Fwd: Re: Don't Panic - Not All Jobs Are Headed Overseas

Tue Mar 2 18:01:45 PST 2004

NNTP-Posting-Date: Sat, 21 Feb 2004 17:29:41 -0600
Subject: Re: Don't Panic - Not All Jobs Are Headed Overseas
Date: Sat, 21 Feb 2004 15:29:41 -0800
From: Tim May <timcmay at removethis.got.net>
Newsgroups: misc.survivalism
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In article <1e4e3692.0402211504.1db2b7ea at posting.google.com>, William
<billybeeper at juno.com> wrote:

halcitron at aol.comhatespam (Halcitron) wrote in message
news:<20040219051351.19387.00001980 at mb-m26.aol.com>...
Don't Panic - Not All Jobs Are Headed Overseas

Any keyboard job can be shipped overseas, including engineering (CAD),
XRAY and MRI analysis/interpretation.

Unless they have robotic heavy equipment, bulldozer and crane
operators may still have a future.

The rest will be burger flippers and Walmart greeters.

Here's an article I sent off this morning to a mailing list made up of
some of the brightest programmers I know. A few names have been
replaced with pseudonyms, for their protection:

--begin forwarded article--

Most of these comments all support the basic point: programming is not
an easy, or "blue collar," job, and attempts to teach programming to
folks who really are better-suited to be welders or auto mechanics or
seamstresses (for the PC, "sewpersons") are probably doomed. Just
yesterday there was a news item (Yahoo) about the financial collapse of
a bunch of "technical schools" which purported to teach their students
how to get high-paying jobs in the burgeoning field of Web page
development!! (Not too surprisingly, most of the students didn't get
interesting or well-paying jobs, and this was only partly because of
the dot bombs.)

Larry's point: "Before you get them to university, stuff them with
years of doing
geometric proofs.  Works wonders." goes to the heart of the issue. (I
loved geometry, did very well in it, and the lessons I learned from it
I use every day. One of my earliest exposures to programming was c.
1967 when my _excellent_ 10th grade geometry teacher told us about how
a computer had discovered a brand-new proof of triangle similarity,
using a truly "out of the box" approach...I didn't catch the name then,
but I later surmised he was talking about one of David Gelernter's
geometry theorem-provers, which were developed in the early 1960s.)

My strong belief is that poor students make poor programmers. (Poor
students in the sense of ability to learn, not the grades they get...I
know a bunch of very smart programmers, many of them presenting code
this weekend at CodeCon in San Francisco, who never went to college.
Some dropped out of high school. But they were still quick learners,
i.e., good students.)

Good programmers really are mathematicians of a sort. Understanding
logic and how to think are crucial stages (the point John Stenhart made
about "I've been volunteering to teach "computer science" in my local
high school. The course that I've designed is along the lines of
"Learning to think using computers as an excuse."  It's been a real
adventure because, at least where I live, kids don't learn how to think
in school.")

If students don't know even how to frame a simple argument, how to
consider alternatives, how to refute or falsify assumptions, it's
pretty hopeless to try to train them to be Java or PHP programmers.
Maybe doing cookie-cutter Web pages, but nothing very substantial and
nothing with much of a future. (As the many "Webmasters" at companies
discovered in the late 90s, when Web page creation tools got more
sophisticated; turned out that memorizing a bunch of HTML wasn't
needed.)

Overheard many times at the local malls:

"Like, you know, and then she goes "Huh?", and then I go "Way!", and it
was, like, weird!. And then I was like _so_..."

This doesn't translate well into computerese. Not the words, and
especially not the stream-of-consciousness mental process. (I read an
analysis of this kind of valspeak, and its isomorphic ghettospeak
versions, with the conclusion that many of today's kids are "replaying
movies in their head," hence the blow-by-blow recitation of what people
said, in fragmentary form. Logic, summaries, induction, deduction, and
analysis are mostly absent from their speech.

I have virtually no hope for 95% of today's high school graduates in
terms of their involvement in technology. And while exporting
programming to India isn't the full solution, it's a start: at least
their high school graduates are for the most part solidly trained in
the things a programmer needs--and not just math and logic: also
rhetoric, grammar, understanding the parts of speech, etc., are all
variants of the formalist, logical approach.

(I've talked to a lot of those at Intel who are rapidly moving software
and even design jobs to India and China. My old boss, Craig Barrett,
has been warning of these problems for _years_. Many high schools would
rather be babysitters for gang bangers and teach fluffy stuff about
lesbian sex  and "tolerance" than teach the "logic and rhetoric" core.
Which means a lot of programming and design jobs are going to be moving
out of the U.S.)

For the truly gifted, which I think nearly all Programmer's Conference
attendees are, things should be bright, especially with powerful tool,
languages, and machines leveraging the innate capabilities. But for
"Joe Average programmer," things don't look so bright. And the
prospects for teaching those who can't think, in Jon's analysis, the
prospects are grim.

(The community colleges are mostly a total joke. I see the syllabi (in
plain speak, the courses) from my local JCs, notably Cabrillo College
and UFO (University of Fort Ord, aka Cal State Monterey Bay) and they
are travesties. The computer courses are crammed with the "trade
school" junk about learning to be a Certified Microsoft Windows
Technician. Some of these students may in fact get jobs helping local
businesses figure out how to insert the CD-ROM into their PCs, but
mostly the training is scut work, almost guaranteed to be obsolete in a
few years when the Next Big Thing appears...then I guess they go back
for night school retraining in "How to be a Certified Microsoft
Longhorn Security Installer.")

As a welfare state nation, we are reaping what we have sown. The
dumbing-down of education has been successful.

It's going to be interesting to see where we are in 20 years, when
today's illiterates are the tax-paying core earners who are expected to
pay for the retirement of the largest generation in American history,
the Boomers.

--Tim May

-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'