As a developer, there is too much out there to master everything. Don’t even try. Learn how you work best as a developer, build a toolset that fits you, and don’t try to have all the answers. Focus on learning how to find the answers quickly.
Source: This Picture Will Change the Way You Learn to Code – Saul Costa – Medium
When you’re a cryptographer, telling your preteen kids what you do isn’t easy.
“While suitable for kids eight and older, PocketBlock is by no means restricted to kids. Troutman said it’s also suitable for professional developers who want to deepen their understanding of the way cryptographic algorithms work, given that they’re often implementing them.”
Source: Meet PocketBlock, the crypto engineering game for kids of all ages
I just read this great article in the Atlantic.
80 MILLION Americans have an IQ of 90 or below. What is your first gut reaction about those people when you hear that?
Throughout human history, the most valuable substance on Earth has been… the human brain. Even the dimmest of humans can be taught to do tasks that we still have trouble getting machines to do.
But that is changing rapidly. And just like jobs that require “muscle” (agriculture, manufacturing) have mostly disappeared, jobs that require structured thought (finance, law) are starting to disappear as well.
So that piece of wetware in your skull is going to be scrutinized further and further, as its economic value plummets and your worth as a cog in the GDP falls with it.
Source: The War on Stupid People
We must recognize that computer science is fundamental. Every student in the United States should learn about algorithms, how the Internet works or how to make an app. But more important, computer science teaches kids to be problem solvers and innovators. Helping students develop these skills will benefit them in every subject, in the classroom and beyond.
Source: Computer science is the key to America’s skills crisis | TechCrunch
Evidence is ample that the very claim of a STEM shortage in the U.S. is phony. Salzman noted that “overall, our colleges and universities graduate twice the number of STEM graduates as find a job each year.” The mismatch is especially stark in the biomedical field. There, according to a 2014 paper by experts from UC San Francisco, Harvard and Princeton, “the training pipeline produces more scientists than relevant positions in academia, government, and the private sector are capable of absorbing.”
As a result, “a growing number of PhDs are in jobs that do not take advantage of the taxpayers’ investment in their lengthy education.” As we reported last year, the same high-tech corporations that poormouth their ability to find skilled workers simultaneously lay them off by the thousands.
High-tech firms in the U.S. cut nearly 80,000 employees last year, according to the job placement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. That included 47,000 announced layoffs from Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Unisys and Microsoft. (The former CEO of the latter, Steve Ballmer, is also a co-chair of the Partnership for a New American Economy.)
The reality of the H-1B program is that it fails to serve as a conduit for the skilled and virtuous immigrant known for what Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., described as “the entrepreneurial spirit, the determination to make a go of it.”
Specifically, for business and other liberal-arts majors, the prestige of the school has a major impact on future earnings expectations. But for fields like science, technology, education and math, it largely doesn’t matter whether students go to a prestigious, expensive school or a low-priced one—expected earnings turn out the same. So, families may be wasting money by chasing an expensive diploma in those fields.
Source: Do Elite Colleges Lead to Higher Salaries? Only for Some Professions
“For a long time we wondered why more people didn’t major in computer science,” Aiken reflects. “Everyone in the field believed it was the future and that [it] represented an important way of thinking. Now the world believes us, and we have an overwhelming number of students.”
