As a former EDS employee you've got no grounds to say anything.
Soooo...by your logic, if I'm part of a group being criticized, I have no right to defend myself? Odd, that.
I probably have an interesting close-but-not-part-of-the-system perspective on EDS. Our company was owned (but practically independently operated) by EDS for a couple of years. We're an engineering company, maintain a product with 20m LOC, etc. I feel like I'm qualified to judge 'good' developer from 'bad'.
EDS employs a good number of highly competent technical people. They're hindered by the huge number of ex-GM boobs that represent a bulk of its middle- and upper-management. That company has been summarily screwed by its upper management. I met a number of their consultants, they were smart (and yes, constantly turning over) people.
Well, actually, you are still a little wrong. You said 'The OC is not set in OC, it's set in LA', but I think you meant 'The OC is not filmed in OC'. It's correct to say, for instance, that the beginning of A New Hope was set on Tatooine, when in reality it was filmed on Earth. Just a nitpick, but in your first post you did sound like you were saying that the show was depicting itself as being in LA.
Heh. Nope. Just a code monkey. I guess it's like A Clockwork Orange - I've sat through so many meetings of managerspeak with my eyes clamped open that it's been fried into my brain.
used to be all about making better faster machines with more features
Maybe it's shifting towards adequetly powered machines with features that actually work all of the time.
computer is a tool, not a toy, when did we see a shift from functionality to marketing spin?
As soon as Joe Consumer wanted one in the living room instead of just the home office. Why is this a bad thing? Miniaturization will just increase the pervasiveness of computer hardware in general. There *needs* to be a paradigm shift in the PC industry. These things need to go from tempremental monsters that need more attention than my two year old, to appliances on par with my Tivo. To an extent, Mac is successfully in this transition state already. (no - I'm no fanboy, don't even own one, but I think they're well made)
No offense, but I'm trying to figure out what's insightful about this post. The Unix workstation market is gone? I would say the Unix workstation market is still performing very well in its intended market.
I work for a major MCAD company, and we still develop for Sun, IBM, and HP workstations. One customer comes to mind that buys thousands of Sun seats, and you can bet they're buying the latest workstations.
And yes, we also port to 64-bit linux and 32-bit/64-bit Windows. The market is beginning to move in this direction because of cheap hardware, but 32-bit Windows/Linux just can't handle the requirements of a high-end CAD model. And hardware for 64-bit Windows/Linux hasn't been established enough for any of the big players to invest in to any large extent.
And what do clusters have to do with anything? Much of the analysis software can leverage this technology, but a cluster does me no good if I'm an ME trying to perform a transform on a 20k surface model. I just need gobs of memory and a stable platform to drive it.
There are software markets outside of the realm of webservers and enterprise databases, you know.
Why would this get moderated o/t? Methinks the moderators need to RTFAS - it clearly mentions 'two kinds' of popular computer right in the summary.
For what it's worth, I agree - in the early- to mid-eighties, I knew *at least* as people that had Ataris (400/800/ST) or Commodores (64/Amiga) than I did people that had a PC or Apple. Apples were the providence of the schools; I only knew one person that had one at home. I had one friend early on that had a Peanut, and we all thought his parents must have been rich;-).
I'm against you because you promote false marriage to get a job.
I think that you massively misinterpreted his original post. He basically said 'I didn't require an H1B (as in, I'm playing on as level a field as any American), and I still easily found a job.' The fact that he married an American is a sidebar that you mistakenly integrated into his statement.
Thanks for helping to destroy stereotypes - here I was thinking all low UIDs were smart;-).
For those that didn't catch the references made by the grandparent, he's probably referring to a popular (and often accurate) generalization that the many 'rugged', 'independent thinking', outspoken voters in Republican-dominated states are often farmers. They (often, no always) depend on gigantic federal subsidies to make a living. The irony is that these are often the same Republicans that can be heard saying that their taxes carry lazy welfare recipients.
17 of the 20 states that receive the most dollars in federal aid per dollar paid in taxes are Republican dominant states. These Republican-voting states receive more money from the Fed than they pay in with taxes.
And to the parent, you do *sound* like one of these people, but the grandparent never said you were one.
That's something I don't understand. I assume you're paying this person with a credit card, or a broker that's hooked up to (presumably) your credit card or checking account. The vendor is usually sending something to your corporal address - if you're trusting that to a vendor, and they're trusing your source of payment, what's the big deal with supplying your email address?
Why not a caller-ID type model? - you can attach your authenticated mail address, or choose to be completely anonymous. As the receiver, I can choose to block all anonymous mail.
I don't think it's a basic right for anyone to *force* their communication on someone else without the sender revealing who they are. As long as the receiver has the ability to regulate anonymous data, you can maintain the sender's right to anonymity, as well as the receiver's need to protect him/herself.
What does that even mean? Titles for GameCube cost as much as their equivalent PS2 titles, and the hardware runs at, what, a $50 difference in price?
I own a PS2 and a gamecube, and it amazes me how many people don't give Nintendo a fair shot because of the kiddie-style animation so common to GC titles. IMHO, the gameplay of a typical original GameCube/N64 game is *far* ahead of most of the titles originating on PS2/SPS.
As a matter of fact, I would go so far as to say that *Sony* gets the low end of the market, serving the least common denominator(sports game, anyone?), while Nintendo's games, while superficially more infantile, serve the high-end gamer much more consistently. Did anyone really ever consider Mario 64 or Metroid Prime a 'low-end' game?
(I guess my definition of 'high-end gamer' differes from a lot of people's. High-end games should feature the most carefully planned gameplay, not necessarily the most carefully rendered blood spatters.)
What a whiney little post.
on
Upgrade Your Dog
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· Score: 2, Insightful
You distill all of the things that we've come to know and love about dogs to biological imperative, but then explain a cat's positives in terms that, given your premise, should only be applied to human beings:
a species which was originally hard-coded into hunting in groups, obeying the strongest in the group, and marking and defending its hunting territory
A cat doesn't have a master. It might see you as a friend if you're nice to it. Or merely a roommate
I had to laugh when I ran into these two sentences that live in separate, but convenient for you, logical universes.
The house cat was derived from a solitary predator; it's aloof because, as you've pointed out, it has no inbred allegience to anything. It appears to be your 'friend' because you feed it, or drug it, or stroke its fur exactly the right way. It can be simplified as automata just as easily as a dog. And if you've never seen an intelligent dog, you've never seen one in agility training, or seeing eye dogs, or dogs that occasionally save a drowning child from a pool or its master from a burning house. If you're talking algebra, well, I think we've just entered the lofty heights of Homo sapien.
After all, who are you to say that human - and certainly cat - love is so different? Could you not distill human love down to the selection of the most genetically attractive partner? Or the biologically programmed imperative to care for a child? Or for the child to feel love for the 'master' that has fed and housed him/her, despite abuses and neglect? Dogs aren't the only ones that feel unconditional affection. I hope your opinions about animal emotion are only biased against Canis familiaris; if you can really see nothing about love and friendship that transcends basic biology, I pity you.
I've been to New York, and lived in cities just as big. As I said in my last post, aside from the mentally disabled who aren't equipped to drag themselves to a shelter, it's just not the same. It's one thing to not have the resource - or desire - to help that last fraction of a percentage with a screw loose. It's another to have a large proportion of your population starving (still an estimated 12-15% of India is even 'Untouchable', and always will be?). And no, I never said 'it's their own damn fault.' That's just a straw man.
As for my 'commie' viewpoints, on the contrary: I have a strong belief that the strength of a great free market lies in small- and medium-sized businesses. But as big business grows in the US, the lines between socialism and capitalism become blurred. We are already at the earliest stages of government and business being the same entity, and as lobbying dollars grow this will only become worse. India, instead of seeing a grassroots free-market economy, is seeing big-business dominate from the top-down. I find it almost humorous that you find the fact that 'sweepers and cleaners own cell phones' to be a sign of prosperity. I find it a sign of indentured servitude to Western big business.
I never said that India shouldn't be allowed to create a space program. This is one of the great fallacious arguments of the modern liberal: I *can* do something, so how dare you say I *shouldn't!* I'm not saying it should be legislated against, or that the market should be limited, I'm just saying that the country's priorities are ill-ordered.
This is a terribly unjustified comment. I can easily justify India spending the relatively low amount of money on their budding space program, but drawing incompatible comparisons to the US is just unnecessary.
I was waiting for a comment like yours, one where someone says 'look at the US! They have poor, too, and they spend their dollars on space programs and Olympians and guns!' I think the Guns or Butter argument is applicable to India, too, but you *cannot* compare the 'poverty' of the US (at any time in its history) to the unbelievable conditions in India today. Have you been?
'Poverty' in the US is a smallish house or section A housing on a street where your chances of being shot run into whole digits. Where even if you don't have (private) health insurance, the government will provide emergency and preventative care that rivals many countries' primary healthcare system. Yes, there is severe inequality, but people simply don't starve in the US unless there's some insanity present, such as a neglecting parent or unstable elderly person. We have roads, roads that can reach any other road in the proper country, roads that are repaved regularly and are well-lit and well-marked. Education is universal; the US' problems with education are similar to its gun control problems: it's social. Any family who *wants* their child to have a first class education will have it. The States spend more on their worst schools than many countries (with albeit much better test scores) spend on their best ones. Infrastructure budget is no problem in the US.
In India there are *350 million* malnourished people. If you visit Grandma and it rains just enough, the road you took to her house is blocked and you don't go to school for a month. This is a country where lepracy and plague can still be found. India badly needs to make its transportation, health, and educational infrastructure universal. By comparison, the US was leagues ahead by the time the space program evolved.
Yes, I have friends who are IT pro's in India and live better than 99% of the population. There's been a wonderful surge in infrastructure and basic care over the last 20 years, but the 'middle class' is a scant few percentage of the total population. The US has its significant problems, but comparisons are silly at best, and at worst terribly insulting to the poor of any third-world country. I firmly believe the US should send more aid to countries like India, but to say the US doesn't take care of its own is laughable.
India will, in my opinion, have a concentration of wealth in very few hands the likes of which the US has never seen. I've seen all of these posts saying 'the Indian economy will benefit from these big business ventures, the poor will benefit in the long-run!' Since when did liberalesque slashbots support trickle-down economics? Ironic.
'Seems like just yesterday that every press release for every company had to be loaded with such synergistic words as enterprise-enabled, web-widgeted doo-dads, whether it was really relevant or not. Is Google the next version of this? I can see it now:
Duke Nukem: now with Google-style weapons lookup!
Norton Antivirus: Now with Google-style virus lookup!
AutoCad 2005: Now with Google-style component lookup!
Crazy world. Next thing you know they'll be hooking up lava-lamps to build machines.
That video is absolutely hilarious. It looks like the copter is full-scale, and the woman is enormous. As she stared almost menacingly at the tiny device, I kept expecting to hear tiny Japanese men in the robot yelling 'godzira! godzira!'
Thanks for clarifying, well said. You're right about moderating human behavior; it's a pipe-dream, and like so many laws, would probably introduce even more chance for irresponsible behavior.
I like your reference to 'disruptive technology.' I'd not heard the term before, but just googled it and found some interesting reading - thanks!
Sorry, are you saying you'd have modded me down because you disagree with me? Your post is somewhat hard to interpret. If you would've modded me down, you should go read the moderation rules before you get points again. If I'm just misreading your intent, apologies. I don't disagree with what you're saying -- the Internet *is* truly a great development for humanity, but like all technologies, it is often leveraged in a less than responsible way. These sub-optimal paths should be moderated/legislated.
I'd want the best person to do the job, not look at salaries and location
There's the rub. You keep blathering that US IT positions are overpaid, but you haven't covered the obvious conflicting case - that there are also average-to-low paying positions in the US that are going to the same places. Tech support. Customer service. Manufacturing.
US corporate officers are NOT standing in a board room and deciding that local developers are too greedy, and deciding to outsource on principle. They're doing it with EVERY position they can get away with, because of the relative strength of the dollar in these countries. My equivalents in India are NOT underpaid -- 20k will get you a long, long way in that country. Two cars, a nice house, a good amount of disposable income. Better than about 99% of India's population.
You say that development isn't hard - then is it any more fair that the Indian developer is living *much* higher on the hog than the average vendor or factory worker? The point is, US companies would export every position in the company if they could. They would export development even if the avg salary was 30k. But you can't export street cleaners, or doctors, or mechanics, or sales staff. The telephone workers and IT staff of the world are getting royally fucked because, yes, the fruits of their labor are so easily moved across long distances. If you couldn't publish code on a network, you can bet the farm that development would still be growth career in the US.
Ironic, isn't it, that as the US tech industry helped the internet to mature to what it is today, they effectively tied their own noose?
not exactly hard to develop, hardly rocket science
Um, I develop software that helps to design rockets, does that count?
It's all about what you're developing. I'd agree that there are many overpaid IT positions, but those that are actually using the math, physics, and engineering principles that so many lament having 'wasted time' on, earn there pay every day. I know many that do.
Everything's supply and demand - do you think there's something inherently special about a doctor that they "deserve" 180k+ a year? Is a lawyer's job really so hard that it's 'just' for them to bill $250/hour?
If I were in the business IT/web development sector that seems to be implied here, a bright, motivated developer who could *design* and develop large, scalable, maintainable systems, would be worth every bit of 80k. I could certainly hire someone that could cobble something together for half the price, but you get what you pay for.
Troll, but generally indicative of many people's attitudes, so I'll take a shot...
College is by all acounts a peice (sic) of crap. For the computer scientist, it really doesn't DO anything for you. It doesn't really do anything for YOU - for me it was worth every penny.
My life is larger than the 40-60 hours a week I spend in front of a computer. I have relationships, hobbies, and disciplines which are not at all related to my degree. College helped me to round out my knowledge. Yes, I can read literature now, and a writer can learn calculus in his spare time, but why limit yourself? Aren't we both enriching our lives by learning something that deviates from our normal preferences? After college, can I get the face time with a published professor to do so? Not bloody likely. Learn as much as you can while you can. Much of the knowledge might not help you earn a paycheck, but my life is more than an effort to get a good review from my manager.
Will I ever publish a book on history? Probably not. Does my understanding of modern and ancient history give me a better perspective on modern politics and other social affairs? Absolutely. We go to work so that we can eat and stay warm, but aren't literature and the other arts some of the true achievements of humanity? It is proof of having risen above our past station as hunter and gatherer. I've quoted Dostoevsky before on./: Beauty will save the world. Is this not worthy of your money and focused attention? Is it not the duty of the universities to carry out this mission? Altruism is a *learned* state of maturity, you are not born with it.
As for the "practical", "career relevant" part of this discussion, this Northface U is nothing but a trade school. Trade schools are fine, if you want to be the career equivalent of a plumber. Good plumbers make lots of bucks, but they're for the most part drones that follow the path of the plumber who taught them. It's a skill; a memorized list of things to do - a machine following an algorithm, if you will. I went to school to learn about many aspects of my chosen vocation. I'm NOT just a drone who can accomplish one trade and one set of tasks. College taught me to think creatively, and to blend ideas across many disciplines to solve problems.
And as for whether or not someone's 'High School' (sic) taught them to write a five paragraph essay, I know many, many bright people who couldn't write their way out of a tampon box. If you think your 12th grade lit class was the be-all and end-all of writing prose, you are indeed the poster boy for why full general education-based degrees are still necessary.
The world needs more Renaissance thinkers, people who can apply their skills with a sense of maturity and responsibility. Frankly, I wouldn't for a second think of hiring someone to develop or manage the development of a commercial software product, if I knew that they'd not written so much as a five paragraph essay since high school. How banal, how shallow.
I wouldn't think so at all. There plenty of people (even..gasp...Americans!) that would put many, many translated novels on their short list of greatest books ever. I offer as a sample:
The Idiot Candide War and Peace The Inferno The Prince The Art of War Cyrano De Bergerac Siddhartha and on, and on...
There are many non-native language books in the pan-English world that are thought of as classics. It does get harder when you leave the realm of Euro & Russian novelists, but I did offer at least one non-fiction example.
Slashdot Mirror
Soooo...by your logic, if I'm part of a group being criticized, I have no right to defend myself? Odd, that.
I probably have an interesting close-but-not-part-of-the-system perspective on EDS. Our company was owned (but practically independently operated) by EDS for a couple of years. We're an engineering company, maintain a product with 20m LOC, etc. I feel like I'm qualified to judge 'good' developer from 'bad'.
EDS employs a good number of highly competent technical people. They're hindered by the huge number of ex-GM boobs that represent a bulk of its middle- and upper-management. That company has been summarily screwed by its upper management. I met a number of their consultants, they were smart (and yes, constantly turning over) people.
Not that I..uh..urr..watch the show...
Heh. Nope. Just a code monkey. I guess it's like A Clockwork Orange - I've sat through so many meetings of managerspeak with my eyes clamped open that it's been fried into my brain.
Maybe it's shifting towards adequetly powered machines with features that actually work all of the time.
computer is a tool, not a toy, when did we see a shift from functionality to marketing spin?
As soon as Joe Consumer wanted one in the living room instead of just the home office. Why is this a bad thing? Miniaturization will just increase the pervasiveness of computer hardware in general. There *needs* to be a paradigm shift in the PC industry. These things need to go from tempremental monsters that need more attention than my two year old, to appliances on par with my Tivo. To an extent, Mac is successfully in this transition state already. (no - I'm no fanboy, don't even own one, but I think they're well made)
I work for a major MCAD company, and we still develop for Sun, IBM, and HP workstations. One customer comes to mind that buys thousands of Sun seats, and you can bet they're buying the latest workstations.
And yes, we also port to 64-bit linux and 32-bit/64-bit Windows. The market is beginning to move in this direction because of cheap hardware, but 32-bit Windows/Linux just can't handle the requirements of a high-end CAD model. And hardware for 64-bit Windows/Linux hasn't been established enough for any of the big players to invest in to any large extent.
And what do clusters have to do with anything? Much of the analysis software can leverage this technology, but a cluster does me no good if I'm an ME trying to perform a transform on a 20k surface model. I just need gobs of memory and a stable platform to drive it.
There are software markets outside of the realm of webservers and enterprise databases, you know.
For what it's worth, I agree - in the early- to mid-eighties, I knew *at least* as people that had Ataris (400/800/ST) or Commodores (64/Amiga) than I did people that had a PC or Apple. Apples were the providence of the schools; I only knew one person that had one at home. I had one friend early on that had a Peanut, and we all thought his parents must have been rich ;-).
I think that you massively misinterpreted his original post. He basically said 'I didn't require an H1B (as in, I'm playing on as level a field as any American), and I still easily found a job.' The fact that he married an American is a sidebar that you mistakenly integrated into his statement.
Thanks for helping to destroy stereotypes - here I was thinking all low UIDs were smart ;-).
17 of the 20 states that receive the most dollars in federal aid per dollar paid in taxes are Republican dominant states. These Republican-voting states receive more money from the Fed than they pay in with taxes.
And to the parent, you do *sound* like one of these people, but the grandparent never said you were one.
That's something I don't understand. I assume you're paying this person with a credit card, or a broker that's hooked up to (presumably) your credit card or checking account. The vendor is usually sending something to your corporal address - if you're trusting that to a vendor, and they're trusing your source of payment, what's the big deal with supplying your email address?
I don't think it's a basic right for anyone to *force* their communication on someone else without the sender revealing who they are. As long as the receiver has the ability to regulate anonymous data, you can maintain the sender's right to anonymity, as well as the receiver's need to protect him/herself.
I own a PS2 and a gamecube, and it amazes me how many people don't give Nintendo a fair shot because of the kiddie-style animation so common to GC titles. IMHO, the gameplay of a typical original GameCube/N64 game is *far* ahead of most of the titles originating on PS2/SPS.
As a matter of fact, I would go so far as to say that *Sony* gets the low end of the market, serving the least common denominator(sports game, anyone?), while Nintendo's games, while superficially more infantile, serve the high-end gamer much more consistently. Did anyone really ever consider Mario 64 or Metroid Prime a 'low-end' game?
(I guess my definition of 'high-end gamer' differes from a lot of people's. High-end games should feature the most carefully planned gameplay, not necessarily the most carefully rendered blood spatters.)
a species which was originally hard-coded into hunting in groups, obeying the strongest in the group, and marking and defending its hunting territory
A cat doesn't have a master. It might see you as a friend if you're nice to it. Or merely a roommate
I had to laugh when I ran into these two sentences that live in separate, but convenient for you, logical universes.
The house cat was derived from a solitary predator; it's aloof because, as you've pointed out, it has no inbred allegience to anything. It appears to be your 'friend' because you feed it, or drug it, or stroke its fur exactly the right way. It can be simplified as automata just as easily as a dog. And if you've never seen an intelligent dog, you've never seen one in agility training, or seeing eye dogs, or dogs that occasionally save a drowning child from a pool or its master from a burning house. If you're talking algebra, well, I think we've just entered the lofty heights of Homo sapien.
After all, who are you to say that human - and certainly cat - love is so different? Could you not distill human love down to the selection of the most genetically attractive partner? Or the biologically programmed imperative to care for a child? Or for the child to feel love for the 'master' that has fed and housed him/her, despite abuses and neglect? Dogs aren't the only ones that feel unconditional affection. I hope your opinions about animal emotion are only biased against Canis familiaris; if you can really see nothing about love and friendship that transcends basic biology, I pity you.
I've always wondered if it was just an incredible fluke, or something that could happen easily again. Now I know
As for my 'commie' viewpoints, on the contrary: I have a strong belief that the strength of a great free market lies in small- and medium-sized businesses. But as big business grows in the US, the lines between socialism and capitalism become blurred. We are already at the earliest stages of government and business being the same entity, and as lobbying dollars grow this will only become worse. India, instead of seeing a grassroots free-market economy, is seeing big-business dominate from the top-down. I find it almost humorous that you find the fact that 'sweepers and cleaners own cell phones' to be a sign of prosperity. I find it a sign of indentured servitude to Western big business.
I never said that India shouldn't be allowed to create a space program. This is one of the great fallacious arguments of the modern liberal: I *can* do something, so how dare you say I *shouldn't!* I'm not saying it should be legislated against, or that the market should be limited, I'm just saying that the country's priorities are ill-ordered.
I was waiting for a comment like yours, one where someone says 'look at the US! They have poor, too, and they spend their dollars on space programs and Olympians and guns!' I think the Guns or Butter argument is applicable to India, too, but you *cannot* compare the 'poverty' of the US (at any time in its history) to the unbelievable conditions in India today. Have you been?
'Poverty' in the US is a smallish house or section A housing on a street where your chances of being shot run into whole digits. Where even if you don't have (private) health insurance, the government will provide emergency and preventative care that rivals many countries' primary healthcare system. Yes, there is severe inequality, but people simply don't starve in the US unless there's some insanity present, such as a neglecting parent or unstable elderly person. We have roads, roads that can reach any other road in the proper country, roads that are repaved regularly and are well-lit and well-marked. Education is universal; the US' problems with education are similar to its gun control problems: it's social. Any family who *wants* their child to have a first class education will have it. The States spend more on their worst schools than many countries (with albeit much better test scores) spend on their best ones. Infrastructure budget is no problem in the US.
In India there are *350 million* malnourished people. If you visit Grandma and it rains just enough, the road you took to her house is blocked and you don't go to school for a month. This is a country where lepracy and plague can still be found. India badly needs to make its transportation, health, and educational infrastructure universal. By comparison, the US was leagues ahead by the time the space program evolved.
Yes, I have friends who are IT pro's in India and live better than 99% of the population. There's been a wonderful surge in infrastructure and basic care over the last 20 years, but the 'middle class' is a scant few percentage of the total population. The US has its significant problems, but comparisons are silly at best, and at worst terribly insulting to the poor of any third-world country. I firmly believe the US should send more aid to countries like India, but to say the US doesn't take care of its own is laughable.
India will, in my opinion, have a concentration of wealth in very few hands the likes of which the US has never seen. I've seen all of these posts saying 'the Indian economy will benefit from these big business ventures, the poor will benefit in the long-run!' Since when did liberalesque slashbots support trickle-down economics? Ironic.
Duke Nukem: now with Google-style weapons lookup!
Norton Antivirus: Now with Google-style virus lookup!
AutoCad 2005: Now with Google-style component lookup!
Crazy world. Next thing you know they'll be hooking up lava-lamps to build machines.
That video is absolutely hilarious. It looks like the copter is full-scale, and the woman is enormous. As she stared almost menacingly at the tiny device, I kept expecting to hear tiny Japanese men in the robot yelling 'godzira! godzira!'
I like your reference to 'disruptive technology.' I'd not heard the term before, but just googled it and found some interesting reading - thanks!
Sorry, are you saying you'd have modded me down because you disagree with me? Your post is somewhat hard to interpret. If you would've modded me down, you should go read the moderation rules before you get points again. If I'm just misreading your intent, apologies. I don't disagree with what you're saying -- the Internet *is* truly a great development for humanity, but like all technologies, it is often leveraged in a less than responsible way. These sub-optimal paths should be moderated/legislated.
There's the rub. You keep blathering that US IT positions are overpaid, but you haven't covered the obvious conflicting case - that there are also average-to-low paying positions in the US that are going to the same places. Tech support. Customer service. Manufacturing.
US corporate officers are NOT standing in a board room and deciding that local developers are too greedy, and deciding to outsource on principle. They're doing it with EVERY position they can get away with, because of the relative strength of the dollar in these countries. My equivalents in India are NOT underpaid -- 20k will get you a long, long way in that country. Two cars, a nice house, a good amount of disposable income. Better than about 99% of India's population.
You say that development isn't hard - then is it any more fair that the Indian developer is living *much* higher on the hog than the average vendor or factory worker? The point is, US companies would export every position in the company if they could. They would export development even if the avg salary was 30k. But you can't export street cleaners, or doctors, or mechanics, or sales staff. The telephone workers and IT staff of the world are getting royally fucked because, yes, the fruits of their labor are so easily moved across long distances. If you couldn't publish code on a network, you can bet the farm that development would still be growth career in the US.
Ironic, isn't it, that as the US tech industry helped the internet to mature to what it is today, they effectively tied their own noose?
Um, I develop software that helps to design rockets, does that count?
It's all about what you're developing. I'd agree that there are many overpaid IT positions, but those that are actually using the math, physics, and engineering principles that so many lament having 'wasted time' on, earn there pay every day. I know many that do.
Everything's supply and demand - do you think there's something inherently special about a doctor that they "deserve" 180k+ a year? Is a lawyer's job really so hard that it's 'just' for them to bill $250/hour?
If I were in the business IT/web development sector that seems to be implied here, a bright, motivated developer who could *design* and develop large, scalable, maintainable systems, would be worth every bit of 80k. I could certainly hire someone that could cobble something together for half the price, but you get what you pay for.
College is by all acounts a peice (sic) of crap. For the computer scientist, it really doesn't DO anything for you.
It doesn't really do anything for YOU - for me it was worth every penny.
My life is larger than the 40-60 hours a week I spend in front of a computer. I have relationships, hobbies, and disciplines which are not at all related to my degree. College helped me to round out my knowledge. Yes, I can read literature now, and a writer can learn calculus in his spare time, but why limit yourself? Aren't we both enriching our lives by learning something that deviates from our normal preferences? After college, can I get the face time with a published professor to do so? Not bloody likely. Learn as much as you can while you can. Much of the knowledge might not help you earn a paycheck, but my life is more than an effort to get a good review from my manager.
Will I ever publish a book on history? Probably not. Does my understanding of modern and ancient history give me a better perspective on modern politics and other social affairs? Absolutely. We go to work so that we can eat and stay warm, but aren't literature and the other arts some of the true achievements of humanity? It is proof of having risen above our past station as hunter and gatherer. I've quoted Dostoevsky before on ./: Beauty will save the world. Is this not worthy of your money and focused attention? Is it not the duty of the universities to carry out this mission? Altruism is a *learned* state of maturity, you are not born with it.
As for the "practical", "career relevant" part of this discussion, this Northface U is nothing but a trade school. Trade schools are fine, if you want to be the career equivalent of a plumber. Good plumbers make lots of bucks, but they're for the most part drones that follow the path of the plumber who taught them. It's a skill; a memorized list of things to do - a machine following an algorithm, if you will. I went to school to learn about many aspects of my chosen vocation. I'm NOT just a drone who can accomplish one trade and one set of tasks. College taught me to think creatively, and to blend ideas across many disciplines to solve problems.
And as for whether or not someone's 'High School' (sic) taught them to write a five paragraph essay, I know many, many bright people who couldn't write their way out of a tampon box. If you think your 12th grade lit class was the be-all and end-all of writing prose, you are indeed the poster boy for why full general education-based degrees are still necessary.
The world needs more Renaissance thinkers, people who can apply their skills with a sense of maturity and responsibility. Frankly, I wouldn't for a second think of hiring someone to develop or manage the development of a commercial software product, if I knew that they'd not written so much as a five paragraph essay since high school. How banal, how shallow.
Good point - I have a much harder time thinking of a list when narrowed to the 20th century. Hesse comes to mind; Steppenwolf was a masterpiece.
The Idiot
Candide
War and Peace
The Inferno
The Prince
The Art of War
Cyrano De Bergerac
Siddhartha
and on, and on...
There are many non-native language books in the pan-English world that are thought of as classics. It does get harder when you leave the realm of Euro & Russian novelists, but I did offer at least one non-fiction example.
willfully subsidizing these kinds of projects
Do you have trouble dealing in the abstract?