Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by takyon on Friday July 17 2015, @08:17AM   Printer-friendly
from the brb-printing-diploma dept.

We often discuss the merit (or necessity) of having a formal degree in technology. This story is another installment in that debate:

The Department of the Interior's computer systems played a major role in the breach of systems belonging to the Office of Personnel Management, and DOI officials were called before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Wednesday to answer questions about the over 3,000 vulnerabilities in agency systems discovered in a penetration test run by Interior's Inspector General office. But there was one unexpected revelation during the hearing: a key Interior technology official who had access to sensitive systems for over five years had lied about his education, submitting falsified college transcripts produced by an online service.

The official, Faisal Ahmed, was assistant director of the Interior's Office of Law Enforcement and Security from 2007 to 2013, heading its Technology division. He claimed to have a bachelor's degree from the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, and a master's degree in technology management from the University of Central Florida—but he never attended either of those schools. He resigned from his position at Interior when the fraudulent claim was exposed by a representative of the University of Central Florida's alumni association, who discovered he had never attended the school after Ahmed accepted and then suddenly deleted a connection with her on LinkedIn.

TFA emphasizes the falsification he did of his credentials, but there seems to be heavy insinuation that lack of degree = lack of ability.


Official Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 17 2015, @08:22PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 17 2015, @08:22PM (#210579)

    Only once did someone complete it under 15 minutes. He found a better offer and we couldn't hire him.

    There's your problem. If you can't find competent people and the ones that you do get better offers: your compensation is far too low and/or your expectations far too high.

    Double the salary and try again.

  • (Score: 2) by tibman on Friday July 17 2015, @09:02PM

    by tibman (134) Subscriber Badge on Friday July 17 2015, @09:02PM (#210595)

    That hasn't worked well for us because someone somewhere always offers more. You end up with developers that only care about money and barely learn the system before leaving for another company. You'll spend the next two months fixing their work. I would say our salaries aren't high but they are good. We aren't trying to recruit the best. We will settle for good enough. As far as expectations go we have very few. You have to fizzbuzz, you have to be a culture fit, and have to be trainable. If the CTO wrote some incorrect code or said the wrong thing, you have to tell him. Put him on the spot right there. Have an argument. The best supported argument wins. You can try that with company policy too but he'll probably win because it's subjective : )

    Double salary would put me in the top 5%, which doesn't sound right. Developers should be around top 20-25%?

    --
    SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 17 2015, @09:18PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 17 2015, @09:18PM (#210603)

      All employment contracts state the employer owns all code media etc etc and patents the employee creates during the term of employment: ie the employee is owned and can't do hobby opensource projects at home. Why would anyone work for you bloodsucking fucks?

      • (Score: 2) by tibman on Friday July 17 2015, @10:08PM

        by tibman (134) Subscriber Badge on Friday July 17 2015, @10:08PM (#210624)

        Ours doesn't. You can even work on personal projects at work. But once you check code into company owned version control it becomes work product and the company owns the copyright and will likely patent it (theyhave a few already). Myself and two other guys do "collaborative" for fun projects during lunch and some afternoons. They usually never go anywhere and get abandoned half-way. Programming doesn't always have to be serious, it can be a lot of fun.

        The last one i worked on was a 5th Edition Dungeon Generator [tageverything.org] with the goal of copying the rules directly from the official guidebook. I didn't finish the passages section and it isn't that great yet. Never even built out a real graphical map, just dumped ascii to the screen. You might have to gen a few to see something interesting.

        My buddy made an online character sheet editor [tageverything.org] for an old 80's game called Heavy Gear. Mostly because he always had issues getting people into the game. Telling them to read the first 60 pages of a photocopied PDF scares away a lot casuals.

        NOTE: JavaScript warning for both of those links. They won't work without it.

        --
        SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.