This is the type of school you don't usually go to 5 days a week. Instead, you split that time between school and apprenticeship (i.e. internship). That way, you're forced to see the industry from day 1 and there's no situations where you graduate without being employable (as I often see in CS majors these days).
The result is that you have training as a skilled technician, and can make a good living immediately. The industry also has skilled workers to fill their gaps. It seems like a no brainer to me. You don't need a 4 year university diploma for everything.
Also, it blows my mind that industry bitches and moans about having no workers yet makes no effort in that direction either. My school, WPI, was founded back in the 1860s by industrymen as a "free school for industrial science". Where is this sensibility now? 20 odd companies and approximately 200 citizens helped build the buildings for the school. What happened to this sense of community?
Edit: Now that I think about it, on a slightly unrelated note, why don't universities have mandatory internships anymore? The more, the better.
Some do. I went to the University of Waterloo - it's well known for its co-op system (i.e. internships). The program I was under put you through 5-6 4-month internships before you could graduate.
Linky McLink: http://cecs.uwaterloo.ca/
I have to say, it is by far the best decision I've ever made. If I had gone through undergrad without taking internships I'd be pretty fucked right now. Instead, I had a small lineup of name-brand companies courting me out of college and that's subsequently opened a lot more doors.
If you're going through an engineering/CS education right now and you're not doing internships, you're doing it wrong.
When it comes to education and employment, there is no single right way of doing things.
If you want to go down the academia path, I'm sure the optimal course of action is different, but for private sector employment it doesn't get better than internships.
I've done a lot of interviewing, and while open source projects are valuable, they are largely not as valuable to a company as real industry experience. Now, this differs in degrees - if you're a core contributor to a well known library for example, I'd give that a lot more credence than "hacked on various open source things".
Research on campus also pales in effectiveness to industry experience. Software in industry has a lot of constraints and differences to hacking on your own time, at your own pace, and similarly has a lot of differences to academia.
This is supported by my interview experiences - I interview a lot of masters-level people with impressive rosters of research projects on their resumes, but many of them cannot code at all, to the point where I wonder what exactly they contributed to these projects, if anything. On the other hand, I've never interviewed someone way out to lunch who has a background interning at the "big names" (e.g., Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, etc).
Having a company with a very high hiring bar on your resume is like a gigantic stamp of approval - people know these companies hire tough, and if you passed their bar (and spent time there, and didn't get fired), you automatically have more cred than someone who worked on anonymous FOSS projects or his/her own projects.
We have a similar alternative here in Australia; often known as "TAFE" (in Western Australia, at least) where the fees are typically just up-front and very cheap (we're talking hundreds, as opposed to 20-30k+ for University) for vocational courses, and a bit more for apprenticeships.
Saying that, and mostly due to our mining activity, there are a lot of people seeking this route. In fact, it's not uncommon for an electrician or fitter to earn a good $80k+ for FIFO work with just a couple of years experience (the news media usually says $100k, but that's the exception). Not bad considering what a lot of DBA's, programmers and sysadmins with 1-2 years of experience get.
Keep in mind we have a Government scheme called HECS/HELP, where the Government pays your fees (with some fairly high limits). You pay them back once you earn a certain level of income (the rate increases as you earn more) and there is no interest, however it does increase in June every year via inflation.
Excuse my very high-level overview.
I start a business means my present job opens up, as well as any additional hires my business would need. Jobs problem gone.
Excellent argument for real reform to health insurance access.
Yet, I see more risk taking in the US than in Germany. I suppose, its rather that Europeans are less risk taking, so they also support a better safety net. I know its not my business, but I can't help being scared about the idea, that the most dynamic country in the western world might slow down because of copying Europe.
The US getting more universal health care coverage will not change that.
This is trending a bit off topic. Feel free to respond, but I won't.
Your theory may be interesting but is completely opposite from reality.
If the government wants to see more people starting new businesses and taking risks, it needs to remove the HUGE disparity in healthcare costs between working for a large corporation and going solo. There's just no reason it should exist.
(I find it hard to accept that a lack of free health insurance is keeping that many would-be entrepreneurs at their day jobs any more than a lack of free housing is. If you have some form of disease that keeps you from getting insurance, I completely sympathize (and I believe the health care law will solve that issue), but for most people it is just another cost to consider before leaving - like housing, transportation, etc.)
If we can somehow find a way to rein in costs of health services (perhaps by disincentivizing supplier-induced demand through price ceilings in both malpractice awards AND gasp healthcare service price controls a la Singapore, Japan, or Switzerland), we can get further away from our dependence on large corporations to employ everyone.
Would a universal health care system make it even easier? Sure, no doubt. But I often hear that it's so difficult and costly to purchase individual health insurance, and that just seems to be untrue. Are there other factors I'm not considering?
If you quit your job, COBRA allows you to continue to pay 101% of the group rates for 18 months and keep your old insurance.
It's possible that they didn't understand the nature of their compensation, and mistakenly believed their compensation was lower than it was. But in that case, I'd suggest they simply failed at financial planning.
(Note: if you can't do proper financial planning, don't do a startup.)
Now my fondness for all things Eastern European is very well known - but even I think it's insane that while we have millions of English jobless, someone flew 600 miles to serve me coffee at the train station in the mornings.
I've never been to Canada but I love Eastern Europe, there's a buzz there, an energy that drove these kids to learn English and travel to where the work is. To be a young Eastern European today is a glorious thing - you could go anywhere in the EU and be better educated, harder working and better looking than 95% of the locals, 99% in some places. These kids are going to rule the world one day and they'll have earned it - but we'll have thrown it away.
Although, as a programmer, I had to remove a dead rat from a track (rail) after the cart (electrified, motor model size) carrying medical samples hit it. It was quite the shock climbing the ladder, opening the false ceiling, and then doing the horror-movie-style 180 with the flashlight.
"In May 2008, median annual wages of wage-and-salary computer applications software engineers were $85,430. The middle 50 percent earned between $67,790 and $104,870. The lowest 10 percent earned less than $53,720, and the highest 10 percent earned more than $128,870."
On the other hand, from that same page:
"Median annual wages of wage-and-salary computer programmers were $69,620 in May 2008. The middle 50 percent earned between $52,640 and $89,720 a year. The lowest 10 percent earned less than $40,080, and the highest 10 percent earned more than $111,450. "
and
"In May 2008, median annual wages of wage-and-salary computer systems software engineers were $92,430. The middle 50 percent earned between $73,200 and $113,960. The lowest 10 percent earned less than $57,810, and the highest 10 percent earned more than $135,780."
So they make a strong distinction between "programmers" and "software engineers". I guess there's a definition in there somewhere, I didn't read it that closely (which is why I initially took the 85k as 'overall' median).
They make it equally difficult to figure the plumber and other vocational professions. The initial pages seems to bunch a varying groups together. ick
defs: Computer software engineers design and develop software
omputer programmers write programs. After computer software engineers and systems analysts design software programs, the programmer converts that design into a logical series of instructions that the computer can follow (A section on computer systems analysts appears elsewhere in the Handbook.)
What the ....? I'm guessing there are many reasons to get an education, but isn't the primary reason to understand the world better than before?
A solid case can be made that America's biggest problem right now is our populations inability to think critically. "here, take this loan with fluctuatings interest rates that only lasts 5 years. don't worry you can refinance in 5 years after your house is worth more". "Don't worry about eating well or exercising, here are some pills that will solve it all for your". "let's pray for a solution to our national debt" <- I wish I were making that up
Here's an example - I go to the doctor, the doctor prescribes a certain cholesterol medication, I go pick it up and start taking it regularly. There's every chance that next year, someone on the internet will be implying that I'm stupid, that I lack critical thinking skills, because everyone knows that this cholesterol drug causes a major medical condition. I'll be told that anyone who knew anything about medicine at the time I was prescribed this drug would have told me that I shouldn't have taken it. And yet, my doctor, who presumably did know things about medicine, told me to take it. Should I have done my own due diligence into this drug? How would I know where to start? Do I need to be taught biology so that I know how to figure out which medicine is and isn't safe? Does everyone need to have enough understanding of medicine to make these sorts of decisions?
The financial system is less complicated than medicine, but it is not at all trivial. People who were sold snake oil by those with more expertise than themselves do not lack critical reasoning skills. They merely trusted authority, which we all have to do on a daily basis just to get by in a world where everything is complex.
tl;dr; People who didn't understand the consequences of adjustable rate mortgages or believe that prayer is the only way they can contribute to solving our debt problem aren't stupid; they don't know much about finance, but they probably know a lot about something else.
Surely that's rhetorical?
Do you honestly think most people pursue education primarily to understand the world better, and not to increase their earning potential?
The idea that an education turns one into a producer from a consumer sounds absurd. People without educations produce!
LOL, of course, that's why they flock to the West to pick asparagus &_& . Now I agree that many people from the East have better work mentality than the unemployed here in the West, but that's out of economic necessary, and not some sort of fundamental genetic trait; and it'll be gone in 15 years when the economic standards have leveled and everybody has gotten used to it.
Also, I see it as a great opportunity (for say the UK) to have people from the rest of the EU. I mean, you did not have to pay for 18 years of their education and health care. That is not bad for the taxpayer.
Disclaimer: I am Czech and used to work as a fruit picker during Summer months :)
Your spelling tics ('nu labour') and use of the suggestion that the party lied by promoting a policy of wider university education which turned out to be a failure suggest a rather intense bias. It seems not to have occurred to you that the Blair government thought widespread higher education was the antitode to Britain's structural economic problems and simply Got It Wrong. Likewise, there are a lot of people on the left who are convinced that Thatcher set out to wreck the economy by plundering the state monopolies, when the reality is that they were in terrible shape and the abrupt recession that followed a long period of financial expansion came as a nasty surprise for the then-ruling Conservatives under John Major.
I mean, it's fun to imagine that wicked politicians crash the economy for their own personal gain; but even a brief study of history suggests that wrecking an economy is usually followed by painful electoral defeat and a long term in the wilderness. Most politicians are not especially malicious, they're just not especially competent either. Gordon Brown looked like a magician until the financial crisis hit, and had probably come to believe he was. Likewise, Thatcher looked like a genius until there were riots in the streets and Sterling collapsed not long after her departure. If you can only remember the faults of the most recent government, then you're in danger of repeating the ones of that which came immediately before, or those of their predecessors.
The Nu Labour "project" was very cynically about power for the sake of power, using techniques hitherto reserved for selling consumer goods and pop music. Thatcher, for all her faults, was a true believer in what later became known as Thatcherism. Blair and Brown were so intent on power their whole political careers that they had absolutely no idea what to do when they got it!
1) A flood of government equity, distributed by those ever-so-entrepreneurial bureaucrats. There is, of course, no chance that the same people who brought us ethanol subsidies ("so stupid not even the Soviets tried it"), the Fannie Mae housing bubble and the $3000 hammer won't screw it up.
2) A no-cost-to-government expansion of Medicare, which I'm sure has some Canute-like power to push back the tides of adverse selection. For efficiency and quality of service provision, please refer to sarcasm in point 1).
3) Tax credits for jobs created -- there was a day when this sort of thing was called "profit", which entrepreneurs were allowed to keep, but I suppose funding 1) and 2) will finally put paid to this dwindling concept.
Jokes about "liberals" would be easy, but unfair, as Congressional conservatives have been just about as bad, AND in violation of principles that should have guided them better.
Why on God's green earth would _programmers_ slap kludges like these on fundamental system failures? If someone proposed fixing bugs this way the collective sneering here would break the internet.
We've got billions (trillions?) already deployed in "education", whose product is widely understood as unsatisfactory at best. We just had a post showing that about 25% of the students at a well-regarded university are interested in nothing but the grade, and are so unprepared they can't imagine any way to get it on their own. Why not fix THAT?
And why is it that all fixes proposed amount to hurling more man-months at the problem?
I'm sure you mean well, and there's no doubt the problems are complicated, but seriously, this sort of thing lacks the thought I presume HN types bring to work every single day.
It would be put into a trust, disbursed and managed as a credit union by participant states and guaranteed by the NCUA, not centrally-governed.
And, all of those "waste" slags you have against the government are exactly why my proposal would be decentralized and managed on the state level by default. The $3000 hammer is swallowed into the Pentagon, which is why it's dysfunctional. Decentralized management by default makes the program work effectively: spread the "risk" geographically rather than in one silo.
I think you just fundamentally oppose government action in any scenario because of your political leanings (likely libertarian from the attitude), which is fine, but to write such vitriol while simultaneously offering nothing of your "if i ruled the world" solution smacks as being simply obtuse for trolling purposes.
"A no-cost-to-government expansion of Medicare, which I'm sure has some Canute-like power to push back the tides of adverse selection."
So, every small business is filled with sick people who would enroll because they can't afford private insurance outside?
I'm proposing that it would be a financial boon for SMBs because they can get better rates through Medicare for their group than from private insurers. Bonus: there would be healthy people enrolling in the program who don't need constant healthcare services.
"We've got billions (trillions?) already deployed in "education", whose product is widely understood as unsatisfactory at best. We just had a post showing that about 25% of the students at a well-regarded university are interested in nothing but the grade, and are so unprepared they can't imagine any way to get it on their own. Why not fix THAT?"
Oh, so the answer to fixing economically bloated and unsatisfactory education is to do what exactly to the bloated and unsatisfactory education system? Yours doesn't seem like much of a solution. It's actually a non-solution, no offense.
"I'm sure you mean well, and there's no doubt the problems are complicated, but seriously, this sort of thing lacks the thought I presume HN types bring to work every single day."
You took time to write about how terrible I am for even back-napkinning some solutions, without offering anything in return. Thanks for the gainsaying: I learned alot about you.
This stuff doesn't even link up with your first explanation of the problem.
You can see the details enough to see the problems, but you see the implications and don't like them. So you find ways to overlook them without even noticing what you've done. You are outsmarting yourself. It's precisely because you are so smart that you have driven yourself to positions that make no sense.
THAT is the problem. I could pose mathematical proofs of a contrary approach and you'd still fight it.
Because you are smart enough to see that going after the real problems in education would touch some fundamental and touchy subjects: parental responsibility, what "equality" and "fairness" really mean, whether we _can_ educate _everyone_, whether "teachers" as currently organized as a benevolent as they claim. And so on. Lord only knows what the final answers would be, but even talking about this stuff would be enough to blow the Progressive Coalition into a thousand tiny pieces. So we don't go for the central, systemic problems of the main program, we write scads of bug-catching programs to sit atop them and intercept the bugs. That would never work in code, and it won't work for government.
THAT is the offer. You are going about the problem all wrong -- your approach goes against everything you (meaning "you" as a stereotyped smart, problem-solving, elegance-seeking, Hacker News ur-type) do so well, day in and day out.
Now, I apologize for the grandiose generalizations and stereotyping and the reckless assumptions about goals and mental state. I just don't understand why such brilliant people are so routinely taken with "solutions" of a pattern they wouldn't tolerate for 15 seconds in their work. Go ahead, downvote this too, I suppose it deserves it -- but holy mackerel, I just don't get it.
"Smarter"? Why would they need to be "smarter"? They just need to analyze a business plan just like any other bank would (which is why I propose a "credit union" style of management and disbursement), but you're saying it will be rife with waste and fraud. I disagree, and can name this very network upon which we disagree as just one counterexample of a government funded program (centralized at that!) that works, and that likely would've never happened without soul-crushing R&D and deployment expenditure from a cabal of private network competitors. In other words, it wouldn't have happened, from the "session" OSI layer back to physical. I can also name other government developments (Polio elimination, Interstate System, Railroad, hell even the USPS up until about 4 years ago) that made America the engine of the world economy; but it belabors the point and you'll just disagree anyway.
"Healthy people will pay premium for a program that will take them at any time? C'mon man, really?"
They will if they can get a discount over Blue Cross for similar coverage. Why do you think people shop at Wal-Mart? Because of the happy faces?
You say you're all about business, try this exercise real quick: go and see how much it would cost to get coverage for a four-person startup through a private insurer (remember, get like for like coverage) vs. premiums for Medicare. See the difference? Now calculate it if one of the four has/had cancer. Not so fun.
"I just don't understand why such brilliant people are so routinely taken with "solutions" of a pattern they wouldn't tolerate for 15 seconds in their work"
Your design pattern, if I can suss it out from your comment about "equality" and "fairness" and "educating everyone", is that you want simple human nature/nurture to win out against educating all children (even and especially corner cases like poor and problemed ones).
"So we don't go for the central, systemic problems of the main program, we write scads of bug-catching programs to sit atop them and intercept the bugs. That would never work in code, and it won't work for government."
First, comparing educating children to bug-catching programs is asinine on it's face; secondly, there are a number of successful companies out there that have legacy code to maintain that is rife with bugs. Not only that, this code often can't even be read let alone maintained by anyone but a single person that the company then has to continually shovel money at to keep them from leaving. Wall St., the insurance industry (go figure since we're talking healthcare!), hell even the two most successful technology companies on planet earth by any measure (Microsoft and Apple) maintain buggy legacy code for ages. It's in fact, rare that they throw out the entire system. Yet, you want to do that for a country with 75 million kids.
If you think our current educational system "works", then why is it that our economic problems are poor worker preparation and inflexible attitudes about work?
If you are satisfied with how you're thinking about all this, I can't change that. Maybe sometime, when you're wondering why everyone is so stupid / evil that they can't see the brilliance of boosting small businesses with $10bn annual subsidy and their own single payer health system, you'll consider that maybe something along these lines helps explain the disconnect.
BTW, suggesting that the Postal Service was some kind of economic accelerator until 4 years ago is just ignorant. Their productivity is terrible, UPS & FedEx kicked their ass decades ago. They should have been relegated to rural / remote universal service, and the rest privatized, a long time ago. Think about why they weren't and you'll go a long way to understanding why political entities make lousy economic decisions.
We've done this already.
At best, we might have the benefit of the fraud benefiting a million individuals, like in the housing bubble, instead of a handful, like in the S&L days.
People fresh out of college (most of whom are already carrying a 5-figure debt) don't have $60k to live off of for the 18-months before they (might) turn a profit.
I've been around VERY few businesses that were profitable at 6 months. Either you are digging out from the high initial capital costs (like a restaurant) or you're actually having to build the thing you want to sell. Going from inception to profitability in 6 months would be, at least by my estimation, remarkable.
Building products and launching services takes time. If we want to encourage entrepreneurs, we should be focused on getting them over those initial hurdles.
I know tons of people who started their own businesses -it's got little to do with seed capital and everything to do with execution. They had it, and they blew it, through bad decions mostly.
For those grads, I suppose ycombinator and techstars suit them well. That's only a small part of the "Small Business" equation, however. There are cafe owners that need part-time help and need easy-access capital to help them over supply humps.
Not every inventor can get float money from crowdsourced places like kickstarter, either because their product is not "consumer-friendly" or because it's in a decidedly unsexy industry (like precision gauges, for example). And, while there are cool coworking or tool-borrowing libraries popping up, there are no cool "we'll work on your marketing, sales admin" places. Those take money. The SBA-for-all concept can help, I think.
Entrepreneurialism in the vast majority of this country, let alone the world, is not at all related to computers, the internet, cloud services, or any such hoo-hah.
We exist in a little tiny sphere in a little tiny corner of all that is small businesses.
The vast majority of entrepreneurialism that happens in the world has real costs and a need for real capital. Try running a corner store when you have no money to buy inventory, or pay rent on the space.
1and1 at the time was running a deal for 3 years free hosting. We made a site on there, put up AdSense, made enough money to buy a domain. Then made enough money to upgrade to paid shared hosting, and then dedicated hosting. It's still profitable today.
I don't think the US disdains education. They just don't like anything related to math or engineering.
Here's another idea that goes with your thought: Why don't employers stop asking for every cert and piece of experience under the sun? Whatever happened to on-the-job training?
This exists in IT but I'm sure it is the same elsewhere.
Hate the man or his policies (or both), but you can't deny President Obama's observation that training education is the real problem in the so-called "jobless recovery". America as it currently stands has a total, almost prideful disregard for education (public and higher) and technical training. NPR and WSJ report that there are two million open jobs in the US. That's right, up to 2,000,000 jobs are currently open in places like manufacturing in the US. The problem? No one knows how to do the things that fill those positions. Extra tragedy: There aren't enough schools that train in these "manufacturing 2.0" jobs and there aren't enough people that care to learn those skills.
So, the more these jobs languish unfilled, the more productivity slows, the less likely the economy flourishes, and the more the currently unemployed will stay that way unless they remediate or accept jobs beneath their experience/education/skill level.
My personal pet theory, however, is that we don't have a jobs problem, we have a Business-with-a-capital-b problem. Entrepreneurship is still seen by many in two extreme ways that I feel actually turn people off to it.
First, people see entrepreneurship as some mystical, romantic idea reserved only for the rich, connected, and intellectually elite. You can't be successful in business without being (or knowing) rich, come from the Ivy League, or just dumb luck. None of those are in large supply, thus the trappings of success go to those who either know better (like we on HN?) or actually fall into the aforementioned groups.
If not the former, then starting a business is an action plan of last resort ("well, I've been unemployed for awhile now, may as well start that new business I wanted to do while I was wasting away in my cubicle for 10 years polishing slide decks and pushing papers." It's seen almost derisively ("Oh, you're starting a business. Couldn't find a real job, eh?").
Pie-in-the-sky solution? $10 Billion every year for 10 years on prime-rate or lower, long-term, guaranteed SBA loans. Create a federal credit union for this purpose, run by participating states, backed by the NCUA, to manage small-biz eligibility determinations, disbursements and repayment. Eligible business borrowers must have a business plan with 5-year revenue projections as well as application that are analyzed and "scored" using a points system like they do in Canadian immigration applications.
Then, open medicare enrollment to small businesses (below 99 or fewer employees) and self-employed persons and their partners/dependents. Base price on current per-capita cost on a sliding-scale to ensure no deficits or taxpayer burden.
Then, tax credits for every domestic job created.
Full disclosure: I'm a liberal.