Cycling is unpowered. Walking is unpowered. Both use the same human muscle system and human fuel system, but one accomplishes locomotion with 1/7 as much energy. Walking is obviously very inefficient, and to claim humans are so efficient at walking that we don't know if we can make them any more efficient is ludicrous; there is obviously a lot of loss in the system to look for.
Pendulums swing forever. Have you not seen a pendulum? They get momentum from the rotation of the earth. There's a pendulum that has been swinging since 1855; that doesn't just happen by magic.
Well, maybe these engineers would have had jobs that some other engineers had, and so some other engineers wouldn't have jobs. Somebody would have not had a job.
It's funny, too: humans are so efficient walking that we don't know if we can make them walk any more efficiently, but we do know that they use as much energy to walk 1 mile as they use to bicycle 7 miles.
The problem I see with this is that it would give corporations power over the employees they have educated. No business would pay to have an employee educated if there was a chance they'd leave immediately after, so they'd either require them to stay with the company for N years, or make the entire debt repayable the moment they quit.
Yes, I've thought of that as well. Have you read your employment contract? Mine specifies that I can have $5000 per year of tuition, but I must stay with the company for 2 full years or else pay the whole balance back. It's not even pro-rated. This is the same situation as today, and so it did come to my attention.
When you think about it, it's not really a big deal. It actually moves some control onto the individual, and moves it off the business.
Currently, the onus is on individuals to educate themselves, with all the risk involved. Businesses know what's going on in their market and in their business: they have work performance information and business strategic goals, they have market projections and metrics on their growth, and they have highly-experienced business analysts to tell them how many people they're going to need in the next 2-4 years. An individual has to guess what the whole market will look like, with all of this information opaque to them, and with the worry that other individuals will have the same idea and get the same education: even if you correctly guess that there will be 200,000 new Computer Programming jobs when you graduate, that doesn't much help if 2 million people start college for Computer Programming the same year as you do.
If the business is left to carry the workforce, any market growth quickly dries up the pool of candidates. The business must therefor start hiring entrants, bringing them in, training them, sending them off to be educated, and so forth. During this time, the employer can shift lower-skill work from expensive, high-experienced, highly-skilled labor onto the new entrants, making effective use of them and furthering the business strategy: the entrant, while learning, is valuable to the business. While all of this is going on, the business is paying the student a salary: the entrant is gaining workforce experience, an education, and an income, with all risk on the employer.
Now, I'll agree with you that, as a matter of fairness, the employer should at least pro-rate the student's education over time; besides just being sensible, the employer is deriving benefit from the employee during their education, and so is in fact being paid back. Let's say the entrant has, as I have, a 2 year repayment contract: he must remain with the employer for two years, or else pay back his tuition costs. Well, at graduation time four years in, the first two years are done and gone; the student is obligated for two years of tuition, and must stay with the business to avoid that financial burden. In a sense of fairness, the employee should only owe half of the third year and all of the fourth year; a year after graduation, the employee will only owe one half of a year's tuition.
Of course it would be better for the employee if the employer waived the tuition repayment entirely; as you've pointed out, the employee may decide to immediately quit, and wouldn't want to be saddled with that burden. What about the employer, though? The employer made an investment; don't they deserve good faith on the social contract they've made with the employee? And from the employee's perspective, if another employer places an offer, can't they cover the employee's repayment, as they often do now?
I think this is a net-positive movement, even with your concerns taken into consideration. Perhaps you could consider it for a while, consider the alternatives from the perspective of the employee and the employer, consider the advantages and disadvantages, and weigh each out. I'm sure you'll see that it's at least more complex than a simple matter of employee lock-in.
So, the statistics, the surveys, the published numbers from the Department of Labor, show a special category of "Managers", which is about 15% of STEM workers--the rough size of Computer Workers or Engineers by trade--and also shows people working in Social Services (these are your trash collectors), Services (fast food), Retail (Wal-Mart), Arts and Entertainment (this technically encompasses everyone from movie theater ticket vendors to strippers--strippers and waitresses at the Tilted Kilt are considered "Entertainment Workers", which legally allows the business to discriminate based on sex, age, body shape, and so forth), Agriculture, Construction, and Production (factory work), and Sales.
The statistics specifically show categories for computer technicians and engineers. The categories of Health Care, Legal, Business, and Office Support aren't about running the IT systems in these jobs--nor are they about being managers, since there's a separate Manager category. You'll notice that Law, Business, and Sales are humanities-based careers.
So, again: we have a lot of trash men, factory workers, burger flippers, and retail clerks with STEM degrees. We also have people doing filing work for accountants and lawyers (you aren't going to be an accountant or lawyer without a finance or law degree). Sales is a strange category: Sears employs commissioned salespeople, and so these aren't considered Retail, but rather Sales; the difference between Sales and Retail is real, but it is also the difference between a Sears cashier and a Sears computer salesman (or a car salesman).
No, we don't have 74% of STEM degree holders managing STEM jobs. We have some 15% of STEM degree holders managing non-STEM jobs, though. We can say maybe 40% got decent jobs, 26% got STEM jobs, and 60% got shit jobs.
This is how they wind up in social services (trash men), retail (WalMart), and services (McDonalds)? They get promoted from Line Sandwich Maker to Line Manager?
It's common practice to stand up a Microsoft Windows 2013 server as a Certificate Authority, and put the CA key on all computers by Group Policy. Then you intercept every SSL connection and replace the certificate with an internal one, of which the IDS has the private key. The routers and such also use the same private key. The proxy server (transparent or otherwise) handshakes with the remote server using the correct certificate, decrypting and re-encrypting all traffic as it flows through.
Good. Once it's gone, maybe we'll all be rich enough to buy solar panels.
A solar panel tax break just raises the damand by, say, $500 of government incentive, plus persuasive incentive margin. That is to say: a $1500 installation that gets a consumer-reaching $500 rebate becomes a $2000 installation, in theory; in reality, the consumer sees a chance to obtain a discount on a $2000 installation, and manufacturers can profit more by raising that installation cost to $2100 because fewer than 20% of customers are turned off by that extra $100. Thus the consumer needs $600 more in his pocket, and comes out $100 poorer in the end.
These numbers are, of course, illustrative of a concept in market demand economics dealing with subsidies on the consumption end. The reality is more complex. For example, as you have pointed out, the imminent revocation of the ITC is driving up demand as people grab for the perceived free money; this means prices can go even higher, people can be even more disadvantaged by the government rebate, but they will still have more incentive to buy than in a non-credit market where the total cost to themselves is lower because there is no perceived monetary benefit in such a market.
Three Mile Island was the most fantastic design ever. A catastrophic failure leads to absolutely no negative consequences except for that of a nasty red mark on the balance sheet.
The main point is not to jump into new things in your industry. When I grabbed for MongoDB, it wasn't MongoDB 0.2 alpha or 1.0 or whatnot; it was MongoDB 2.2, a relatively mature product. At the time, it was new to the industry: a lot of articles on Slashdot and so forth were jabbering about these new "NoSQL" databases and "Document stores" and whatnot, and arguing their merits and shortcomings. The article proscribes that MongoDB would be something that cost me an "Innovation Token" if I were to grab it right then.
My point is that I did just that: I saw MySQL wasn't working, at all, for our projects, and that MongoDB fit some of our needs much better. Our software design and code became orders of magnitude more manageable and efficient. After that, we rewrote the MySQL calls as ORM, while using MongoDB via direct query--we quickly integrated and profited from two new technologies, reducing our risk and streamlining our business.
We did exactly the opposite of what the article says, and gained great benefits in opposition to what the article claims. By identifying and selecting the correct tools, be they old or new, we opened the path to innovation, allowing ourselves to carry out new strategies and develop new ideas quickly and effectively.
Yes, and there are also key close-out tasks to cap off open projects to deliver to the next guy, or to transfer knowledge and move off responsibilities gracefully. Cutting off is a great strategy where the user is not unique, and a devastating one where he is training his replacement or in charge of things that rarely require attention; most often, it's somewhere in-between, and some careful decisions are required.
Malware isn't as targeted as an individual, although I've seen financial records damaged and personal e-mails disseminated by malware. My stint at various companies, contractors, government positions, and private sector jobs has given me a lot of exposure to shit that goes wrong. Even when I had little technical power, I slowly identified ways to leverage the small access I needed, and to gain higher access; access control is idyllic, and information often leaks around a lot due to the need for certain things to be available.
I used to administrate IDS systems and approve firewall requests. In this capacity, I had no ability to do any real damage: every system I interfaced with was handled by an agent, either to install my hardware, to set my network routes, to configure the firewalls, to route span traffic to me, or to shut off ports when I discovered dangerous behavior on the network. I could damage our IDS, but nothing else. By contrast, those administrators each had a massive amount of power: they could sniff network traffic, route it for man-in-the-middle attacks, leak any information they wanted; even I was able to regularly extract administrative network passwords from our traffic, since our IDS ran decryption through our internal certificates and showed me raw attack traffic. I couldn't see your personal gmail account, but I could see the plaintext of your ssh connection to a CISCO switch.
I do work in network security; most mundanes who dabble figure that security is this rock-hard wall of protection, or it's wrong. They often forget the definition of information security, which includes confidentiality, integrity, and accessibility; it is the accessibility that people most forget, demanding confidentiality and integrity while refusing to sacrifice either where accessibility is impacted unacceptably. In my example with the IDS, the IDS must decrypt traffic to search for attacks which may compromise confidentiality or integrity, yet it also reveals passwords to a small group of people who may themselves compromise confidentiality or integrity by using these passwords; this is why HMAC was invented, but it is not always available within a protocol suite.
Oh, they can read and listen fine enough; but they don't always have social tact or good English grammar. Improving these things is incidental to employing good project management: it often happens when you take a direct approach to stakeholder communication and project planning, but it's not strictly a prerequisite. Even then, much of that only entails improving the clarity and completeness of communication; while there are structural and informational improvements, grammatical improvements don't necessarily come along.
Consider for a moment an e-mail that claims there are problems, that things aren't working, and that people want things too much. Such an e-mail can communicate the situation in all its completeness as I've just done, with little to no information on the specifics, with fragments of one thought jumbled with fragments of another as the text races back and forth between different issues. Such an e-mail would be much better if it first grouped together each part of the problem and relayed these groups sequentially, and second included a complete explanation for each part of the problem. Even then, the e-mail may be one giant paragraph, loads of run-on sentences, fragments of thoughts, and so forth.
As a project manager, you might learn to interpret this, and then produce a better-formed document to pass on to the other stakeholders; you'll continue to receive hackneyed garbage from your engineers, who still communicate like brain-damaged gradeschoolers, and just deal with it.
In the same way, these people may not deal elegantly at all with human beings; I myself am a very logical, fact-driven person, and have such a problem. In my case, I prefer to look at a problem and produce a solution; however, responding to problems often entails pointing out some painful, annoying things that people are still sore over, in the process highlighting all of their recent personal failures and generally shoving these things back in their faces while showing them how much better and more intelligent you are than they. I've found it more effective to separate out the case study and describe a solution, theoretical risks, and justification from the broad field of my work, allowing them to make the implications themselves and offering to provide the case studies if they need some specific concerns to raise to upper management. After rolling the ideas around and discussing them, the sting of failure is anesthetized, and they're far less hurt by the reminder now that they feel some control over the situation.
Of course, either approach I've described here is technically correct: I follow the same analytic process and deliver the same results regardless. I've learned to apply some consideration of complex human interactions when delivering those results, which is a whole different concern from my hard technical skills. I have said many times that there are no super brains: genius is technique, and I was born with the same capacity as everyone around me; this, too, is technique, and anyone can learn, as I have to only a small degree yet, to interact better with people just as well as they can learn grammar, computer programming, or quantum physics. As I've also come to understand lately, such skills are critical for success in the workplace.
People with STEM degrees have lower unemployment, and higher salaries. To say there is a "glut" relative to humanities is silly.
People with STEM degrees tend to be more affluent, thus more articulate, than poor, inner-city negroes who nobody likes anyway. They can pass an interview at Burger King better than a fourth-generation-welfare black kid. If we fixed our school systems--if we adjusted schools in our poorest cities to attend to the needs of the poverty-stricken minorities they service--such individuals would grow up poor and without a college education, but articulate, sociable, and on the same footing as middle-class engineers when they walk into the local WalMart looking for a job.
They are indeed important skills. But they are not "humanities".
Speaking, writing, organizing your office memos, dealing skillfully with people. These are called soft skills, and are humanities. Humanities include linguistics, social sciences, communications studies, and even law. A lawyer goes to a specialized school and then apprentices for years in nearly a decade of study entirely in humanities; diplomats, politicians, and business executives make a critical study of humanities to learn to negotiate and to speak in public; teachers go to college to study humanities, learning how to interact with children and parents. These are all studies in humanities.
Everything organized has some method of organization. People talk about schemaless documents, but they arrange them into related collections which carry some common features.
Yeah I work with technical people. 99% of them are moronic, drooling fuckups who somehow secured themselves a job without being able to construct a clear sentence. Somehow, they're able to do complex things in databases and write architecturally demanding software, even though they communicate like brain-damaged teenagers high on some unholy concoction of mind-altering substances.
I thought this would be a similar economic argument: 74% of STEM majors don't work in STEM fields, but instead in services (fast food), retail, social services (trashmen) or as aids running papers back and forth. I've made such arguments to illustrate why we need to dismantle the government's activities in post-K-12 education and leave workforce building up to the market, using this STEM market glut as a prime example.
They made a more humanizing argument which I can't disagree with. Both arguments are quite valid: the ability to deal with people, to write well, to communicate, to create, these are also important job skills.
Slashdot Mirror
Hugo Award for Best Black?
Cycling is unpowered. Walking is unpowered. Both use the same human muscle system and human fuel system, but one accomplishes locomotion with 1/7 as much energy. Walking is obviously very inefficient, and to claim humans are so efficient at walking that we don't know if we can make them any more efficient is ludicrous; there is obviously a lot of loss in the system to look for.
Pendulums swing forever. Have you not seen a pendulum? They get momentum from the rotation of the earth. There's a pendulum that has been swinging since 1855; that doesn't just happen by magic.
OnLive's 5 customers are probably crying now.
Well, maybe these engineers would have had jobs that some other engineers had, and so some other engineers wouldn't have jobs. Somebody would have not had a job.
Some people consider IPS monitors unsuitable for games requiring fast reflexes (i.e. FPSes) due to their double-digit response times.
My $800 inline IPS can apply firewall rules and deep packet inspection to 26GB of traffic per second with a double-digit latency of 10us.
A pendulum is powered by the rotational energy of the earth in its orbit around the sun. It has the largest external power source in the world.
It's funny, too: humans are so efficient walking that we don't know if we can make them walk any more efficiently, but we do know that they use as much energy to walk 1 mile as they use to bicycle 7 miles.
I don't have to take it in the ass to afford it!
The problem I see with this is that it would give corporations power over the employees they have educated. No business would pay to have an employee educated if there was a chance they'd leave immediately after, so they'd either require them to stay with the company for N years, or make the entire debt repayable the moment they quit.
Yes, I've thought of that as well. Have you read your employment contract? Mine specifies that I can have $5000 per year of tuition, but I must stay with the company for 2 full years or else pay the whole balance back. It's not even pro-rated. This is the same situation as today, and so it did come to my attention.
When you think about it, it's not really a big deal. It actually moves some control onto the individual, and moves it off the business.
Currently, the onus is on individuals to educate themselves, with all the risk involved. Businesses know what's going on in their market and in their business: they have work performance information and business strategic goals, they have market projections and metrics on their growth, and they have highly-experienced business analysts to tell them how many people they're going to need in the next 2-4 years. An individual has to guess what the whole market will look like, with all of this information opaque to them, and with the worry that other individuals will have the same idea and get the same education: even if you correctly guess that there will be 200,000 new Computer Programming jobs when you graduate, that doesn't much help if 2 million people start college for Computer Programming the same year as you do.
If the business is left to carry the workforce, any market growth quickly dries up the pool of candidates. The business must therefor start hiring entrants, bringing them in, training them, sending them off to be educated, and so forth. During this time, the employer can shift lower-skill work from expensive, high-experienced, highly-skilled labor onto the new entrants, making effective use of them and furthering the business strategy: the entrant, while learning, is valuable to the business. While all of this is going on, the business is paying the student a salary: the entrant is gaining workforce experience, an education, and an income, with all risk on the employer.
Now, I'll agree with you that, as a matter of fairness, the employer should at least pro-rate the student's education over time; besides just being sensible, the employer is deriving benefit from the employee during their education, and so is in fact being paid back. Let's say the entrant has, as I have, a 2 year repayment contract: he must remain with the employer for two years, or else pay back his tuition costs. Well, at graduation time four years in, the first two years are done and gone; the student is obligated for two years of tuition, and must stay with the business to avoid that financial burden. In a sense of fairness, the employee should only owe half of the third year and all of the fourth year; a year after graduation, the employee will only owe one half of a year's tuition.
Of course it would be better for the employee if the employer waived the tuition repayment entirely; as you've pointed out, the employee may decide to immediately quit, and wouldn't want to be saddled with that burden. What about the employer, though? The employer made an investment; don't they deserve good faith on the social contract they've made with the employee? And from the employee's perspective, if another employer places an offer, can't they cover the employee's repayment, as they often do now?
I think this is a net-positive movement, even with your concerns taken into consideration. Perhaps you could consider it for a while, consider the alternatives from the perspective of the employee and the employer, consider the advantages and disadvantages, and weigh each out. I'm sure you'll see that it's at least more complex than a simple matter of employee lock-in.
Your argument is:
1) "You're wrong. They're managers."
2) "You're wrong."
So, the statistics, the surveys, the published numbers from the Department of Labor, show a special category of "Managers", which is about 15% of STEM workers--the rough size of Computer Workers or Engineers by trade--and also shows people working in Social Services (these are your trash collectors), Services (fast food), Retail (Wal-Mart), Arts and Entertainment (this technically encompasses everyone from movie theater ticket vendors to strippers--strippers and waitresses at the Tilted Kilt are considered "Entertainment Workers", which legally allows the business to discriminate based on sex, age, body shape, and so forth), Agriculture, Construction, and Production (factory work), and Sales.
The statistics specifically show categories for computer technicians and engineers. The categories of Health Care, Legal, Business, and Office Support aren't about running the IT systems in these jobs--nor are they about being managers, since there's a separate Manager category. You'll notice that Law, Business, and Sales are humanities-based careers.
So, again: we have a lot of trash men, factory workers, burger flippers, and retail clerks with STEM degrees. We also have people doing filing work for accountants and lawyers (you aren't going to be an accountant or lawyer without a finance or law degree). Sales is a strange category: Sears employs commissioned salespeople, and so these aren't considered Retail, but rather Sales; the difference between Sales and Retail is real, but it is also the difference between a Sears cashier and a Sears computer salesman (or a car salesman).
No, we don't have 74% of STEM degree holders managing STEM jobs. We have some 15% of STEM degree holders managing non-STEM jobs, though. We can say maybe 40% got decent jobs, 26% got STEM jobs, and 60% got shit jobs.
This is how they wind up in social services (trash men), retail (WalMart), and services (McDonalds)? They get promoted from Line Sandwich Maker to Line Manager?
It's common practice to stand up a Microsoft Windows 2013 server as a Certificate Authority, and put the CA key on all computers by Group Policy. Then you intercept every SSL connection and replace the certificate with an internal one, of which the IDS has the private key. The routers and such also use the same private key. The proxy server (transparent or otherwise) handshakes with the remote server using the correct certificate, decrypting and re-encrypting all traffic as it flows through.
Yeah, two-dimensional shockwave? What?
Good. Once it's gone, maybe we'll all be rich enough to buy solar panels.
A solar panel tax break just raises the damand by, say, $500 of government incentive, plus persuasive incentive margin. That is to say: a $1500 installation that gets a consumer-reaching $500 rebate becomes a $2000 installation, in theory; in reality, the consumer sees a chance to obtain a discount on a $2000 installation, and manufacturers can profit more by raising that installation cost to $2100 because fewer than 20% of customers are turned off by that extra $100. Thus the consumer needs $600 more in his pocket, and comes out $100 poorer in the end.
These numbers are, of course, illustrative of a concept in market demand economics dealing with subsidies on the consumption end. The reality is more complex. For example, as you have pointed out, the imminent revocation of the ITC is driving up demand as people grab for the perceived free money; this means prices can go even higher, people can be even more disadvantaged by the government rebate, but they will still have more incentive to buy than in a non-credit market where the total cost to themselves is lower because there is no perceived monetary benefit in such a market.
Three Mile Island was the most fantastic design ever. A catastrophic failure leads to absolutely no negative consequences except for that of a nasty red mark on the balance sheet.
The engineers are the ones hit the hardest! Computer programmers have a better employment rate than engineers!
The main point is not to jump into new things in your industry. When I grabbed for MongoDB, it wasn't MongoDB 0.2 alpha or 1.0 or whatnot; it was MongoDB 2.2, a relatively mature product. At the time, it was new to the industry: a lot of articles on Slashdot and so forth were jabbering about these new "NoSQL" databases and "Document stores" and whatnot, and arguing their merits and shortcomings. The article proscribes that MongoDB would be something that cost me an "Innovation Token" if I were to grab it right then.
My point is that I did just that: I saw MySQL wasn't working, at all, for our projects, and that MongoDB fit some of our needs much better. Our software design and code became orders of magnitude more manageable and efficient. After that, we rewrote the MySQL calls as ORM, while using MongoDB via direct query--we quickly integrated and profited from two new technologies, reducing our risk and streamlining our business.
We did exactly the opposite of what the article says, and gained great benefits in opposition to what the article claims. By identifying and selecting the correct tools, be they old or new, we opened the path to innovation, allowing ourselves to carry out new strategies and develop new ideas quickly and effectively.
Yes, and there are also key close-out tasks to cap off open projects to deliver to the next guy, or to transfer knowledge and move off responsibilities gracefully. Cutting off is a great strategy where the user is not unique, and a devastating one where he is training his replacement or in charge of things that rarely require attention; most often, it's somewhere in-between, and some careful decisions are required.
Malware isn't as targeted as an individual, although I've seen financial records damaged and personal e-mails disseminated by malware. My stint at various companies, contractors, government positions, and private sector jobs has given me a lot of exposure to shit that goes wrong. Even when I had little technical power, I slowly identified ways to leverage the small access I needed, and to gain higher access; access control is idyllic, and information often leaks around a lot due to the need for certain things to be available.
I used to administrate IDS systems and approve firewall requests. In this capacity, I had no ability to do any real damage: every system I interfaced with was handled by an agent, either to install my hardware, to set my network routes, to configure the firewalls, to route span traffic to me, or to shut off ports when I discovered dangerous behavior on the network. I could damage our IDS, but nothing else. By contrast, those administrators each had a massive amount of power: they could sniff network traffic, route it for man-in-the-middle attacks, leak any information they wanted; even I was able to regularly extract administrative network passwords from our traffic, since our IDS ran decryption through our internal certificates and showed me raw attack traffic. I couldn't see your personal gmail account, but I could see the plaintext of your ssh connection to a CISCO switch.
I do work in network security; most mundanes who dabble figure that security is this rock-hard wall of protection, or it's wrong. They often forget the definition of information security, which includes confidentiality, integrity, and accessibility; it is the accessibility that people most forget, demanding confidentiality and integrity while refusing to sacrifice either where accessibility is impacted unacceptably. In my example with the IDS, the IDS must decrypt traffic to search for attacks which may compromise confidentiality or integrity, yet it also reveals passwords to a small group of people who may themselves compromise confidentiality or integrity by using these passwords; this is why HMAC was invented, but it is not always available within a protocol suite.
Oh, they can read and listen fine enough; but they don't always have social tact or good English grammar. Improving these things is incidental to employing good project management: it often happens when you take a direct approach to stakeholder communication and project planning, but it's not strictly a prerequisite. Even then, much of that only entails improving the clarity and completeness of communication; while there are structural and informational improvements, grammatical improvements don't necessarily come along.
Consider for a moment an e-mail that claims there are problems, that things aren't working, and that people want things too much. Such an e-mail can communicate the situation in all its completeness as I've just done, with little to no information on the specifics, with fragments of one thought jumbled with fragments of another as the text races back and forth between different issues. Such an e-mail would be much better if it first grouped together each part of the problem and relayed these groups sequentially, and second included a complete explanation for each part of the problem. Even then, the e-mail may be one giant paragraph, loads of run-on sentences, fragments of thoughts, and so forth.
As a project manager, you might learn to interpret this, and then produce a better-formed document to pass on to the other stakeholders; you'll continue to receive hackneyed garbage from your engineers, who still communicate like brain-damaged gradeschoolers, and just deal with it.
In the same way, these people may not deal elegantly at all with human beings; I myself am a very logical, fact-driven person, and have such a problem. In my case, I prefer to look at a problem and produce a solution; however, responding to problems often entails pointing out some painful, annoying things that people are still sore over, in the process highlighting all of their recent personal failures and generally shoving these things back in their faces while showing them how much better and more intelligent you are than they. I've found it more effective to separate out the case study and describe a solution, theoretical risks, and justification from the broad field of my work, allowing them to make the implications themselves and offering to provide the case studies if they need some specific concerns to raise to upper management. After rolling the ideas around and discussing them, the sting of failure is anesthetized, and they're far less hurt by the reminder now that they feel some control over the situation.
Of course, either approach I've described here is technically correct: I follow the same analytic process and deliver the same results regardless. I've learned to apply some consideration of complex human interactions when delivering those results, which is a whole different concern from my hard technical skills. I have said many times that there are no super brains: genius is technique, and I was born with the same capacity as everyone around me; this, too, is technique, and anyone can learn, as I have to only a small degree yet, to interact better with people just as well as they can learn grammar, computer programming, or quantum physics. As I've also come to understand lately, such skills are critical for success in the workplace.
People with STEM degrees have lower unemployment, and higher salaries. To say there is a "glut" relative to humanities is silly.
People with STEM degrees tend to be more affluent, thus more articulate, than poor, inner-city negroes who nobody likes anyway. They can pass an interview at Burger King better than a fourth-generation-welfare black kid. If we fixed our school systems--if we adjusted schools in our poorest cities to attend to the needs of the poverty-stricken minorities they service--such individuals would grow up poor and without a college education, but articulate, sociable, and on the same footing as middle-class engineers when they walk into the local WalMart looking for a job.
They are indeed important skills. But they are not "humanities".
Speaking, writing, organizing your office memos, dealing skillfully with people. These are called soft skills, and are humanities. Humanities include linguistics, social sciences, communications studies, and even law. A lawyer goes to a specialized school and then apprentices for years in nearly a decade of study entirely in humanities; diplomats, politicians, and business executives make a critical study of humanities to learn to negotiate and to speak in public; teachers go to college to study humanities, learning how to interact with children and parents. These are all studies in humanities.
Everything organized has some method of organization. People talk about schemaless documents, but they arrange them into related collections which carry some common features.
Yeah I work with technical people. 99% of them are moronic, drooling fuckups who somehow secured themselves a job without being able to construct a clear sentence. Somehow, they're able to do complex things in databases and write architecturally demanding software, even though they communicate like brain-damaged teenagers high on some unholy concoction of mind-altering substances.
I thought this would be a similar economic argument: 74% of STEM majors don't work in STEM fields, but instead in services (fast food), retail, social services (trashmen) or as aids running papers back and forth. I've made such arguments to illustrate why we need to dismantle the government's activities in post-K-12 education and leave workforce building up to the market, using this STEM market glut as a prime example.
They made a more humanizing argument which I can't disagree with. Both arguments are quite valid: the ability to deal with people, to write well, to communicate, to create, these are also important job skills.