.
Very much like the drunk whom loses their car keys in the dark alley, but decides to search under the streetlamp for the keys, "because the light is better under the lamp". It tends to be a bit of a waste of time. Having a billion drunks search under the streetlamp in parallel for the keys isn't going to help.
If someone solves P = NP, like most big problems its going to be solved by someone applying some recently discovered, or at least never before applied technique that only a specialist in that odd field would know, and without even expecting it'll happen the answer falls out of a related calculation. Its not going to be from a million monkeys randomly trying modifications of the quadratic formula.
I read a car example somewhere, probably slashdot. OK so if you have misplaced your car keys, this is a P!=NP problem. It's easy to confirm whether or not you have found your keys at any point in the search, but finding the keys themselves likely will require looking through all possible locations where they could be.
Terrible example because your "NP" example is inherently a polynomial time problem, so you've got it exactly backwards. Doesn't matter how many dimensions your universe has, if it takes one time unit to search one unit cell, then inherently the total time required to search any given region can only increase as a polynomial as the region scales linearly. So searching for car keys is very strictly a polynomial time problem and scales somewhere between power of 2 and power of 3.
Want a NP problem for an old person, whip out ye olden times interstate road atlas (or if the interstate is too modern for them, try railroad timetable). Ask them to find the fastest route to visit all their friends and relatives and note how the effort required is pretty easy at low digits and gets terrifyingly difficult once you have a couple hundred, to the point where whim or guess -n- check is the best solution. Now thats something that does not scale polynomially.
One widely held, and completely wrong, belief about P != NP is that if a poly solution exists for currently non-poly problems, it'll be a simple click of a mouse to instantly solve all poly problems, which is pretty ignorant. What if the poly time solution has a constant C factor that is a multiple of the age of the universe? Or if the "easy" squared coefficient numerically equals a mere google to the power of a google to the power of a google? Its very interesting mathematically, and as the answer to a trivia contest type question, but it does not necessarily have to have any real world impact at all.
Seriously, what is with people thinking "if I can not understand it fuck it" these days? How arrogant have we become?
1 word: Reagan. He's the one who started all this nonsense about how it's a bad thing to be educated and intelligent. It made his hick supporters "feel bad" so now they lash out at the "intelligencia".
Not bad for a troll.
Anti-intellectualism in American Life, by Richard Hofstadter published in ... 1963. Not 1988. In fact Hofstadter was dead by '70.
"‘the more learned and witty you bee, the more fit to act for Satan will you bee" John Cotton 1642 in Boston USA
Its across the political spectrum, not just a republican thing.
People still use email? Or are they talking about usenet spam, which unfortunately still blasts out? Hold on while I check my gopher server.
From talking to "non techies" email is pretty near dead outside the corporate world. Person to person text is now conducted exclusively via SMS or facebook wall postings. Personal to business transactions (site registrations, etc) are done with gmail and email is otherwise not used anymore.
Thats just a technical skills list. No big deal? How about non-technical issues:
1) The environmental laws relating to septic tanks change occasionally and are different for every municipality you work in.
2) The plumbing code rules / laws change constantly for each municipality for appliances. So... your dishwasher now needs a vacuum breaker on the waste side. No, it needs a new, different type of vacuum breaker. Now you must hardwire the AC. No, it must connect to a GFCI plug fed by a lightswitch under the sink within 3 feet of the outlet. And now it needs to be fed off a dedicated 15 amp circuit from the electrical panel. And its all different at the city down the road. Ditto the icemaker in the fridge, which must, or must not, or can possibly have a needle shutoff valve or a ball valve or it depends. You need a building permit to add an outdoor faucet fixture, err wait thats just in the city to the east, here you need dedicated copper bond grounding conductors to hook up a hot tub, but not a pool, unless its grandfathered in.
Tradesmen actually make pretty good lawyers in their specific area of expertise.
Not because it's hard to teach SQL, but because they should know basic database theory and practice - and how could they have possibly learned that without having learned SQL?
You might be surprised. After the first week of intro to database class, we spent one week focused very intently on each Codd normal form, including multiple homework assignments, basically case studies that needed to be worked around and/or redesigned. This was probably my first CS class that had more lines of essays written than lines of code. And ER diagrams, and UML, and flowcharts, and other graphics arts. Thats like what, eight weeks plus the first week, equals nine weeks, and the semester is only around twelve weeks long. They should have called it "database normalization class" not a general intro, whatever. Then there was about one week of "everything you need to know about generic SQL in two lectures" (ultra glossed over) and then a week of optimization theory (this is why you want indexes! this is why full text search is slow! this is why you avoid regex in SQL if at all possible! This is why you want lots of fast disk and lots of RAM!). Add a week or two for reviews, midterms, final, thats it.
Everyone had MS Access and mysql / postgresql at home but actually writing SQL did not happen very much in the first semester class. To give you an idea, the final had multiple choice questions of about this level:
Circle the statement that does NOT exist in sql:
SELECT
UPDATE
REBOOT
DELETE
The final was all essay questions about a rather complicated and detailed payroll database that was ridiculously poorly designed, how we would work around it in its broken state to accomplish various tasks, and exactly how we'd re-implement portions of it in a completely normalized form if only we could do so.
This was at a fairly typical midwestern liberal arts, college computer science department, less than a decade ago.
You don't hire a waste management engineer to drive a garbage truck, do you?
and the argument you'll hear in response:
"In a 25% unemployment situation, whats wrong with going for a phd to do a high school grad's job, maybe he will do it better?".
"It's bad sportsmanship to complain when they jump ship to a real job, or your requirements were too tight so you couldn't find one, but a display of bad sportsmanship doesn't mean it was overall a bad game plan".
I'm just repeating stuff I heard, not necessarily agree with.
My current employer would flip out if I did, we hired pure Database people for a reason.
To create willful ignorance and a huge impedance bump, with the result that the algorithms and procedures you design, will not smoothly and quickly mesh with the database hardware and software configuration they maintain, while not implementing important new technologies that bridge both areas? As long as your competitors make the same mistake, you're safe, probably, but it can be a pretty tedious working environment if you're doing anything unusual or complicated or interesting.
There are IT degrees out there now and they will prepare you pretty well, but they are basically vocational degrees that the course material will have changed every 5 years. Today's CS degree has mostly the same theory it did 20 years ago.
The quality of IT degrees is highly variable, in comparison to CS degrees. The tiny liberal arts college I attended in the early 00s had both CS and IT attend the same discrete math, data structures, and systems analysis classes, but while us CS guys were in calculus, OO-programming, and a really strange compiler class, the IT guys were chilling in intro to accounting and other business school classes. If I recall they were required to take "intro to management" with the theory that later on, they would be hiring us CS guys, even if we had the "harder" "higher level" course load.
The place to run away from, is the IT degrees with courses like "Excel 2003". Pretty much any class with an individual software product in the title is no good. "Database design using Codd normal forms" is probably a pretty good I.T. class (and my experience in the working world shows its very obviously not well attended). "How to click and drool in MS Access" is probably not a good I.T. class.
Ugh. I've tried recruiting employees from the local 2 year colleges, but what do they teach? Game programming. What the hell?
That must mean game programming has now crashed. After the "multimedia cdrom" crash in the 90s, they set up a program for that. Then after the dot com crash they set up the "web designer" program. I suspect in a couple years we'll be seeing a "myspace social media technician" program.
I went into the article expecting the usual bone-headed incompetent management drivel, but the last item on the list of jobs that are hard to fill still blew me away:
10. Active Federal Government Security Clearance
Seriously, any hiring manager that thinks it's the universities' responsibility to get security clearances for students as part of a degree, wow, that's a hiring manager that somebody should drag out back and shoot.
The company not willing to pay for it is "code words" for the boss wants to hire military vets or reservists. I got my "secret" clearance years and years before I graduated, for free... Well, it actually took years of service in the USAR ... The school financial aid office was instrumental in helping me get my GI Bill benefits (took months) so I'm not surprised they'd try to embrace and extend into helping get clearances.
I'm currently looking to hire (NYC, relatively junior position, general unix skills strongly preferred, perl also preferred but not required, what we really want is someone who has a little bit of general programming experience and demonstrated problem solving skills).
I'm not interested in moving and I have about two decades too much experience for you, but it sounds none the less interesting. You forgot to mention by far the most important determinant of the class of personnel whom apply, that being PAY. SALARY. BENEFITS. Just a tiny little thing like that. Unless you're a all-volunteer organization or "work in this startup for equity shares" or whatever.
To get around cost of living disparities, lets just say that where I live, what you're asking for would require as a pretty middle of the road offer, "annual salary about 1/2 the cost of an equally very entry level suburban 'raising a family'-style house". So if your typical entry level starter house in NYC area goes for $600K, you're offering $300K per year for this job, correct? I'm guessing you're offering about a tenth of that, and are not too happy with the results. You get what you pay for... On the surface, sure I'd like an auto mechanic whom charges only $10/hr, then again, I've heard of the damage jiffy lube guys can do, and maybe I want to pay a little more after all...
That way, the best will apply and we'll simply take the one that has the most of the skills we require.
"That way, the best will apply and we'll simply take the best liar or con artist"
Anyone who's been around awhile has probably watched this play out. Thankfully I was not directly involved but it was kind of weirdly funny to watch.
If by bricked you mean you locked yourself out, confreg foolishness while booting, clear the password line, reboot, and 9600 8n1 but anyone whom can't figure out the right RS232 settings while plugged in, probably should not be plugged into a RS232 port. Actually the correct answer is "google.com" and anyone whom can't handle that, can't be a tech. If by bricked you mean the somewhat more common "dead as a brick doesn't even boot no lights" then welcome to the finer details of smartnet (uh, you did renew your smartnet contract, right?)
Humorously, the proper analogy is mechanical engineer is to auto mechanic as computer scientist is to I.T. tradesman. Its the designer vs implementer/repairer analogy. If you can redefine "profession" weirdly enough, perhaps under that weird definition then I.T. is a profession as opposed to a skilled trade. Most people making that mistake assume that at least socially profession is greater than skilled trade, IT is cool, therefore IT must be a profession. Not so.
HR claims they can't find someone else with the precise work history of any individual worker, and that's unfortunately the only way they know how to hire.
Boss sees article in PC magazine on buzzword of the week, next week everyone's stuck implementing it, and everyone figures it out on the fly, without having to replace the entire departments employees (unless buzzword of the week was outsource...). HR doesn't even know thats theoretically possible for a human whom is a resource to accomplish, its conceptually like alchemy, they cannot believe its possible.
The other funny scenario is where they "can't afford the delay of weeks of training" but they can apparently afford the delay of months of searching for the perfect applicant.