What school did you go to that was only 3K for a full year of tuition, much less books?
Community college. I already had an A.A. degree in General Education. Adding an A.S. degree in Computer Programming on top of that meant taking the courses in that major.
That also neglects the increased cost in transportation, although I suppose in your case housing was fixed cost unless you had to move to attend classes.
I was working 60 hours a week and teaching Sunday school at the time. Apartment rent came out of my regular paycheck. I lived next door to the community college, so I just walk to class.
If you did an "online" university you got screwed - no accreditation.
I did several online classes through the community college. Because the classes I needed to graduate got cancelled several semesters in the row, I took three them as self-study classes with the dean being my supervising instructor. I made the president's list for maintaining a 4.0 GPA in my major upon graduation.
After 9/11 came and went, George W. signed into a law a $3,000 tax credit for workers to go back to school for job training or a new career. (This was different than an earlier law that Bill Clinton gets credit for.) I was able to go back to school to learn computer programming and earn my technical certifications to leave my dead-end job as a video game tester and start work in the IT field. My entire school bill while taking classes part-time and working full-time over five years was FREE! Today I make more money — and pay more in taxes — than I did as a video game tester prior to the dot com bust. Thanks, George W.!
I think it's 4th and Mission. One at the garage, one inside the Meteron and the other at the opposite corner. I haven't been in the area in years. One is an official Starbucks store. The other two are affiliated with Starbucks and serve Starbucks coffee.
Would you care to demonstrate why that's incorrect? I think it includes retired people, but as far as I can tell it's factual.
The 92 million figure includes the elderly and students. The earliest mention of the 92 million figure was January 2014. So no changes in that figure for the last two years? Unemployment not getting better or worse?
It's propaganda at best.
So is the 92 million figure straight out of the right wing echo chamber. A false fact repeated a million times doesn't make it true.
I tried one at a store once. It did not find it intuitive.
At the shopping mall near my home, an Apple Store and Microsoft Store are across from each other. The Apple Store is always busy with many employees helping customers. The Microsoft Store is always empty with a few employees standing around. You might like the Microsoft Store better.
In most situations, certificates are almost worthless, and most classes teach you information without context and that will be old in a few years.
If you're doing IT contract work, certificates are a checklist requirement for HR recruiters. As for my programming classes, I never learned a particular programming language but I do remember all the programming structures. I can write a program in pseudo code and then figure out the syntax of a programming language that I never worked with to implement the program.
I have noticed there are many problems that are hard enough that if someone has to ask how to do something, they shouldn't ever do it.
I had that problem with programming. I didn't understand it until I've taken all of my mathematic classes in college, worked in the industry for a decade, and then went back to college to learn programming.
Successful companies allow for on the job training.
Most Fortune 500 companies do not provide training. Most of my on the job training has been, "Here's your situation, deal with it and good luck!"
Unless they are switching careers or making up for lost time, nobody should ever be expected to bring work home just to succeed.
The training at home is not for the current job, it's for the next job that I'm planning to get. My current job doesn't require Python, Linux or project management. Those are things I wish to know for the next job in three to five years from now.
We need to move past the elitist "I had to learn it and it sucked, so screw you" mentality in IT.
I did that for six years as a video game tester. For the first three years I was the liaison between the QA and IT departments because IT ran a Diablo server that the testers weren't allowed to play on and IT was banned from servicing the QA computers. When I was a lead tester for three years, I went back to school to learn computer programming and get my technical certifications for IT.
I swear, I forgot to check the stupid little boxes on installers enough to set my search engine to Yahoo five times and install at least 3 dumb toolbars.
Uninstalling those toolbars was the bane of my existence as a help desk technician during the 2000's.
However, it is the concern of Information Technology which is a distinct discipline to CS and should not be conflated.
The Fortune 500 companies I worked for has policies that prohibits help desk and desktop techs from remotely turning on a workstation for a user. Most of the time these policies apply to users who are working from home and have a secondary workstation that's turned off. It's not IT's job to turn on their computers. If a newly hired CS graduate doesn't know how to turn on a workstation (most have a power button in front), he can sit around and do nothing. It's HR problem, not an IT problem.
I was deliberately handing out rope at a lynching party. This sort of crap had been an ongoing problem. It allowed me to boot him off the team and get an excellent replacement.
I had a boss who tried to do that to me, but I kept a log book and documented everything. HR decided in my favor. His replacement told me stop documenting management actions and told him to bugger off. Many companies later, I still keep a log book and document everything.
A "teaching language" might not be bad either, but it somehow not the greatest motivator to learn a toy language.
I heard Python has become a teaching language at the community college level.
What they really ended up with was a bunch of students hating Java, then learning C, loving it and absolutely refused to go back to Java.
That's what happened to me. My community college couldn't afford to the Microsoft site license to teach C/C++ on Visual Studios (a requirement requested by local employers). I had to learn all flavors of Java in my programming classes. The Linux instructor taught us some command line C/C++ in his classes. When the site license got renewed, none of the lab computers could run MS Visual Studios.NET and it took a while to get new computers. I never touched Java after graduating. I use Python and sometimes C for my programs.
The privilege to be more likely to die on the job than a woman?
That's unlikely to happen. I take care of myself and have a 40-hour per job.
The privilege to be less likely to graduate from college than a woman?
I have two associate degrees, one in General Education (1994) and Computer Programming (2007). A handful of technical certifications. Might take professional development courses in project management if I can afford the $700 per class fee for six classes.
The privilege to die at an earlier age?
My male relatives are outliving their wives by 10 to 20 years.
The privilege to lose your kids in a custody battle by default?
That didn't happen with my brother. Of course, his first wife was a drug addict who didn't want help.
I will point to a python library that I want them to use in what should be a 40 line bit of code to do some very straightforward thing and a week later I find them beavering away in Haskell building a "state-machine".
A 40-line Python program shouldn't take a week to write. I can understand why CS graduates would wander off into a rabbit hole to write a Haskell state machine. What I don't understand why you didn't keep a closer eye on them to make sure they didn't dive into a rabbit hole in the first place.
No one is spending any money on security, they just chuck it in as a line item on a job requirements sheet.
The federal government is spending money on computer security. That's how I got my current job in government IT. So many computers, so many problems. I thank Microsoft everyday for my job security.
I virtual Apple ][ would also be good, the i6502 was a nice simple machine. But Apple would probably complain, while the IBM 7090 is out of trademark and patent protection.
The 8-bit computers are still popular with electronic and programming hobbyists. Here are links for the Apple ][ emulator and Apple DOS source code.
So why not teach it where the programmers are being taught, in a CE or IT department, rather than in CS, where there is relatively little work on "programming" as such?
Because when I think of the term "computer science," or more precisely the initials "CS," I believe it covers every aspect of computers from the pie in the sky theories to the power button. Apparently, this is a common misconception that many people outside the university system have.
To paraphrase Robert Kiyosaki of "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" fame: the higher you go for education degrees, the less you learn.
Translations: universities are pushing out specialists when this country need generalists.
Because white privilege is no longer the social norm it used to be. I live in California where white people are a minority in a minority-majority state. If I get on the bus, I may be the only white person, four or five languages other than English are being spoken, and some are born outside of the United States. I find this perfectly normal.
My extended family in Idaho are horrified by this. They expect everyone to speak English, they expect minorities to know their place (i.e., Chinese in Chinese restaurant or laundry mat, Mexicans in Mexican restaurant or in the fields, and a black person at the rodeo accusing a little white boy of racism to tell an off-color joke about white people), and foreigners, especially Californians, to stay the hell out of Idaho.
Ask when you can expect someone to be sensitive to you and your culture and your situation.
As a fat conservative white male, I can't and don't expect that. I just check my white privilege at door and give everyone the same respect. I haven't had an issue with anyone in years.
[...] any joker that can pass a security clearance [...]
I'm going to guess that you never had a government security clearance. When I got my government IT job, my two-hour investigative background interview lasted four hours because of two potential red flags. The first red flag was that I lived in the same apartment for 10+ years. Most people on average moved every few years. The second red flag was working multiple jobs for seven days a week for two years after being unemployed for two years (2009-2010), underemployed for six months (working 20 hours per month), and filing for chapter seven bankruptcy in 2011. If you have more than one job at a time, you must have money problems. So the 20+ contact jobs that lasted one day to nine months during that time had to be checked out by the government.
As for the jokers who got through the process, started work and thought they could slack off because it was a "gubermint" job, they were quickly fired and shocked to find themselves unemployed. Most of my coworkers are ex-military with zero tolerance for slackers.
It's not like the IT departments are self educated.
Successful IT technicians are the ones who never stop learning. They put in their eight-hour day and go home to work on their technology projects, learn a certification or take night classes to advance themselves. The fastest way to commit professional suicide is to stop learning.
It would basically come down to "always run updated software, because that is what the teacher told us and apart from that, do as we like".
Written by someone who has never worked in a Fortune 500 IT department.
Proper security requires people, who actually understands the problem, which points towards the universities.
Here's the problem with the university education: most, if not all, people stop learning after they graduate from school because they're no longer in school.
I had two friends who graduated from CS programs at the state university, got jobs at major companies, worked seven years in the same position, and got laid off during the dot com bust. The took a six-month vacation while collecting unemployment benefits, figuring that they deserved it after working so many years in the industry. And then they couldn't find a job because their job skills were obsolete. Instead of going back to school, enrolling in a boot camp, or buying a book to teach themselves, they ran out of money and became drug store clerks. Fifteen years later they're still drug store clerks.
Another example. An IT manager at my work was responsible for imaging laptops. Been doing the job for 15 years since graduating from the university. Until he got a brand new Dell laptop that needed a replacement hard drive. He couldn't find the hard drive since it didn't have 2.5" hard drive bay. We told him that the hard drive was a solid state drive on a card, which he claimed was the wireless card and threw a fit when we pointed out the wireless card. That laptop sat in his office for six months before another manager pulled it out and sent it back to Dell under warranty.
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What school did you go to that was only 3K for a full year of tuition, much less books?
Community college. I already had an A.A. degree in General Education. Adding an A.S. degree in Computer Programming on top of that meant taking the courses in that major.
That also neglects the increased cost in transportation, although I suppose in your case housing was fixed cost unless you had to move to attend classes.
I was working 60 hours a week and teaching Sunday school at the time. Apartment rent came out of my regular paycheck. I lived next door to the community college, so I just walk to class.
If you did an "online" university you got screwed - no accreditation.
I did several online classes through the community college. Because the classes I needed to graduate got cancelled several semesters in the row, I took three them as self-study classes with the dean being my supervising instructor. I made the president's list for maintaining a 4.0 GPA in my major upon graduation.
After 9/11 came and went, George W. signed into a law a $3,000 tax credit for workers to go back to school for job training or a new career. (This was different than an earlier law that Bill Clinton gets credit for.) I was able to go back to school to learn computer programming and earn my technical certifications to leave my dead-end job as a video game tester and start work in the IT field. My entire school bill while taking classes part-time and working full-time over five years was FREE! Today I make more money — and pay more in taxes — than I did as a video game tester prior to the dot com bust. Thanks, George W.!
Serious question: which corner is that?
I think it's 4th and Mission. One at the garage, one inside the Meteron and the other at the opposite corner. I haven't been in the area in years. One is an official Starbucks store. The other two are affiliated with Starbucks and serve Starbucks coffee.
Would you care to demonstrate why that's incorrect? I think it includes retired people, but as far as I can tell it's factual.
The 92 million figure includes the elderly and students. The earliest mention of the 92 million figure was January 2014. So no changes in that figure for the last two years? Unemployment not getting better or worse?
It's propaganda at best.
So is the 92 million figure straight out of the right wing echo chamber. A false fact repeated a million times doesn't make it true.
Urban area unemployment rate is over 33% approaches even 50%.
Let me guess... you believe that 92 million Americans are still unemployed?
I tried one at a store once. It did not find it intuitive.
At the shopping mall near my home, an Apple Store and Microsoft Store are across from each other. The Apple Store is always busy with many employees helping customers. The Microsoft Store is always empty with a few employees standing around. You might like the Microsoft Store better.
In most situations, certificates are almost worthless, and most classes teach you information without context and that will be old in a few years.
If you're doing IT contract work, certificates are a checklist requirement for HR recruiters. As for my programming classes, I never learned a particular programming language but I do remember all the programming structures. I can write a program in pseudo code and then figure out the syntax of a programming language that I never worked with to implement the program.
I have noticed there are many problems that are hard enough that if someone has to ask how to do something, they shouldn't ever do it.
I had that problem with programming. I didn't understand it until I've taken all of my mathematic classes in college, worked in the industry for a decade, and then went back to college to learn programming.
Successful companies allow for on the job training.
Most Fortune 500 companies do not provide training. Most of my on the job training has been, "Here's your situation, deal with it and good luck!"
Unless they are switching careers or making up for lost time, nobody should ever be expected to bring work home just to succeed.
The training at home is not for the current job, it's for the next job that I'm planning to get. My current job doesn't require Python, Linux or project management. Those are things I wish to know for the next job in three to five years from now.
We need to move past the elitist "I had to learn it and it sucked, so screw you" mentality in IT.
I did that for six years as a video game tester. For the first three years I was the liaison between the QA and IT departments because IT ran a Diablo server that the testers weren't allowed to play on and IT was banned from servicing the QA computers. When I was a lead tester for three years, I went back to school to learn computer programming and get my technical certifications for IT.
You just stole that quoted phrase from the GP! Give it back now you asshole!
Comments like this is why I think ACs should be abolished from Slashdot. :P
In that case, it would certainly be expected that the CS graduate be capable of powering on a workstation.
Uh, no. If a CS graduate can't turn on his own workstation, I'll have to question his qualifications for the job.
I don't expect any computer scientist to have any training in singular or networked systems administration.
Turning on a workstation isn't a system admin task.
I swear, I forgot to check the stupid little boxes on installers enough to set my search engine to Yahoo five times and install at least 3 dumb toolbars.
Uninstalling those toolbars was the bane of my existence as a help desk technician during the 2000's.
However, it is the concern of Information Technology which is a distinct discipline to CS and should not be conflated.
The Fortune 500 companies I worked for has policies that prohibits help desk and desktop techs from remotely turning on a workstation for a user. Most of the time these policies apply to users who are working from home and have a secondary workstation that's turned off. It's not IT's job to turn on their computers. If a newly hired CS graduate doesn't know how to turn on a workstation (most have a power button in front), he can sit around and do nothing. It's HR problem, not an IT problem.
I was deliberately handing out rope at a lynching party. This sort of crap had been an ongoing problem. It allowed me to boot him off the team and get an excellent replacement.
I had a boss who tried to do that to me, but I kept a log book and documented everything. HR decided in my favor. His replacement told me stop documenting management actions and told him to bugger off. Many companies later, I still keep a log book and document everything.
A "teaching language" might not be bad either, but it somehow not the greatest motivator to learn a toy language.
I heard Python has become a teaching language at the community college level.
What they really ended up with was a bunch of students hating Java, then learning C, loving it and absolutely refused to go back to Java.
That's what happened to me. My community college couldn't afford to the Microsoft site license to teach C/C++ on Visual Studios (a requirement requested by local employers). I had to learn all flavors of Java in my programming classes. The Linux instructor taught us some command line C/C++ in his classes. When the site license got renewed, none of the lab computers could run MS Visual Studios .NET and it took a while to get new computers. I never touched Java after graduating. I use Python and sometimes C for my programs.
Did your two community college degrees teach you what an anecdote is?
I learned about anecdotes from the English lit classes that I took.
Perhaps you should spend that $700 on statistics 101.
Why should I spend $700 to learn something that doesn't exist in statistics that I already learned in English lit?
The privilege to be more likely to die on the job than a woman?
That's unlikely to happen. I take care of myself and have a 40-hour per job.
The privilege to be less likely to graduate from college than a woman?
I have two associate degrees, one in General Education (1994) and Computer Programming (2007). A handful of technical certifications. Might take professional development courses in project management if I can afford the $700 per class fee for six classes.
The privilege to die at an earlier age?
My male relatives are outliving their wives by 10 to 20 years.
The privilege to lose your kids in a custody battle by default?
That didn't happen with my brother. Of course, his first wife was a drug addict who didn't want help.
Yeah, you should be ashamed of yourself.
I'm not. Is that a problem?
I will point to a python library that I want them to use in what should be a 40 line bit of code to do some very straightforward thing and a week later I find them beavering away in Haskell building a "state-machine".
A 40-line Python program shouldn't take a week to write. I can understand why CS graduates would wander off into a rabbit hole to write a Haskell state machine. What I don't understand why you didn't keep a closer eye on them to make sure they didn't dive into a rabbit hole in the first place.
No one is spending any money on security, they just chuck it in as a line item on a job requirements sheet.
The federal government is spending money on computer security. That's how I got my current job in government IT. So many computers, so many problems. I thank Microsoft everyday for my job security.
I virtual Apple ][ would also be good, the i6502 was a nice simple machine. But Apple would probably complain, while the IBM 7090 is out of trademark and patent protection.
The 8-bit computers are still popular with electronic and programming hobbyists. Here are links for the Apple ][ emulator and Apple DOS source code.
http://www.lampefamily.us/jonathan/applepc_emulator/
http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/apple-ii-dos-source-code/
So why not teach it where the programmers are being taught, in a CE or IT department, rather than in CS, where there is relatively little work on "programming" as such?
Because when I think of the term "computer science," or more precisely the initials "CS," I believe it covers every aspect of computers from the pie in the sky theories to the power button. Apparently, this is a common misconception that many people outside the university system have.
To paraphrase Robert Kiyosaki of "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" fame: the higher you go for education degrees, the less you learn.
Translations: universities are pushing out specialists when this country need generalists.
Why shouldn't you expect it?
Because white privilege is no longer the social norm it used to be. I live in California where white people are a minority in a minority-majority state. If I get on the bus, I may be the only white person, four or five languages other than English are being spoken, and some are born outside of the United States. I find this perfectly normal.
My extended family in Idaho are horrified by this. They expect everyone to speak English, they expect minorities to know their place (i.e., Chinese in Chinese restaurant or laundry mat, Mexicans in Mexican restaurant or in the fields, and a black person at the rodeo accusing a little white boy of racism to tell an off-color joke about white people), and foreigners, especially Californians, to stay the hell out of Idaho.
Ask when you can expect someone to be sensitive to you and your culture and your situation.
As a fat conservative white male, I can't and don't expect that. I just check my white privilege at door and give everyone the same respect. I haven't had an issue with anyone in years.
You bloody moron, that is pretty much verbatim what i saw on another thread.
If you checked the name of the poster, it's my comment.
Either you stole it, or you are spamming your shitty anecdotes all over the web.
This is Slashdot. You must be new around here.
You and ShanghaiBill should get together and play cracker while you decide how best to act like complete belligerent pricks.
I do love trolling the trolls on Slashdot.
[...] any joker that can pass a security clearance [...]
I'm going to guess that you never had a government security clearance. When I got my government IT job, my two-hour investigative background interview lasted four hours because of two potential red flags. The first red flag was that I lived in the same apartment for 10+ years. Most people on average moved every few years. The second red flag was working multiple jobs for seven days a week for two years after being unemployed for two years (2009-2010), underemployed for six months (working 20 hours per month), and filing for chapter seven bankruptcy in 2011. If you have more than one job at a time, you must have money problems. So the 20+ contact jobs that lasted one day to nine months during that time had to be checked out by the government.
As for the jokers who got through the process, started work and thought they could slack off because it was a "gubermint" job, they were quickly fired and shocked to find themselves unemployed. Most of my coworkers are ex-military with zero tolerance for slackers.
It's not like the IT departments are self educated.
Successful IT technicians are the ones who never stop learning. They put in their eight-hour day and go home to work on their technology projects, learn a certification or take night classes to advance themselves. The fastest way to commit professional suicide is to stop learning.
It would basically come down to "always run updated software, because that is what the teacher told us and apart from that, do as we like".
Written by someone who has never worked in a Fortune 500 IT department.
Proper security requires people, who actually understands the problem, which points towards the universities.
Here's the problem with the university education: most, if not all, people stop learning after they graduate from school because they're no longer in school.
I had two friends who graduated from CS programs at the state university, got jobs at major companies, worked seven years in the same position, and got laid off during the dot com bust. The took a six-month vacation while collecting unemployment benefits, figuring that they deserved it after working so many years in the industry. And then they couldn't find a job because their job skills were obsolete. Instead of going back to school, enrolling in a boot camp, or buying a book to teach themselves, they ran out of money and became drug store clerks. Fifteen years later they're still drug store clerks.
Another example. An IT manager at my work was responsible for imaging laptops. Been doing the job for 15 years since graduating from the university. Until he got a brand new Dell laptop that needed a replacement hard drive. He couldn't find the hard drive since it didn't have 2.5" hard drive bay. We told him that the hard drive was a solid state drive on a card, which he claimed was the wireless card and threw a fit when we pointed out the wireless card. That laptop sat in his office for six months before another manager pulled it out and sent it back to Dell under warranty.