Whether you're at a big institution or a small one, you're right, it's essential for students to be proactive in having contact with faculty. I doubt in _any_ program you've got faculty chasing students down (although at "University A" I did have one excellent professor who, in addition to being very accessible, threw parties to which he invited undergraduate & graduate students.)
At "University B", one of the "name" faculty members was notorious for being so phenomenally rude and standoffish that virtually _nobody_, not even other faculty members, felt comfortable approaching him. I'm a pretty persistent and enthustiastic guy (sometimes too much so...) and had good relationships with non-CS faculty at the same very large institution. But by hiring a bunch of prima donnas, the CS department at "University B" stacked the deck beyond the usual factors of it being "easy to fade into the crowd."
I took undergraduate classes from CS departments at two different universities over a period of twelve years (1980-92). (I kept getting jobs and stuff, okay?:-) I've also hired and managed dozens of programmers since then.
First I'll address this question as a student, then as an employer.
Unviersity "A" had a much lower ranking, and did not emphasize research. University "B" was much larger, much better funded, and was rated in the top ten state university CS programs.
I think that undergraduate programs in research-intensive fields such as computer science suffer tremendously when the priority is on research and not on teaching. The poster talks about approachability: this is WHY YOU ARE AT A UNIVERSITY, is so you can interact 1:1 with people who have made studying CS their lives. Spending time with someone whose research is a notch less exciting is infinitely preferable to spending NO TIME with someone whose fascinating research you might as well have just read a book about.
No big surprise, I learned a lot more stuff, both useful and interesting, at University "A" than at University "B". It was also a much more satisfying experience.
I wish that I hadn't been such a slacker in High School, as I hear great things about some of the very, very top programs, that combine the best of both worlds.
So: hire faculty who actually want to teach undergraduates, who will spend 1:1 (or 1:N for small values of N) time with them, and who are good communicators.
As an employer, I really like the increased attention in a number of universities to group projects and methodology. Not that what they teach is necessarily any good (same for theory & algorithms) but because it at least provides some underpinnings and may persuade students that thinking about these things is important.
It's extremely helpful to someone I'm interviewing if, upon graduation, they can sit down and demo a significant piece of software that they worked on with a team.
So: make sure your CS graduates have at least some meaningful group-based project where they create something they can show peopple.
Living in Oakland, and working for a company that would be affected by the Bernstein case I had the opportunity to see Judge Patel in action.
Based on her performance in court, and her decision in that case, I have to say I'm a fan. She's certainly not a friend of big business or the government, and trying to look for conspiracy theories there is a waste of time, IMHO.
Anyone with a legal background who has thought about how to provide a service like Napster in any depth realizes that, because of statements they have made (intent) and the architecture of the service, they are most likely in the wrong legally. Other services have put considerably more effort into thinking through the legal consequences of their services, and it will be interesting to see how things shake out for them.
After following this link I came across the following amazing non-sequitor:
16603. Every person who, as a condition to a sale or consignment of
any magazine, book, or other publication requires that the purchaser
or consignee purchase or receive for sale any horror comic book, is
guilty of a misdemeanor, punishable by imprisonment in the county
jail not exceeding six months, or by fine not exceeding one thousand
dollars ($1,000), or by both.
This section is not intended to prohibit an agreement requiring a
person to purchase or accept on consignment a minimum number of
copies of a single edition or issue of a magazine or of a particular
book or other particular publication.
As used in this section "person" includes a corporation,
partnership, or other association.
As used in this section "horror comic book" means any book or
booklet in which an account of the commission or attempted commission
of the crime of arson, assault with caustic chemicals, assault with
a deadly weapon, burglary, kidnapping, mayhem, murder, rape, robbery,
theft, or voluntary manslaughter is set forth by means of a series
of five or more drawings or photographs in sequence, which are
accompanied by either narrative writing or words represented as
spoken by a pictured character, whether such narrative words appear
in balloons, captions or on or immediately adjacent to the photograph
or drawing.
I imagine it depends a lot on the agency and the project.
My first regular programming gig (in 1982) was for the USDA, working on a project to track every cow in the US. The "Brucellosis Information Project" (or, as the phone book listed it, the "Bruce Llosis Information Project") used a combination of already outdated giant mainframe technology (Univac) and already outdated minicomputer technology (Harris). They had the world's largest Univac site.
One of many reasons I was not renewed was for my highly annoying tendency to harp on the fact that they were spending inordinate amounts of money on trailing-edge technology, and to point out better technologies (generally ones involving Unix.) The problem was that the technology had all been specified years ago, and they didn't have the flexibility to change it. The project eventually failed.
(Another reason that I was not renewed was that I totally alienated the senior administrative officer when I couldn't stop laughing during the loyalty oath.)
Ten years later, I found myself in Fort Collins again for a year, and I ended up as a contractor on another USDA project: to keep track of all the dirt^H^H^H^H soil in ths US. In the intervening years, the cumulative effect of everyone shouting "Unix" at the senior administrators (still the same people, in some cases) had sunk in, but the general lesson had not. They were using a combination of 3B2s (ack!) and these other weird proprietary AT&T Unix boxen. They were going to put one of these in every Soil Conservation Office in the US, at a phenomenal price (about ten million bucks just in Unix licenses, not including support.)
With my somewhat more mellow personality and senior role, I actually got a few people to (briefly) consider the idea of the government buying a license and creating its own release of System V, which would come close to breaking even just on this one project. Apparently, though, this sort of project is Just Not Done. (At least at that time.) This time, however, they were sad to see me go, although I couldn't get out of there quick enough and get back to the real world.
I now hear that various agencies are using Linux & Freebsd and so on (although at USDA in '92 you could be fired for bringing in outside software). I know that Apache is extremely popular in some quarters as well.
In short, the point of these two crusty old stories is that there are bound to me many large chunks of the government that are as crusty and hide-bound as the USDA. You may luck out and find an area where you get to play with cool toys, but don't hold your breath.
The game industry has considerably more allure than other aspects of the computer industry that use the same skills. Because of this, you're going to tend to find both lower pay and inferior working conditions.
The game industry is strongly cyclical as a whole, and as games get more and more expensive to make, the effect of a single flop is magnified, to the point where it can be enough to destroy a small to medium-sized company. So you can expect the same lack of job security you'd get working for a serious technology startup but without anything approaching the potential financial upside.
The very fact that people are (mostly) seriously discussing the idea of how to "break in" to the gaming industry with an MIT graduate says it all. With enough potential talent harboring that kind of groveling attitude, it's a buyer's market.
It's pretty funny to find this article posted on Slashdot, an entity that I think provides a somewhat flawed, but still pertinent counter-example to Carr's imagining.
Carr believes, in essence, that centralized authority -- of any sort -- can effectively help people determine how they want to view a global sea of information. By setting up big bad corporations vs. big bad government as the only two alternatives, he complete misses the very interesting alternative of emergent collaborative filtering projects such as Slashdot, Advogato, Everything2, etc.
Carr suffers from a common, lingering misperception that it is either possible or desirable to prevent the voluntary collaboration between arbitrary pairs of information providers and consumers. That's not to say that anyone wants to have an unfiltered, unmediated view of the global infosphere, but the idea that an organization modeled after the FDA is going to be able to regulate the "internet" without destroying its usefulness (and, in turn, spawning alternatives) is ridiculous.
I actually agree that there is dangerous, unpleasant, and irksome stuff out there. The answer is to not read it, and to help others who don't want to read it to not read it.
I'm seeing essentially two sets of competing definitions, and they reflect the way the titles are used in the (wildly) different lands of the Fortune 500 vs. technology startups.
In the technology startup, you usually have a CTO before you have a CIO. CTOs are very frequently technical founders who either decided (or had it decided for them) to not be CEO or some other traditional management role. Also, acquisitions are great spawners of CTOs. When it's not merely a parking place, the CTO at a technology startup might (a) have the customer-focused technology strategy role that a number of people have explained, (b) may in fact be sitting at the top of the tree of all developers, or (c) may be something like an uber-Chief Architect, possibly with a little team of architects, in parallel to the larger development team.
When CIOs are introduced at startups, it's generally part of the tectonic shift away from being a startup. This is generally (as many people have explained) a PHB who has an inwardly-focused technology role. Whether or not this person sits at the top of a techology _product_ groups (including, possibly, the CTO) depends on the organization, although it has always struck me as a Bad Idea and is not very common in technology companies. Conflict between CTOs and CIOs in fast-growing tech companies are not unusual (e.g. LinuxCare) and stem from the fact that any good technology company will tend to have a bunch of very smart tech folks long before they start building out serious internal IT, and these folks, while tempermentally unsuited to operational roles, will make their annoyingly correct opinions known to the IT folks to the point where open warfare can break out.
If a company is not, fundamentally, a technology company, things are quite different. As one poster pointed out, the tension is usually between pockets of IT expertise in outlying groups vs. Central Services. CIOs at large, non-technical companies generally do (try) to sit on pretty much everything technical, and for various reasons (economies of scale, power trips, whatever) try to get things done in a consistent way as dictated by their organization. In an organization like this, a CTO generally would report to the CIO, and would have a role something like an uber-Chief Architect. This would generally _not_ be an outward-facing role, although this person might participate in IT-related standards bodies, write papers, etc. out of personal interest.
The export laws are quite explicit in regulating the activities of a "US Person", regardless of where that person is located (inside or outside of the US.) A US person includes individuals who are US citizens as well as US companies. So, if a US Person is in Canada, or Australia, or Egypt or wherever, if they work on crypto it counts as an export. The whole issue of it being done over the net is a distraction.
Uh, FYI, Sameer is not the "S" in RSA. He was, however, the founder of C2Net software, well-known for the Stronghold web server, and also for organizing outdoor dance parties. (See: http://www.bpm.ai/~sameer) He once appeared on the cover of Forbes above the caption "This Guy Wants to Overthrow the Government." You're probably thinking of "Shamir."
Now, Securify's president, Taher El Gamal, _was_ the inventor of an alternative to RSA, called, well, El Gamal.
I'm horribly biased, since I work at Securify, but I know that in addition to these well-known folks who are here, the guys actually working on the site do not lack knowledge, courage or attitude. In the long run, though, we'll just have to see what happens.
Slashdot Mirror
Whether you're at a big institution or a small one, you're right, it's essential for students to be proactive in having contact with faculty. I doubt in _any_ program you've got faculty chasing students down (although at "University A" I did have one excellent professor who, in addition to being very accessible, threw parties to which he invited undergraduate & graduate students.)
At "University B", one of the "name" faculty members was notorious for being so phenomenally rude and standoffish that virtually _nobody_, not even other faculty members, felt comfortable approaching him. I'm a pretty persistent and enthustiastic guy (sometimes too much so...) and had good relationships with non-CS faculty at the same very large institution. But by hiring a bunch of prima donnas, the CS department at "University B" stacked the deck beyond the usual factors of it being "easy to fade into the crowd."
I took undergraduate classes from CS departments at two different universities over a period of twelve years (1980-92). (I kept getting jobs and stuff, okay? :-) I've also hired and managed dozens of programmers since then.
First I'll address this question as a student, then as an employer.
Unviersity "A" had a much lower ranking, and did not emphasize research. University "B" was much larger, much better funded, and was rated in the top ten state university CS programs.
I think that undergraduate programs in research-intensive fields such as computer science suffer tremendously when the priority is on research and not on teaching. The poster talks about approachability: this is WHY YOU ARE AT A UNIVERSITY, is so you can interact 1:1 with people who have made studying CS their lives. Spending time with someone whose research is a notch less exciting is infinitely preferable to spending NO TIME with someone whose fascinating research you might as well have just read a book about.
No big surprise, I learned a lot more stuff, both useful and interesting, at University "A" than at University "B". It was also a much more satisfying experience.
I wish that I hadn't been such a slacker in High School, as I hear great things about some of the very, very top programs, that combine the best of both worlds.
So: hire faculty who actually want to teach undergraduates, who will spend 1:1 (or 1:N for small values of N) time with them, and who are good communicators.
As an employer, I really like the increased attention in a number of universities to group projects and methodology. Not that what they teach is necessarily any good (same for theory & algorithms) but because it at least provides some underpinnings and may persuade students that thinking about these things is important.
It's extremely helpful to someone I'm interviewing if, upon graduation, they can sit down and demo a significant piece of software that they worked on with a team.
So: make sure your CS graduates have at least some meaningful group-based project where they create something they can show peopple.
Living in Oakland, and working for a company that would be affected by the Bernstein case I had the opportunity to see Judge Patel in action.
Based on her performance in court, and her decision in that case, I have to say I'm a fan. She's certainly not a friend of big business or the government, and trying to look for conspiracy theories there is a waste of time, IMHO.
Anyone with a legal background who has thought about how to provide a service like Napster in any depth realizes that, because of statements they have made (intent) and the architecture of the service, they are most likely in the wrong legally. Other services have put considerably more effort into thinking through the legal consequences of their services, and it will be interesting to see how things shake out for them.
After following this link I came across the following amazing non-sequitor:
16603. Every person who, as a condition to a sale or consignment of
any magazine, book, or other publication requires that the purchaser
or consignee purchase or receive for sale any horror comic book, is
guilty of a misdemeanor, punishable by imprisonment in the county
jail not exceeding six months, or by fine not exceeding one thousand
dollars ($1,000), or by both.
This section is not intended to prohibit an agreement requiring a
person to purchase or accept on consignment a minimum number of
copies of a single edition or issue of a magazine or of a particular
book or other particular publication.
As used in this section "person" includes a corporation,
partnership, or other association.
As used in this section "horror comic book" means any book or
booklet in which an account of the commission or attempted commission
of the crime of arson, assault with caustic chemicals, assault with
a deadly weapon, burglary, kidnapping, mayhem, murder, rape, robbery,
theft, or voluntary manslaughter is set forth by means of a series
of five or more drawings or photographs in sequence, which are
accompanied by either narrative writing or words represented as
spoken by a pictured character, whether such narrative words appear
in balloons, captions or on or immediately adjacent to the photograph
or drawing.
I imagine it depends a lot on the agency and the project.
My first regular programming gig (in 1982) was for the USDA, working on a project to track every cow in the US. The "Brucellosis Information Project" (or, as the phone book listed it, the "Bruce Llosis Information Project") used a combination of already outdated giant mainframe technology (Univac) and already outdated minicomputer technology (Harris). They had the world's largest Univac site.
One of many reasons I was not renewed was for my highly annoying tendency to harp on the fact that they were spending inordinate amounts of money on trailing-edge technology, and to point out better technologies (generally ones involving Unix.) The problem was that the technology had all been specified years ago, and they didn't have the flexibility to change it. The project eventually failed.
(Another reason that I was not renewed was that I totally alienated the senior administrative officer when I couldn't stop laughing during the loyalty oath.)
Ten years later, I found myself in Fort Collins again for a year, and I ended up as a contractor on another USDA project: to keep track of all the dirt^H^H^H^H soil in ths US. In the intervening years, the cumulative effect of everyone shouting "Unix" at the senior administrators (still the same people, in some cases) had sunk in, but the general lesson had not. They were using a combination of 3B2s (ack!) and these other weird proprietary AT&T Unix boxen. They were going to put one of these in every Soil Conservation Office in the US, at a phenomenal price (about ten million bucks just in Unix licenses, not including support.)
With my somewhat more mellow personality and senior role, I actually got a few people to (briefly) consider the idea of the government buying a license and creating its own release of System V, which would come close to breaking even just on this one project. Apparently, though, this sort of project is Just Not Done. (At least at that time.) This time, however, they were sad to see me go, although I couldn't get out of there quick enough and get back to the real world.
I now hear that various agencies are using Linux & Freebsd and so on (although at USDA in '92 you could be fired for bringing in outside software). I know that Apache is extremely popular in some quarters as well.
In short, the point of these two crusty old stories is that there are bound to me many large chunks of the government that are as crusty and hide-bound as the USDA. You may luck out and find an area where you get to play with cool toys, but don't hold your breath.
The game industry has considerably more allure than other aspects of the computer industry that use the same skills. Because of this, you're going to tend to find both lower pay and inferior working conditions.
The game industry is strongly cyclical as a whole, and as games get more and more expensive to make, the effect of a single flop is magnified, to the point where it can be enough to destroy a small to medium-sized company. So you can expect the same lack of job security you'd get working for a serious technology startup but without anything approaching the potential financial upside.
The very fact that people are (mostly) seriously discussing the idea of how to "break in" to the gaming industry with an MIT graduate says it all. With enough potential talent harboring that kind of groveling attitude, it's a buyer's market.
It's pretty funny to find this article posted on Slashdot, an entity that I think provides a somewhat flawed, but still pertinent counter-example to Carr's imagining.
Carr believes, in essence, that centralized authority -- of any sort -- can effectively help people determine how they want to view a global sea of information. By setting up big bad corporations vs. big bad government as the only two alternatives, he complete misses the very interesting alternative of emergent collaborative filtering projects such as Slashdot, Advogato, Everything2, etc.
Carr suffers from a common, lingering misperception that it is either possible or desirable to prevent the voluntary collaboration between arbitrary pairs of information providers and consumers. That's not to say that anyone wants to have an unfiltered, unmediated view of the global infosphere, but the idea that an organization modeled after the FDA is going to be able to regulate the "internet" without destroying its usefulness (and, in turn, spawning alternatives) is ridiculous.
I actually agree that there is dangerous, unpleasant, and irksome stuff out there. The answer is to not read it, and to help others who don't want to read it to not read it.
I'm seeing essentially two sets of competing definitions, and they reflect the way the titles are used in the (wildly) different lands of the Fortune 500 vs. technology startups.
In the technology startup, you usually have a CTO before you have a CIO. CTOs are very frequently technical founders who either decided (or had it decided for them) to not be CEO or some other traditional management role. Also, acquisitions are great spawners of CTOs. When it's not merely a parking place, the CTO at a technology startup might (a) have the customer-focused technology strategy role that a number of people have explained, (b) may in fact be sitting at the top of the tree of all developers, or (c) may be something like an uber-Chief Architect, possibly with a little team of architects, in parallel to the larger development team.
When CIOs are introduced at startups, it's generally part of the tectonic shift away from being a startup. This is generally (as many people have explained) a PHB who has an inwardly-focused technology role. Whether or not this person sits at the top of a techology _product_ groups (including, possibly, the CTO) depends on the organization, although it has always struck me as a Bad Idea and is not very common in technology companies. Conflict between CTOs and CIOs in fast-growing tech companies are not unusual (e.g. LinuxCare) and stem from the fact that any good technology company will tend to have a bunch of very smart tech folks long before they start building out serious internal IT, and these folks, while tempermentally unsuited to operational roles, will make their annoyingly correct opinions known to the IT folks to the point where open warfare can break out.
If a company is not, fundamentally, a technology company, things are quite different. As one poster pointed out, the tension is usually between pockets of IT expertise in outlying groups vs. Central Services. CIOs at large, non-technical companies generally do (try) to sit on pretty much everything technical, and for various reasons (economies of scale, power trips, whatever) try to get things done in a consistent way as dictated by their organization. In an organization like this, a CTO generally would report to the CIO, and would have a role something like an uber-Chief Architect. This would generally _not_ be an outward-facing role, although this person might participate in IT-related standards bodies, write papers, etc. out of personal interest.
The export laws are quite explicit in regulating the activities of a "US Person", regardless of where that person is located (inside or outside of the US.) A US person includes individuals who are US citizens as well as US companies. So, if a US Person is in Canada, or Australia, or Egypt or wherever, if they work on crypto it counts as an export. The whole issue of it being done over the net is a distraction.
Uh, FYI, Sameer is not the "S" in RSA. He was, however, the founder of C2Net software, well-known for the Stronghold web server, and also for organizing outdoor dance parties. (See: http://www.bpm.ai/~sameer) He once appeared on the cover of Forbes above the caption "This Guy Wants to Overthrow the Government." You're probably thinking of "Shamir."
Now, Securify's president, Taher El Gamal, _was_ the inventor of an alternative to RSA, called, well, El Gamal.
I'm horribly biased, since I work at Securify, but I know that in addition to these well-known folks who are here, the guys actually working on the site do not lack knowledge, courage or attitude. In the long run, though, we'll just have to see what happens.