OT: College is a rip off

[Peter]

Yes he did. He said "it's your own fault".

[Peter]

You are either ignorant of facts or deliberately distorting and falsifying them. Barry did not raise himself out of the gutter of Kenya. He was the child of parents who met in college, in Hawaii. His father who was born in Kenya, returned there after his parents divorced, when Barry was 3. From ages 6-10 he attended local schools in Jakarta, Indonesia. He moved back to Hawaii, lived with his maternal grandparents, and attended a private college prep school. Those are the facts. He NEVER lived in the gutters of Kenya and never raised himself. He had very close relationships with a loving and nurturing mother and maternal grandparents. He was in Kenya for the first time in his life in 1988, when he was 27 years old, to visit his paternal relatives for the first time.

Those are the facts. You may not like him or his politics but that does not justify claiming an entirely false biography for him.

[Peter]

...if they are lucky enough not to suffer permanent brain damage from childhood malnutrition, chronic brainwashing by their peers and seniors who convince them they are losers for life, and/or from multiple concussions from beatings and fights. There's a lot of luck involved here, not only motivation. Medical science still does not understand why some motivated youngsters seem to be able to overcome severe physical and/or environmental insults but others don't. The epidemiology is strongly against overcoming really bad circumstances. Only a small percentage manage to escape their background.

How do you propose to encourage diligence in the typical slum dwelling kid? Apparently further punishing them with deprivation doesn't work, and after a certain age (early to mid-teenage), most will not respond to the best efforts to help them.

[Peter]

And can you cite an authoritative reference for that opinion? I suspect that the majority of the kids that most need parenting reside in a non-traditional home. Most of the time it is father who is missing. Sometimes both parents are missing and the kid is raised by grandparents or aunts. I think that the number of "bad" kids who have grown up in comfortable middle class settings with both parents living under the same roof but completely neglecting their parental role is dwarfed by the number of "bad" kids who had to grow up in horribly dysfunctional homes through absolutely no fault of their own.

[Han]

Peter wrote in news:j7msmv$hlb$ [e-mail]:

It's just my opinion and hearsay: Credentials: 3 of my 4 grandchildren are of schoolgoing age (between 5 and 15 now). My daughter and my SIL are both high school teachers (physics and math).

I agree that certainly in the less advantaged school districts of my daughter & SIL, the single parent family with LOTS of problems is the norm, but that doesn't exclude the neglacting by other families.

[Han]

Han wrote in news:Xns9F837CAFBC696ikkezelf@

207.246.207.168:

grandchildren

(In the latter paragraph I forgot to add that the neglect is often thru no fault of the parents since they are too busy providing basics, certainly in this economy)

[krw]

No, it wouldn't make sense.

[krw]

Better. ;-)

[notbob]

Anal:

2 = 0b10

nb

[Steve B]

Well, Peter. Let's be realistic here. Aren't most of the things that happen to people in their lives their own fault?

Steve

[Steve B]

That is not necessary. It has already been done by Barry himself as well as others.

Steve

[HeyBub]

I agree. In almost every endeavor, you'll have to interact with someone who a) Is your boss (one way or another) and b) Has no idea what you're talking about.

You have to explain it to them in terms they can grasp.

That's where a liberal education comes in. If you both have that as a common ground, it makes the illustration easier.

For example, many's the time I've started an explanation with "Consider the Battle of Agincourt and Henry's problem caused by bad clams..."

[RicodJour]

As much as knowing the odds in Vegas guarantees a winning bet. People don't exist in a vacuum...though that would explain a lot of your thinking. :)~

R

[gfretwell]

If you ever worked with binary, 0 would be no and 1 would be yes. Why waste a bit?

[krw]

I've "worked with binary" for over 40 years (fifty if you include grade school). "01" is not, in any way, a standard representation for two (decimal). Do you represent (decimal) 10 by using the symbol '9'? Why not? '10' wastes a digit'.

[Steve B]

"Educated beyond their capacity." -Enos Guillory-

[Robert Green]

Garbage in, diarrhea out. (-:

That's not an exampke I would have used but it my very brief teaching career I was able to explain concepts like multi-dimensional arrays to students by telling them they were already quite familiar with the concept. They refused to believe me (because the notation was unfamilar to them) until I pointed out that looking up anything in the TV guide was one such example of data arrayed in multiple dimensions. In this case by date, time and channel.

One client, with a master's degree in library science, insisted that instead of using "too many" separate fields for all the data, it should be designed with one big field for all the data that represented a book. She was familiar with one of the commercial personal database software packages of the time (can't recall its name) that did just that. She just didn't get that such a system would not work for a library with tens of thousands of technical reference books and periodicals that had return record sets that matched multiple conditions. Lots of people were just thrown a computer back then and left to fend for themselves or were taught a few courses by people that weren't very far ahead of them, knowledge-wise.

Systems design often included a lot of client education - or re-education in many cases because everything they thought they knew was wrong. Much of that mis-education consisted of using spreadsheets to process data that was far better manipulated with database programs. IMHO, it was easier to convert paper systems to a database program than it was to convert spreadsheets with hundreds of embedded macros.

-- Bobby G.

[Vic Smith]

I was a systems analyst when I retired. Insurance. Always preferred support and enhancement. Didn't like new development hours and deadlines. But I had to do some of it. Interesting thread. I'll only make a few observations from my experience. Mainly that generalizations often don't hold much water. Liberal arts and being a gearhead aren't mutually exclusive. A gearhead with absolutely no arts background can get along and communicate well with users. (Users are now called "clients.) There are remedies to shelter all when that's not true. Speaking of DB's, I was mightily impressed by Deja News, now Google. Being a veteran of VSAM, then IMS, then DB2, both batch and real time, when I went to Deja News and got an instant return, over miles of wire, from what must be hundreds of millions ok keys, I was jealous. Never did find out the platform of their DB, but man, it's slick. Wish I could say I was visionary in seeing the potential of the internet, but I was all bound up in different processing. I pooh-poohed Windows and MS too, as a fad. So don't pay any attention to what I say.

--Vic

[Robert Green]

I'm just the reverse. I got the biggest kick out of creating something from scratch.

I hope I made it clear that in my case, having a psych minor background with lots of sociology helped me greatly in getting the requirements analysis done but it's not a mandatory requirement. There was often great disagreement about what the final system should look like which required mediation skills to solve. Lots of good analysts have these qualities even without formal training. Coming from a large family teaches people a lot about group dynamics. (-:

I was kind of miffed when my bosses decided all the analysts had to take an interviewing course when I had four years of journalism classes under my belt and had interviewed perhaps thousands of people. They wanted me to take the course during a critical implementation phase of a huge new system. I earned the wrath of more than one exec when I said: "If what they're teaching is has merit for me, they should be able to test my skills, determine that I wasn't going to learn anything new and excused me." The idea, it seemed, was to push everyone through the same damn courses regardless of whether they added value or not.

Taking me away from a system that was just being rolled out to rehash old news was just stupid. They finally said "if we let you skip out, then everyone's going to be asking to do the same." My reply that "if they can pass a demonstrating that they already knew the stuff, the SHOULD be excused. It's inefficient to waste people's time like that." The could not have cared less.

Back then there was a push to call them "customers" which I always thought made us sound like McDonald's instead of professional consulting organization.

I recall designing a system for a consortium of law firms involved in a chip dumping case brought by TI in 1985 against all the major PacRim RAM makers. I used four AT clones and four XT's to search a forty thousand document database. Searches in dBaseII often had to run overnight. (-: When I see Google say 2,034,049 records found after a three second search, I am still mightily impressed.

I helped sysop a 5,000 member BBS system running on an ATT 6300 and a bunch of Alloy slave cards. The guy who ran it was the head of computing for NIH. I learned an enormous amount just watching him work - he was very meticulous but was one of those super shy guys who couldn't look at people when talking to them. We even set up relays so that other user groups could access our message base without incurring long distance phone calls. Our user group at one time had three $100K CD's we were so wealthy. That much money turned out to be a curse. We moved the BBS out of NIH where they had been providing free phone lines, electricity and space and rented a big space that eventually sucked out every dime of that $300K and then some. Reminds me of the what just happened with the real estate boom!

After you hoodwinked me with your "a day in the life of a paranoid gun nut" I *always* read your posts with a little more suspicion. (-:

I was always partial to DOS because no-nothing programmers couldn't fake their way around the way the could with a GUI. We called them pluggers because they would copy blocks of code from somewhere and "plug" them into their own programs as their own work - sometimes forgetting to delete the comments that identified where they stole the code from!

In those days, I had my pick of jobs because so many companies where desperate to automate paper systems. There's nothing to compare to learning a new area of expertise by building a system. The most interesting thing I did back then was to automate a system for a company that provided plants to office buildings. Far more complex than you might imagine and it was designed so that people with very little training could use it. I was able to offer them features and enhancements they never even dreamed of once I understood the finer points of the business.

Did a few specialized restaurant systems that used hygrometers and various other checks to make sure the bartenders weren't watering down the liquor or giving away free drinks. Ironically, when the owners fired a bartender that was giving away the odd freebie here and there, their bar profits dropped substantially. Those freebies apparently made customers feel special (psychology here again - the power of intermittent reinforcement) and as a result they came in more often and spent more money.

I really liked building systems because unlike a lot of other jobs where I was rated at the whim of some boss who didn't really know what he was doing, a program that worked well spoke for itself. Journalism was interesting but building systems gave me a much greater sense of achievement. It also drew on almost every skill I had.

I could spent sixteen hours at a clip when I was on a roll sitting in front of a monitor fine-tuning the system and refining the look and feel or running down a bug. That's where the human factors engineering course I took played a significant role. I am amazed at programs (and websites) that create complete sensory overload by having so damn many choices on the screen that no one could possibly keep track of them. Those were the days. In one system I added what turned out to be a very popular "Happy Birthday" login message when employees logged in on their birthdays. Little things like that had a big payoff in limiting gripes about system bugs. (-:

-- Bobby G.

[Vic Smith]

On Thu, 20 Oct 2011 00:58:12 -0400, "Robert Green" wrote:

Right. And I got a kick out redesigning systems after they were in the real world for a while, or when new needs arose. Somewhat the same work, but I could always manage it and set the delivery dates.

Never took psych that I recall. Double Lit and Info Systems major. Needed a 4 hour PL/I course to graduate, and never went back for it after I started working my first IT job. Never regretted that either. Numerous times I told body shops to take "degree" off the resume they worked up for me, because it wasn't true. They did, and I never lacked for work. Different world today. I dealt with recalcitrant customers/clients by accusing them of going Raskolnikov on me. If they were indecisive I'd invoke Hamlet. Then I'd explain the tech facts. I look pretty rough, and they probably thought I was crazy. Worked with managers too. Of course I can be charming when that's called for.

One company I worked for required IT staff to take a full-day course called "Put It in Writing." I had the same feeling as you, that it was a waste of time. But despite my prejudice, what with me being an "A+" essay writer all through school, and being offered sponsorship to the writer's workshop at Iowa in Ames, it turned out very useful. Kept my customers and managers from going nuts reading War and Peace memos form me, and simplified my writing in general.

snip

That's somewhat related to what somebody said here about interviewing people and getting to the "real" gearheads. And why I mentioned that generalizations are dangerous. I worked my first IT job in a Roscoe shop. All command line. My first interview after that job was by a team of 2 gearheads. I know that because I knew them later as a contractor and employee of the company. Because of comments one of them made about Roscoe being simpler than ISPF - I could tell he had never used it - I strongly suspect the reason I didn't get that job was because I hadn't been exposed to ISPF, a much easier to use menu-driven interface. Anyway, a case of gearheads interviewing a gearhead and getting it all wrong due to plain ignorance. I interviewed many people later, and the tech part is the easiest piece. Detecting the odd mass murderer is the difficult part.

snip

I have a different take on that. Got plenty of work satisfaction keeping everybody happy by eliminating bugs and system abends. The operators loved me because when I came aboard, their efforts on the phone and at restarting jobs decreased to almost nothing except hardware errors. Customers' love for me was transitory on that score, but passionate enough for the enhancements I regularly delivered. But I never felt very satisfied after the initial 10 years or so. Most IT systems are short-lived. I saw the demise of almost every system I ever worked on. I was a grunt at the steel mills 43 years ago. Much of that steel still exists. About 40 years ago I heat treated, torch cut, formed and sheared thousands of tons of steel making bulldozers at IH. Enough of them are still in use. Wish I had worked at Cat (-: Same when I was wrenching or running packaging machines. Pallets of stock out the door, for sale. Every day then when I finished work I was physically tired but still strong. Mentally, I wasn't tired at all. And always happy. I knew I had produced tangible goods each and every day. I talked about this with an senior IT guy many years ago. He agreed with me, and talked about what he saw when ever he visited his home town in Ohio. Many buildings his dad had laid brick to build. He had nothing like that resulting from of his career. Now I'm not saying I should have been a bricklayer. Don't want to get too metaphysical about work "legacy." But it exists for sure. Or it doesn't exist.

Gawd!

--Vic