I think that should be amended "If your goal is to have a career in research go for a PhD".
In the end, that's the POINT of a doctoral degree, is to prepare you (and prove you are prepared) to conduct original research in a field. There are two types of jobs: In one type, a PhD will overqualify you and either make you unhireable or left with salary far below your education level (i.e. you, at 26+ will make the same as a 22 year old just starting out). In the other, it is the minimum qualification to get hired (this is mostly commercial and academic research).
Whether you get one or not should depend entirely on your career goals. A PhD, over the long run, will probably not increase your earning potential, and certainly costs a lot more time and sanity.
Well, you would make more if you were in the workforce longer. If your only goal by getting a university degree is "to get a job" and "make money", it's quite obvious you can do it without that. Personally, I don't care how much I would make, I find network admin extremely unsatisfying and would dread waking up each morning to do that.
You're completely correct. Also, a degree in Computer Science isn't MEANT to prepare for a career in IT, it's meant to teach you the Bachelor-level material about COMPUTER SCIENCE. That knowledge (i.e. the "theoretical stuff") is far from useless.
If you want to be the one designing the next generation of programming languages, you would need it. You need it to write non-trivial compilers. The list goes on. There's plenty available in the job market for a CS major and actually wants to do CS. If you plan to do IT, though, much of what you learn will not directly apply to directly to a job you are interesting in.
People well-educated to join the IT market know more about network topologies, queuing theory, some degree of business planning, higher level (as in "bigger picture") notions of security (as opposed to OS and lower levels). Oftentimes universities do not have education in this field, and the default is to get a CS degree instead, which is certainly fine in the sense that you are getting a degree in a closely related field that is also challenging and forcing you to learn how to learn (one of the SKILLS that university actually teaches you).
If you want to rise high in IT, expect on-the-job training or perhaps postbaccalaureate certifications. Computer Science is often a more academic pursuit (this is certainly true of many subfields) and suits itself more to being taught as a university degree, whereas IT has several "trade skills" that are better taught in the field.
As for the original poster, a trade school is not a bad place to start to get something that distinguishes you from other candidates. It may also teach you some things you didn't know, and give you some skills that will make you more competitive in the job market.
However, to you and those that refer to higher education as "a piece of paper", I would not carry around that attitude for too long. You are not morally superior for rejecting university any more than they are for embracing it, and believe it or not the in the 3+ years people spend in university to get their degree(s), they do learn a thing or two, and you will have to gain that knowledge (and the associated experiences) in other ways. To work alongside/eventually above people that do have said education, you will have to accept that they bring something valuable to the table from that education, just as your education and experience are valuable.
If the response from anyone here is "I went to university and it was useless, I didn't learn anything", then it wasn't the university's fault, it was yours. You did it wrong and wasted your and every faculty member's time. And perhaps a fair amount of money.
So - predicting the future is not that hard for the most part - for example, C - will it survive or not? I'd say that seeing linux popularity and the things people do with C today its going to stick around for at least the time it takes to build a new open source OS - something like 4 years at least.
Seriously? You think C is going disappear? You can talk about all the other programming languages you like, but what do you think most interpreters/compilers are written in? And I'm dying to know what this new open source OS will be written in if not C.
Insight into human behaviour and rigourous proofs of software code are not mutually exclusive. The poster to whom I was replying specifically used examples of software creation, and specifically cited an example of choosing "optimal form layout." That is not Computer Science. Security of systems, btw, can also (often) be prove mathematically using modelling and structure d programming (and it is). I agree that in a holistic approach to looking at security that "the human factor" becomes huge, and that is a consideration in Computer Science, Software Engineering, etc. But I never said that it wasn't.
But determining the optimal layout of a form to benefit the users of the system requires observing people and their needs. Understanding what parts of a program are going to be changed because of changing user needs is more important in program design than deciding whether you need a heap sort or insertion sort. Yes, you should know the difference, but you seldom need to program it, just choose the correct one from the system library.
Yeah, and it's not what Computer Science is. It's people like you that seem to say, "Oh you majored in Computer Science, so you can like, fix them and program and stuff?" I did not go and get a four year education with tuition costing six digits to design optimal form layouts. Furthermore, I am not spending 4 more years of my life on a DPhil so I can write cool software, or manage an IT department, or whatever else you people seem to think a university education is good for.
You so clearly either a) did not get a degree, b) got a very easy one, c) got one that was substandard or d) didn't bother to apply yourself (choose all that apply). If none of those are true, then you're viewpoint makes no sense. I can tell you right now that getting a higher degree (eg a PhD) is much much more difficult that merely being literate...
In some of those countries, there may be popular support for the death penalty (from what I hear). The only problem is that their great leaders roped them into the European Union which has saddled them with certain rules. There is also popular support for restricting immigration in some of those countries, but many leaders refuse to act (not unlike the U.S.).
As for Islamic theocracies, there is a difference between not allowing homosexuals to marry and collapsing a wall on them. A lot more discrimination that unequal marriage rights happens to homosexuals in the US. Is there a distinction between that and collapsing a wall on them nevertheless? Yes. But someone used the comparison between the US versus Asian and Middle Eastern countries as a point of reference, which, to me, should be an embarrassment because we would, I think, be in favour of adopting the Westernised ideals that we so self-righteously push on the Middle Eastern countries to which we are comparing ourselves.
The point is this: if we're using comparison with other countries as argument for the validation of certain policies and phenomena in our society, we shouldn't be checking that we're like the countries that collapse walls on people.
There are many, MANY cultures where violent imagery is culturally accepted, but sexual imagery is even more restricted than in the U.S. I'm thinking of the Middle East and Asia especially.
Oh, yes, eurocentric. He should apologise for comparing us to the more technologically advanced and socially aware civilisations. Clearly, in America, we don't belong with them. I mean, we have the death penalty (unlike every EU member country and then some) like China, et al., we repress certain rights of homosexuals (unlike many European countries) just like the Islamic theocracies, I mean, who would EVER confuse us for trying to be ANYTHING like the Europeans. Clearly we're trying to suppress ideas in disagreement with the government and the Bible...
PowerPoint is the worst 'skill' you can force on anyone, and teaching kids how to communicate with it is setting them up for failure if they want to address a large group of people.
If you've ever worked in the corporate world, you've sat through a presentation where slides were clicked through as some middle-management-we-couldn't-fire-you-so-we-promo ted-you-moron read the slides to you, word for word. And that is what PowerPoint has become for so many people: a script to read off of while your audience falls asleep.
Somehow, I don't think that we want the next generation to learn this horridness. If you want to make them present (something I'm not too against) make them use actual visual aids. Make them give a speech. The people that affect their audience the most are the ones that can stand without an LCD projector behind them and still teach/speak/present/not look like an ass.
Pictures of naked people for people to look at just because they're naked are porn...seems a fair definition.
A lot of artists and photographers would probably take issue with that comment. The line is far from clear-cut and this is not the first argument over what is classified art vs pornographic material. And not just visual/audio information is a problem. What if people blog about something inappropriate (sexual experiences, whatever), are then, all Livejournal/Blogger/etc. sites required to move to.xxx or at least a subset of journals thereof? I don't consider that pornography, although probably not something I'd want my young child to read. But I don't think it should be moved to the red-light district of the internet.
The point is that in certain countries/counties/locale of choice people may not have a choice about filtering. It seems to me (warning: conjecture) that because it would be so easy to filter out just.xxx (which is "just porn," anyway) then filtering would become a widespread practice.
I can see the point there. But if you take that objection away, I still just don't see the point, except creating a larger namespace for our pr0n sites, but also making pornography want to use anything BUT.xxx because it'll be harder to block.
Well, I don't know why conservatives are against but. But we know the.xxx forces porn sites to live there, and that blocking the entire.xxx TLD would be easy. But where do you draw the line for porn? What about art featuring naked people (or photographs of naked people that are not sex?).
What about photographs for anatomical purposes? The point is that it not only tells you where porn has to be, it means decided what porn IS for EVERYONE on the internet, and potentially blocks material that would on the line for some people, but over it for more conservative groups. It's an indirect way of telling you what you can publish on sites that aren't labelled.xxx, too.
You are simply making a gross overgeneralization that is completely inaccurate. It's true, mathematics has its place in Computer Science and that a Mathematics degree is by no means a poor thing to have to add to the field of CS. Logic and straight computation isn't where CS ends anymore, and software engineering is not the only other sub-field of CS. My uni has exactly what you described in their Computer Engineering field, and you get a lot of kids read to go out into the work force as software engineers and program their brains out until they get promoted to manage other people that program their brains out.
The CS program requires two classes with the topic of software engineering. Period. Some relate to CS and software engineering (classes on Data Structures, for example) The rest of the required cirriculum is five semesters of CS-related math (algorithmics, number theory, discrete mathematics, etc). Classes in the Design of Operating Systems and the theory of language construction and computability theory are also taught. These are NOT pure mathematics courses, and they are also NOT Software Engineering.
Oh really? Macroing is botting? Is that why programmable macros are a part of the game? He still had to control his character. If anything beyond him hitting that MoB had entered the situation, he would have had to intervene. The extensible UI of WoW lets you automate a TON of tasks. Additionally, the fact that his situation is outside the scope of their TOS definition of botting is a critical distinction. With the extensibility of the game, a clear-cut definition as to what qualifies as botting is very important. If his doesn't meet it, he shouldn't be charged with botting.
And tell me, holier than thou WoW player, have you never watched a movie while playing? Because in MC I have definitely done nothing but mash frostbolt when the hall trash gets pulled to my group while I sit and watch a movie.
Maybe also the administrator should be blocked out of surfing the web and playing games so that people just don't use the admin account for everything.
You can't enoforce policies on a superuser account, else it's not a superuser account.
Not to tamper with national pride, but last I checked Scotland may not be England or Wales, but it certainly is on the Isle of Great Britain, so one might wonder why calling you British is an insult, and if it is please enlighten me.
(If this is the case with Welsh persons, feel free to respond.)
Sorry, I also want to pont out that American kids in my opinion are often more well rounded at youth.
That is absolutely true. Many education systems in Europe expect some form of area concentration at the age of 16! Aside from languages, they already sacrifice many of the general areas of knowledge we take for granted in exchange for becoming better physicists or musicians.
The American system is inherently better in giving students general knowledge. Does this mean it is superior? No. In its current incarnation, American public education allows far too many students to 'slip through the the cracks.' There are kids in the sixth grade that are barely literate, sometimes. That doesn't mean it can't be improved without Europeanizing the education system.
Well, I don't know about you, but my passport has been with me for quite some time and optical readers are no longer up to the challenge of reading it as it has taken quite a beating.
Passing through Immigration lines was painful enough before, but now I have to sit there and watch them fight with the optical scanner for a few minutes. RFID tages would elminate that problem even were they readable from 8 cm away.
And for those of you paranoid enough to think the government will start tracking your every move with your passport, do you think you are any safer everytime you swipe a credit card to pay for something?
The point is that anyone could read the numbers off of your credit card and hav a field day with it. It is easily verifiable if these RFID tags respond to a challenge from any great distance, and I doubt they will in their final incarnation.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that should be amended "If your goal is to have a career in research go for a PhD".
In the end, that's the POINT of a doctoral degree, is to prepare you (and prove you are prepared) to conduct original research in a field. There are two types of jobs: In one type, a PhD will overqualify you and either make you unhireable or left with salary far below your education level (i.e. you, at 26+ will make the same as a 22 year old just starting out). In the other, it is the minimum qualification to get hired (this is mostly commercial and academic research).
Whether you get one or not should depend entirely on your career goals. A PhD, over the long run, will probably not increase your earning potential, and certainly costs a lot more time and sanity.
Well, you would make more if you were in the workforce longer. If your only goal by getting a university degree is "to get a job" and "make money", it's quite obvious you can do it without that. Personally, I don't care how much I would make, I find network admin extremely unsatisfying and would dread waking up each morning to do that.
You're completely correct. Also, a degree in Computer Science isn't MEANT to prepare for a career in IT, it's meant to teach you the Bachelor-level material about COMPUTER SCIENCE. That knowledge (i.e. the "theoretical stuff") is far from useless.
If you want to be the one designing the next generation of programming languages, you would need it. You need it to write non-trivial compilers. The list goes on. There's plenty available in the job market for a CS major and actually wants to do CS. If you plan to do IT, though, much of what you learn will not directly apply to directly to a job you are interesting in.
People well-educated to join the IT market know more about network topologies, queuing theory, some degree of business planning, higher level (as in "bigger picture") notions of security (as opposed to OS and lower levels). Oftentimes universities do not have education in this field, and the default is to get a CS degree instead, which is certainly fine in the sense that you are getting a degree in a closely related field that is also challenging and forcing you to learn how to learn (one of the SKILLS that university actually teaches you).
If you want to rise high in IT, expect on-the-job training or perhaps postbaccalaureate certifications. Computer Science is often a more academic pursuit (this is certainly true of many subfields) and suits itself more to being taught as a university degree, whereas IT has several "trade skills" that are better taught in the field.
As for the original poster, a trade school is not a bad place to start to get something that distinguishes you from other candidates. It may also teach you some things you didn't know, and give you some skills that will make you more competitive in the job market.
However, to you and those that refer to higher education as "a piece of paper", I would not carry around that attitude for too long. You are not morally superior for rejecting university any more than they are for embracing it, and believe it or not the in the 3+ years people spend in university to get their degree(s), they do learn a thing or two, and you will have to gain that knowledge (and the associated experiences) in other ways. To work alongside/eventually above people that do have said education, you will have to accept that they bring something valuable to the table from that education, just as your education and experience are valuable.
If the response from anyone here is "I went to university and it was useless, I didn't learn anything", then it wasn't the university's fault, it was yours. You did it wrong and wasted your and every faculty member's time. And perhaps a fair amount of money.
Try doing this with a PhD =p
Uhh, nothing.
Yes, but they are ubiquitous among common law legal systems that can trace their heritage to England's.
So - predicting the future is not that hard for the most part - for example, C - will it survive or not? I'd say that seeing linux popularity and the things people do with C today its going to stick around for at least the time it takes to build a new open source OS - something like 4 years at least.
Seriously? You think C is going disappear? You can talk about all the other programming languages you like, but what do you think most interpreters/compilers are written in? And I'm dying to know what this new open source OS will be written in if not C.
Insight into human behaviour and rigourous proofs of software code are not mutually exclusive. The poster to whom I was replying specifically used examples of software creation, and specifically cited an example of choosing "optimal form layout." That is not Computer Science. Security of systems, btw, can also (often) be prove mathematically using modelling and structure d programming (and it is). I agree that in a holistic approach to looking at security that "the human factor" becomes huge, and that is a consideration in Computer Science, Software Engineering, etc. But I never said that it wasn't.
But determining the optimal layout of a form to benefit the users of the system requires observing people and their needs. Understanding what parts of a program are going to be changed because of changing user needs is more important in program design than deciding whether you need a heap sort or insertion sort. Yes, you should know the difference, but you seldom need to program it, just choose the correct one from the system library.
Yeah, and it's not what Computer Science is. It's people like you that seem to say, "Oh you majored in Computer Science, so you can like, fix them and program and stuff?" I did not go and get a four year education with tuition costing six digits to design optimal form layouts. Furthermore, I am not spending 4 more years of my life on a DPhil so I can write cool software, or manage an IT department, or whatever else you people seem to think a university education is good for.
Perhaps "male", but the FBI species is too far diverged from human to refer to both of them as "men".
You so clearly either a) did not get a degree, b) got a very easy one, c) got one that was substandard or d) didn't bother to apply yourself (choose all that apply). If none of those are true, then you're viewpoint makes no sense. I can tell you right now that getting a higher degree (eg a PhD) is much much more difficult that merely being literate...
As for Islamic theocracies, there is a difference between not allowing homosexuals to marry and collapsing a wall on them. A lot more discrimination that unequal marriage rights happens to homosexuals in the US. Is there a distinction between that and collapsing a wall on them nevertheless? Yes. But someone used the comparison between the US versus Asian and Middle Eastern countries as a point of reference, which, to me, should be an embarrassment because we would, I think, be in favour of adopting the Westernised ideals that we so self-righteously push on the Middle Eastern countries to which we are comparing ourselves. The point is this: if we're using comparison with other countries as argument for the validation of certain policies and phenomena in our society, we shouldn't be checking that we're like the countries that collapse walls on people.
There are many, MANY cultures where violent imagery is culturally accepted, but sexual imagery is even more restricted than in the U.S. I'm thinking of the Middle East and Asia especially.
Oh, yes, eurocentric. He should apologise for comparing us to the more technologically advanced and socially aware civilisations. Clearly, in America, we don't belong with them. I mean, we have the death penalty (unlike every EU member country and then some) like China, et al., we repress certain rights of homosexuals (unlike many European countries) just like the Islamic theocracies, I mean, who would EVER confuse us for trying to be ANYTHING like the Europeans. Clearly we're trying to suppress ideas in disagreement with the government and the Bible...
PowerPoint is the worst 'skill' you can force on anyone, and teaching kids how to communicate with it is setting them up for failure if they want to address a large group of people.
o ted-you-moron read the slides to you, word for word. And that is what PowerPoint has become for so many people: a script to read off of while your audience falls asleep.
If you've ever worked in the corporate world, you've sat through a presentation where slides were clicked through as some middle-management-we-couldn't-fire-you-so-we-prom
Somehow, I don't think that we want the next generation to learn this horridness. If you want to make them present (something I'm not too against) make them use actual visual aids. Make them give a speech. The people that affect their audience the most are the ones that can stand without an LCD projector behind them and still teach/speak/present/not look like an ass.
Pictures of naked people for people to look at just because they're naked are porn...seems a fair definition.
.xxx or at least a subset of journals thereof? I don't consider that pornography, although probably not something I'd want my young child to read. But I don't think it should be moved to the red-light district of the internet.
A lot of artists and photographers would probably take issue with that comment. The line is far from clear-cut and this is not the first argument over what is classified art vs pornographic material. And not just visual/audio information is a problem. What if people blog about something inappropriate (sexual experiences, whatever), are then, all Livejournal/Blogger/etc. sites required to move to
The point is that in certain countries/counties/locale of choice people may not have a choice about filtering. It seems to me (warning: conjecture) that because it would be so easy to filter out just .xxx (which is "just porn," anyway) then filtering would become a widespread practice.
I can see the point there. But if you take that objection away, I still just don't see the point, except creating a larger namespace for our pr0n sites, but also making pornography want to use anything BUT .xxx because it'll be harder to block.
Well, I don't know why conservatives are against but. But we know the .xxx forces porn sites to live there, and that blocking the entire .xxx TLD would be easy. But where do you draw the line for porn? What about art featuring naked people (or photographs of naked people that are not sex?).
.xxx, too.
What about photographs for anatomical purposes? The point is that it not only tells you where porn has to be, it means decided what porn IS for EVERYONE on the internet, and potentially blocks material that would on the line for some people, but over it for more conservative groups. It's an indirect way of telling you what you can publish on sites that aren't labelled
I'd mod you up if I could.
You are simply making a gross overgeneralization that is completely inaccurate. It's true, mathematics has its place in Computer Science and that a Mathematics degree is by no means a poor thing to have to add to the field of CS. Logic and straight computation isn't where CS ends anymore, and software engineering is not the only other sub-field of CS. My uni has exactly what you described in their Computer Engineering field, and you get a lot of kids read to go out into the work force as software engineers and program their brains out until they get promoted to manage other people that program their brains out.
The CS program requires two classes with the topic of software engineering. Period. Some relate to CS and software engineering (classes on Data Structures, for example) The rest of the required cirriculum is five semesters of CS-related math (algorithmics, number theory, discrete mathematics, etc). Classes in the Design of Operating Systems and the theory of language construction and computability theory are also taught. These are NOT pure mathematics courses, and they are also NOT Software Engineering.
Oh really? Macroing is botting? Is that why programmable macros are a part of the game? He still had to control his character. If anything beyond him hitting that MoB had entered the situation, he would have had to intervene. The extensible UI of WoW lets you automate a TON of tasks. Additionally, the fact that his situation is outside the scope of their TOS definition of botting is a critical distinction. With the extensibility of the game, a clear-cut definition as to what qualifies as botting is very important. If his doesn't meet it, he shouldn't be charged with botting.
And tell me, holier than thou WoW player, have you never watched a movie while playing? Because in MC I have definitely done nothing but mash frostbolt when the hall trash gets pulled to my group while I sit and watch a movie.
Blizzard was entirely out of line this time.
Maybe also the administrator should be blocked out of surfing the web and playing games so that people just don't use the admin account for everything. You can't enoforce policies on a superuser account, else it's not a superuser account.
Not to tamper with national pride, but last I checked Scotland may not be England or Wales, but it certainly is on the Isle of Great Britain, so one might wonder why calling you British is an insult, and if it is please enlighten me. (If this is the case with Welsh persons, feel free to respond.)
Sorry, I also want to pont out that American kids in my opinion are often more well rounded at youth.
That is absolutely true. Many education systems in Europe expect some form of area concentration at the age of 16! Aside from languages, they already sacrifice many of the general areas of knowledge we take for granted in exchange for becoming better physicists or musicians. The American system is inherently better in giving students general knowledge. Does this mean it is superior? No. In its current incarnation, American public education allows far too many students to 'slip through the the cracks.' There are kids in the sixth grade that are barely literate, sometimes. That doesn't mean it can't be improved without Europeanizing the education system.
Well, I don't know about you, but my passport has been with me for quite some time and optical readers are no longer up to the challenge of reading it as it has taken quite a beating. Passing through Immigration lines was painful enough before, but now I have to sit there and watch them fight with the optical scanner for a few minutes. RFID tages would elminate that problem even were they readable from 8 cm away. And for those of you paranoid enough to think the government will start tracking your every move with your passport, do you think you are any safer everytime you swipe a credit card to pay for something? The point is that anyone could read the numbers off of your credit card and hav a field day with it. It is easily verifiable if these RFID tags respond to a challenge from any great distance, and I doubt they will in their final incarnation.