DARPA: U.S. Geek Shortage Is National Security Risk
wired.com
wired.com
_Teaching_ these subjects to teens would probably be a good start.
I'm being serious. The junk that is taught in most schools (and I'm Canadian: our education system is supposedly better than the US) and absurdly labeled these subjects is a huge part of the problem.
Math is taught like magic. Experiments have been banned from the science classroom. Computer science classes teach typing.
I'm exaggerating a little: math occasionally gets explanations, science may occasionally have a very simple experiment, computer science students may learn some programing. But those are the exception, not the rule.
It's utterly broken.
In essence, he believes the power of computers is as a medium for experimentation. If you make it easy for kids to simulate models from axioms, they'll be able to think better. One might call that "programming", but it's really quite a bit more than what people do now.
Um.. in this case fixing is also pretty easy.Just start with making a curriculum which is more inclined towards experimentation and research. Tell students to find things out by them selves instead of spoon feeding them. Tell them the syntax of the language and then keep lab open (open as in anyone can come in and do programming) so that they can work on interesting things. And above all, GRADE them on these experiments. Start off with keeping them as extra credit and graduate that to making it a part of curriculum.
PS:May be one day I would have money and will open up something like "South Harmon Institute of Technology" from the movie "Accepted". Where mind is allowed to stroll freely in the depths of thoughts not drown in books and formulas.
"Students were evacuated from Millennial Tech Magnet Middle School in the Chollas View neighborhood Friday afternoon after an 11-year-old student brought a personal science project that he had been making at home to school ..." http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2010/jan/15/students-evac...
There, I said it, it's not going to be a popular opinion, especially since I'm a Canadian expat in the USA "stealing your jerbs". I know many others like me, who are being well above average rates to work in this country, whose very employment carries steep legal and bureaucratic overhead for our employers. Yet Canadians, Indians, Europeans, etc etc, are still being imported by the planeloads. I know for a fact that our HR department scours American schools for qualified graduates constantly, yet we can't fill spaces quick enough.
I've thought about this some, and my conclusion is that a lot of American geeks just don't work very hard - you have the people who hang out on Digg/Reddit all day. Yeah, they're geeks, but how many languages do they know? Can they build a site from back to front? Do they know their algorithms? People on HN need to realize that they're a vanishingly small minority of the set of all geeks, and that as a crew are in general much more ambitious and capable than most. There's a long way between "I like computers" and "I'm willing to pour ungodly amounts of time into learning computers". For every geek who takes the time to learn all the toolkits and languages to get employed, there are 500 others who couldn't be bothered, and will complain endlessly about undeserving foreigners stealing jobs rightfully theirs.
In other words, for every geek who knows Python inside and out, is up to date on all the latest web technologies, has experience building large scalable systems, etc etc... there are 500 others who can only write VB, and will endlessly complain that they're not employed, or that they're not being paid enough. Unfortunately no "geek employment" number will ever be able to separate the two.
Another perspective could be that (most) Americans who work hard don't become geeks, because the rewards aren't commensurate with other professions.
If you're interested in reading some support for this position, you might check out a recent RAND study that concluded that "cience and technology performance, but said the slow growth of U.S.-born technical workers "will change when the earnings and attractiveness of S&E (science and engineering) careers improve."
A summary is available here:
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/2009-07-08-science-engi...
The full RAND study is at:
Then there's the other side of the fence: some of my friends use Ubuntu on their laptops, are really good with the Internet, and can quote every episode of the Simpsons ever. Quite a few are stuck in jobs like software testing. Why can't they find jobs paying $80,000 which require none of the commercial skills they have assiduously avoided learning? Hmm, tough one.
Are you? Is it even possible to be? Those requirements sound unrealistically high, so either you're a supergenius, you're exaggerating, or your company lists insane requirements and then doesn't actually require them.
The system is built with Ant, Groovy, and Ruby, and deployed on RedHat Linux. You'll be expected to know SH and BASH shell scripts and perform various sysadmin tasks as required, for example, configuring firewalls, Apache, and nightly batches via cron'ed up shell scripts.
In addition to doing Java, we also do migrations from Perl systems and much of our internal utilities are written in either PHP (yay, outsourcing) or Ruby.
One of the core tasks of our customers is creating "reports". We have a software package (which you haven't heard about) which does this for us. You need it to know it backwards and forwards. Also, if it ever fails, knowing how to debug PDFs would be a real help.
I haven't gotten past "generic web developer" into the world of fun that is "IT needs specific to Japanese universities", such as dealing with the common Japanese bank interchange format to process tuition payments. That is one requirement from one of the 37 subsystems on the project I'm on.
You tell me -- what have I said so far that sounds unrealistic or exaggerated?
I know there are a lot of requirements, and I've used most of what you listed there. But even with all the common, plentiful requirements, the bit about an 8pt font was exaggerated.
You could have stopped there :)
When I read this, it seemed like there was a disconnect between the out-sourcing trend and this desire for more computer geeks.
Interestingly, when I recently read BLS website on programmer jobs prospects, they projected a decrease. You can find a reference to this projection here: http://education-portal.com/articles/Mastercam_Programmer_Jo...
But now, the very recently updated BLS website paints a rosy picture.
http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos303.htm
Woo, spooky. Maybe the BLS is listening to darpa at least... WTF!
I'm not sure how useful this distinction is, as every job I've held had highly ambiguous requirements and a lot of trade-offs involved in building a working system from them. It kinda makes me wonder though - a colleague who'd been a PM at both Google and Microsoft said the difference was "Microsoft expects PMs to produce a spec that's thrown over the wall to engineers, who throw it back if there's any ambiguity. Google expects their engineers to have opinions about the product and to resolve most of the details themselves, only consulting the PM if there's something big where they need additional data." I wonder if Microsoft hires programmers and Google hires software engineers?
I don't think that's a fair assessment of the developers themselves. I would write it up to differences in product release mentality -- it takes a different mindset to put bits in a box vs a web server.
I'd kind of cheapens the craft when people look at it in this way, my AI lecturer last year was describing the different roles in creating an AI system and saying that that the job you want is a knowledge engineer is the position you want and the programmer is just a nobody who translates it all into code.
That's the distinction: We in the U.S. are (supposedly) going to retain management (and maybe design) while outsourcing the "lower level" work.
I originally continued with a longer comment, but it summarizes to: "Good luck with that."
My only option is to believe that "management/design stays onshore" is a way to keep current mid-level managers from pulling the ripcord right now, and at least getting all the programming and the technical managers offshore before everyone below director-level wises up.