> I think grads are much more likely to possess these skills for sure, but I would guess that a large percentage of grads don't possess these skills either (at least in my experience).
I agree with this assessment. Even some top-tier CS programs seem to routinely graduate students with poor writing skills and sub-par cultural awareness.
I always recommend to interns that they take some writing-intensive courses, and possibly even pick up a minor in a writing-intensive field like English or Philosophy. And then not just take the course, but also use what they learned to write about things free time they way they (should be) writing code outside of their CS courses.
I think a lot of the strong disagreement in HN re: the value of college basically boils down to the huge amount of variety in the college experience.
Surprisingly, this variety has less to do with the quality of the institution and more to do with the quality/preparedness of the student.
A good litmus test for whether someone is wasting college might be to ask the question: what did you read/build/do this semester outside of your courses that used stuff you learned in your curses during the last year or so?
The less impressive the answer to that question, the more likely it is the student should maybe think about leaving college until they're ready to fully engage.
(Obviously, that litmus test only makes sense for full-time undergraduate students... for working students, it might be something more like "how are you using what you're learning in your day job".)
"Surprisingly, this variety has less to do with the quality of the institution and more to do with the quality/preparedness of the student."
Possibly. But there is an enormous range of institutional quality, from diverse, not necessarily elite or even large, schools to the ones existing almost entirely to absorb GI bill and scholarship funding and maybe provide job training.
The official explanation from the vendor is that this was an "anti-fraud security setting".
Can anyone familiar with CC processing provide insight on whether that's a reasonable explanation?
Regardless, a problem that requires a "software fix" from the vendor and manual visitations to each individual machine doesn't sound like a mere "setting"
Or a deliberate security measure. Embedded devices often use Harvard architecture, with separate memory for code and data, so not allowing remote updates makes remote code execution impossible.
I don't deal with PCI personally, so $0.02, but we're talking retail or unattended devices here.
I.e. low wage, minimal training, not technically proficient users with unsupervised physical access to the machine
A machine through which a large amount of cash (virtual or otherwise) flows.
The criteria of (a) being updatable by a semi-technical customer & (b) being secure against technically malicious or socially engineered ignorance attacks seem challenging to simultaneously satisfy.
allowing easy update over usb is its own thread model, lessened with only allowing signed updates. Like almost everything, it's likely these parking meters have terrible security design. the parking meter I use commonly is incredibly slow, every button push takes 1/2 a second to update the small lcd ui, I really wonder what it can be doing to be so slow. It's probably using multiple levels of interpolation to run a js program or something.
> 4. I think academia suffers from this as well. Mathematicians and physicists always go on talking about "simplicity" and "beauty" as if their job is to deduce the simplicity of the universe.
There is a lot of value in building concise and easy-to-understand explanations of extremely complex phenomenon. Be careful not to throw out Occam's razor with the bathwater.
I tend to agree that the pure mathematics and theoretical physics communities get obsessive. The hero-worship of theory builders in those sciences compounds matters. However, pure math and theoretic physics are the worst offenders by far in the natural science. Theorists in both fields are typically a small minority even within their own departments. The other natural sciences and the engineering disciplines are much less infected.
Some of the over-obsession with beauty in mathematics has its roots in the Church's heavy patronage of mathematics and natural philosophy, as well as religion's overall grip on nearly every intellectual mind prior to the 20th century.
Those studies say something more like "UW Madison/U Washington/UIUC really do give you as good an education as the ivies" and quite a bit less like "college doesn't matter/is just a signal".
I have read that study, but I'm actually digging for a separate study now. I remember it split SAT score, educational attainment, and average salary into separate variables. For people with high SAT scores, average salary 10 years post graduation was basically the same regardless of level of education.
Ivy League matters if you want to be in finance or white shoe consulting.
Everything else, you just work hard at your first job and nobody gives a shit. I went to a big SUNY school and was a mediocre student. We all made out fine.
Their familial controls don't make much sense to me.
An actuary's kid will have an easier time becoming an actuary. Same for lawyers and doctors. That doesn't mean that college is a non causal factor in those students lifetime earnings... Quite the opposite. You're not becoming any of those things without college.
The student went to college precisely because they understand viscerally and precisely how college sets them up for a life of higher than average earnings. And what they need to do at college to tap into that potential.
Similarly, I'm not sure I believe the claim that there's no obvious causal link between education and financial acumen.
The big difference seems to be "do you know WHY you are at college?" And in cases where the answer is yes, it's still a good choice.
> Their familial controls don't make much sense to me.
There's a lot of recent evidence that, all else being equal (controlling for educational attainment, test scores, and grades) parental income/social class has a huge impact on income.
That is, if you come from a lower social class, you can expect a lower income increase from college than someone coming from a higher social class.
There's significant policy implications here-- our long-standing goal of getting lower income kids to take college loans and go to college may not have a positive expected return for them.
no, that’s completely wrong. You are confusing averages and conditional probabilities. On average, those from higher classes may do better - that doesn’t mean that a kid from s lower social class should take that as guidance. It means we should try to erase or lessen differences of opportunities between classes.
Some of these differences are probably innate. A brain surgeon is likely smart and his kids are probably also smart. Some, but most are due to informational deficiencies and networking effects.
> no, that’s completely wrong. You are confusing averages and conditional probabilities. On average, those from higher classes may do better - that doesn’t mean that a kid from s lower social class should take that as guidance.
??? You're saying that someone should not consider the outcome distribution of people similarly situated to themselves when making a choice? Isn't that completely rejecting empiricism?
If, from a public policy standpoint, our effort has been to get to the poor to college to end poverty; and the educated poor do do better with education, but not nearly as well as their middle-class cohort; and the present-value of education is smaller than the present-value of their lifetime wage increases-- one has to question whether the policy is well informed.
If you're asserting that the picture is unduly distorted by those at the very highest spread of the income distribution-- you're right. But the effect is still when we look at median outcomes.
> Some of these differences are probably innate. A brain surgeon is likely smart and his kids are probably also smart.
Presumably we'd be able to measure this and control for this.
> Some, but most are due to informational deficiencies and networking effects.
Yes, and various kinds of cultural cues about class of upbringing that persist after education and act to limit opportunity.
“??? You're saying that someone should not consider the outcome distribution of people similarly situated to themselves when making a choice? Isn't that completely rejecting empiricism?“
No, what I’m saying is presence of a statistical pattern in a whole population is not evidence that we shouldn’t make policy to change it. Statistically, those who live in Miami are more tan than those who live in Wisconsin, on average. But if you expose a Wisconsin resident to the same amount of sun, on average they will be just as tan.
??? We're comparing the income difference (and ratio) between (poor background + college education) and (poor background + no college education) to the income difference between (non-poor background + college education) and (non-poor background + no college education).
In your example, you'd expect the Wisconsin guy to increase in tan more when you put him in the Bahamas and give him a dose of sun than the guy who started out in Miami and was given an equivalent further dose of sun.
But we've measured the opposite-- the guy in Wisconsin (poor background) does get more tan, but doesn't increase in tan (increase in income) nearly as much as the guy who started in Miami (non-poor backgrounds).
No, because we haven’t done nearly enough for the poor guy. It’s not the case that we’ve done everything possible for the poor and they still didn’t improve much. That’s false.
We're measuring the effect of one thing-- getting a poor person to college-- composed with all the other interventions that are spread through the population.
We measure the value of this-- getting to college-- as very small and even possibly negative.
We also measure interventions and their values / impacts on earnings much higher.
Going "la la la but college would be much better and itself a win if we did 50 other supportive things" is all great, but it's fundamentally handwaving in the absence of evidence.
No, we don’t measure this. The study in question tries to make college wage premium go away using questionable control variables. Sure, some skilled trades can make more money than liberal arts grads. But very few people want to be plumbers or work on an oil rig and for good reason.
Even in development. In fact, probably especially in development!
I've done a lot of programming where my productivity was input-constrained, so I know that that such jobs do exist.
I much prefer jobs where my productivity is idea-constrained. The final code tends to be a lot more interesting, the process of creating it a lot more joyful, and the final software artifact a lot more useful.
As a bonus, I tend to be paid at least an order of magnitude more for idea-constrained code.
I don't think that keyboard only coding is even faster, I can beat top competitive programmers on speed and I use mainly the mouse to navigate and select code. It is possible keyboarders could be faster than me if we have to write huge amounts of boilerplate code, like 1 line of code a second, but otherwise using a mouse shouldn't be a disadvantage.
Tip for more productive mousing: Disable "mouse acceleration" or "enhance pointer precision", it makes it harder for your body to adapt to the mouse. I can move it to where I look at the screen in an instant with almost no adjustment needed at the end since when that if off world space and screen space aligns. Of course I learned that skill to select and order units quickly in RTS games, but it works just as well for selecting and manipulating code.
What kind of code are you writing that requires or benefits from a mouse? For selecting code I can imagine it helps. A touchscreen is just as good. But for writing it?
I haven't used a mouse to drive coding since a C++ course in high school almost 20 years ago. The only thing I use it for is selecting and copying code.
For navigating and writing code it's all emacs, tmux, terminals and unix tools.
A touchscreen is a nightmare for manipulating small text.
> For navigating and writing code it's all emacs, tmux, terminals and unix tools.
Well, if you never leave emacs/vim and related workflows, you never know anything else.
For writing code, yes, keyboard is best. For navigating, debugging and other things a TUI does not cut it. And I spend a lot more time reading and thinking about code than actually writing it.
A particular example that stands out in the Linux world is GDB's CLI interface. It sucks. Its TUI is better, but still bad compared to a good GUI.
> navigating, debugging and other things a TUI does not cut it. And I spend a lot more time reading and thinking about code than actually writing it.
as an emacs user, I find it extremely painful watching my colleagues clicking around in eclipse to navigate the code base[1]. It feels just so inefficient and slow.
[1] I assume eclipse actually has keyboard shortcuts, but they do not seem to be used by my eclipse-using colleagues.
Slow? It is definitely faster to use a mouse to click a word in a text than use the keyboard to get to it. (I have no idea about how Eclipse does it, though).
Otherwise we would be playing RTS games with the keyboard. (I am a competitive RTS player, so I can almost instantly hit any point in the screen, which helps; a good mouse also helps a lot).
> For navigating, debugging and other things a TUI does not cut it. And I spend a lot more time reading and thinking about code than actually writing it.
Pure TUI is not optimal, but it still beats available mouse-based interface. At the very least, moving around the code is much faster with incremental search than with scrolling and spotting.
I'm still waiting for a code reading program that supports drawing on top of the code and that would otherwise behave like an infinite desk with (searchable, linkable, annotateable) code printouts on it.
I use it all the time to cut, paste, copy, find and replace selection, indent or dedent specific lines. I can get by just fine using for example vim, but I am much faster with a mouse based interface since mouse based selection is much faster and more flexible. Sure keyboards have some shortcuts for specific kinds of selections, but with a mouse I can select exactly what I want in a fraction of a second.
The only real advantage to a keyboard only interface is the ability to automate steps, but I feel if you feel a need to automate your code writing then it would be better to refactor the code to require less boilerplate.
At least an order of magnitude? That's interesting, considering that even mediocre code jockey can make $100k a year, that must mean you make at least a million a year?
In the software world? Not sure, I mostly do niche environmental consulting, engineering, modeling, etc. and have a reputation for solving weird problems for people in a variety of industries.
Typically the lucrative work I'm talking about happens when I just negotiate a flat fee and it doesn't take me that long. Companies often like that because it limits their risk compared to my hourly rate.
But honestly most consulting in most fields should have this type of negotiating opportunity. As long as it's not a field with some sort of existing convention of hiring lots of "independent contractors" that probably should be employees.
As for time in... It takes a lot for maybe a year or so to get enough reputation that you aren't hustling for clients. But now they call me and I decide whether or not I can take them. I get a lot of last minute rush gigs which are usually the best money if I want to take them. Often I don't, and I throw out a "fuck you go away" number and then they jump at it anyway.
Most students in CS are hired prior to graduation. On both sides the savings of skipping that last semester are marginal, and on the student side there's a nontrivial opportunity cost. 6 months of: studying whatever problem you want with the background you need to maybe solve it, networking, building code/ideas you own, socializing with a purpose (courting) or for fun, or, if you're smart, a bit of all 3.
There's a discrete jump in the career value of the education between not quite finishing a degree and graduating. It's not because there's some super important final semester that's worth much more than any of the previous ones. It's no doubt because it signals some quality like conscientiousness, or perhaps is just easier for an employer to evaluate the meaning of.
> with four years of college time, you can get two career educations with real life industry experience
...depending on both the student and the career.
Many tech jobs require not much more than literacy, 6th grade algebra, and a tiny bit of grit. Most smart middle schoolers could make mid five figures slinging PHP part time. I did in early high school, and I'm not particularly smart or hard working.
But there are many jobs, even in relatively easy fields like programming, where nonnegative productivity requires years of practice.
I couldn't disagree more. College teaches people to learn independently, to communicate their problems and their progress effectively, to write emails professionally, to manage their time and deal with more work than can be handled, to mentor more junior people, etc. Sure, someone straight from high school could have some of these skills, but doing well at a university practically guarantees it.
I agree with this assessment. Even some top-tier CS programs seem to routinely graduate students with poor writing skills and sub-par cultural awareness.
I always recommend to interns that they take some writing-intensive courses, and possibly even pick up a minor in a writing-intensive field like English or Philosophy. And then not just take the course, but also use what they learned to write about things free time they way they (should be) writing code outside of their CS courses.
I think a lot of the strong disagreement in HN re: the value of college basically boils down to the huge amount of variety in the college experience.
Surprisingly, this variety has less to do with the quality of the institution and more to do with the quality/preparedness of the student.
A good litmus test for whether someone is wasting college might be to ask the question: what did you read/build/do this semester outside of your courses that used stuff you learned in your curses during the last year or so?
The less impressive the answer to that question, the more likely it is the student should maybe think about leaving college until they're ready to fully engage.
(Obviously, that litmus test only makes sense for full-time undergraduate students... for working students, it might be something more like "how are you using what you're learning in your day job".)