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from the Free-As-In-Friday-Afternoon-Discussion dept.
Last week, President Trump signed a memorandum for $200M per year in federal funding to advance K-12 computer science education.
A good initiative, says IEEE, but, for just this once, let's not spend this money on yet again a bunch of 3D-printers, laptops or educational robots.
Ideal CS courses should teach computational thinking: logical thinking, abstraction, algorithmic expression, problem decomposition, stepwise fault isolation, and debugging. Hardware ain't helping there. Good, qualified, teachers do. But how do you get (good) CS graduates in front of the classroom when they can easy make a multitude writing software, or doing network engineering?
Companies like Microsoft already have programs that encourage volunteer employees to spend a couple of hours each week, teaching classes at high schools. An even better idea, IEEE claims, would be if those employees spent several days at the school, teaching students, while also mentoring teachers.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by anubi on Saturday October 07 2017, @03:43AM (3 children)
The fact MDC is still unemployed is a good indicator of the surplus of STEM type people.
I am a hardware/analog/interface designer, same story, no meaningful employment. No biggie anymore, I suppose, as I am now on social security. No call for what I do.
So I build and program Arduino/Propeller hybrids for the fun of it. My sudoko, I suppose, being TV bores me to tears. I can interface these to darned near anything. However, as I have become older, I am also slower. It takes time to optimize the design on these things. Even the PCB layout can often take me several weeks to get everything laid out just so.
This kind of attention to detail is not as cost-effective to corporate than hiring someone else at way over my salary to tell me I won't be working there.
I do not use the latest incarnation of Microsoft. Or some particular CAD system. I am much more old school. Eagle 4.16 works fine for me. I do not need all the fancy library access... If I need a part, I make one just like I want, right then and there.
I know in the aerospace sector where I used to work, the path was littered with layoffs, as hiring managers knew there were hundreds of resumes for every opening. So compartmentalize, hire just what you need, and layoff once that project step is done. You can always get another fresh one. There is an endless line of kids right out of college, heavily in debt, that will gladly take any hand extended to them.
Technical work has become like a mechanic who only rents his tools by the hour for a specific contract. Saves money, I suppose, providing those exact tools one needs are always on beck and call, hoping you will pick them up for an hour or two. The trick is to make the work as generic as possible. There is where Microsoft excels. Providing a bounty of students schooled ( on their dime too, no less! ) of the latest Microsoft technology so the company can lay off the people it had that excel in running last year's model. Cheaper than paying for useless experience in obsolete techniques.
Or to use another car analogy, modern business is not looking for people who know how to design a car, rather they are looking for people who know how to drive one.
Do they really intend to hire someone who knows how to design the computer in a car - to deliver pizzas?
Disclaimer: I am the type of guy to design the computer... matter of fact on the monitor adjacent to this one, lies the schematic to the arduino controller I am building to control the engine and transmission in my van. I devote most of my spare time to this. The remaining time is spent on gardening and house maintenance. I speak C++ and assembler. How quaint! But it does the job.
No, I guess I am not really looking for work anymore. I have little time nor energy to waste playing office politics, or funding employee theatre such as showing up in nice car and business attire. After paying executive salaries, most companies probably could not afford to pay my expenses to show up for work anyway.
I feel all I could offer is show kids how to control virtually anything from an Arduino. I have done embedded/realtime my whole life. I would be showing the kids how to control lights, switches, motors, sensors. Few people know this, but controlling a stepper motor correctly is a far more complex endeavor than meets the eye. A lot of inertial dynamics come into play. It actually takes me a propeller cog to control just one motor if I do it right, which also involves accelerometer feedback for resonance cancellation.
Or how to program statistics into machines so meaningful reports can be generated. Or how to design to talk to whatever protocol the other machine wants to talk in. Including TCP/IP ( I could teach several years from Jeremy Bentham's text ( "TCP/IP Lean" ) and the "TCP/IP Illustrated" book set ). But they, like my old RCA tube manual, are seemingly considered obsolete and useless technology.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 07 2017, @04:26AM (2 children)
I'd have tried to get MDC if I thought there was any hope he'd pass a background check. You might be good to hire as well, but you'd probably need to move.
Those jobs with C and assembly haven't really gone away. It's just that the industry has grown in some other places, like web and phone apps.
Supply and demand matters. Everybody else is chasing web and phone apps, including most of the idiots. You can do fine with the C and assembly jobs since there is little competition.
Don't expect to be doing C and assembly at a typical San Francisco start-up. They hate old people anyway. You probably need to look at defense contractors.
Well, you don't think you are looking, but just in case: You can just focus on technical stuff. You can show up in a decaying old car like I did for years, or even ride a bike to work. You can wear a damaged T-shirt with jeans and sneakers just like I am wearing today. We've gone a dozen years without layoffs. I put a bit of a job description in today's poll, https://soylentnews.org/pollBooth.pl?qid=110&aid=-1 [soylentnews.org] You can email me at users.sf.net, with account name albert.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Saturday October 07 2017, @05:36AM (1 child)
Aye... the problem with home ownership. As you are probably well aware of, there are substantial advantages of owning a home, namely you accumulate equity in lieu of rental receipts. But it comes with a disadvantage: liquidity.
I would encounter substantial costs to relocate. A lot of hands will need to be paid off.
I could rent the place out, however remote property management of one parcel isn't my bag.
My alternative is to simply stay put.
I used to work for a defense contractor. Dog-eat-dog. Compartmentalization. Cubicles. Suit-and-tie dress code. Lots of office politics. Damn near impossible to get anything done. My observation is most defense contractors are little more than a pasture to place political friends in for "a good job" in management at public expense. It was there I got the "cappuchin monkey cucumber and grape demonstration" performed on me, with subsequent burnout. It was there I started seeing work as a big pain in the ass to be performed as if I were a prostitute, not done because I was really into it. They called these techniques "leadership training". For all practical purposes, those techniques thoroughly demotivated me. I could not stand to go back to work in that kind of place.
Let 'em prance around in their conference rooms, wearing suits and ties, shaking hands, and doing the executive suite thing. I simply can't be isolated, put in some little cubicle the size of a toilet stall, and expected by the elite management types to perform. About the only thing I can do in such environment is take a shit.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 07 2017, @06:53AM
The home situation is annoying. It seems that, looking at both sides of the transaction, 10% of the value of the sale is eaten up. That sucks, but if you need to move then make it happen. You may come out ahead if you move to a cheaper area. One of our sites, in Florida's Brevard county, is still affordable. The site in South Carolina is probably affordable too.
Your defense contractor experience sounds like something from the 1955 to 1995 time period. I'm seeing the bottom 3 to 5 levels of management not wearing suits full-time, with the bottom 2 levels never wearing them as far as I can see. Offices have ordinary drywall. I don't think it is dog-eat-dog... though I suppose you could cause this or imagine it. Compartmentalization is a security requirement for defense contractors, and it is less-formally used by every well-run company. Google is compartmentalized; don't imagine any random joe can muck with user accounts. Hospitals are compartmentalized.