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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: 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.