Posted on 02/19/2015 10:38:35 AM PST by Impala64ssa
Howard Dean has been under fire after criticizing Wisconsin Governor and potential 2016 presidential candidate Scott Walker for never getting a college degree. He dropped out of college during his senior year to get a job for the Red Cross. Walker went on' The Kelly File' to dispute Dean's claims that he is 'unknowledgeable'.
The GOP governor wasn't the only person fighting back against the comments from a man most famous for screaming himself out of the Democratic Primary. Mike Rowe took to his Facebook page to address the issue in a great post about education in America and what it has become.
The former host of 'Dirty Jobs' starts off by recounting how he got his first job at QVC, despite 'no qualifications to speak of'. He told how he was asked to sell a #2 pencil for 8 minutes, which is no easy task. Once hired, he was tasked with selling random products during the graveyard shift, which he called 'a crucible of confusion and ambiguity, and in hindsight, the best training I ever had.'
After explaining his on the job training he ripped the skill gap and debt our current college system has created:
I think a trillion dollars of student loans and a massive skills gap are precisely what happens to a society that actively promotes one form of education as the best course for the most people. I think the stigmas and stereotypes that keep so many people from pursuing a truly useful skill, begin with the mistaken belief that a four-year degree is somehow superior to all other forms of learning. And I think that making elected office contingent on a college degree is maybe the worst idea I've ever heard.
Check out his full post below:
(Excerpt) Read more at 970wfla.com ...
So Wacky Howie graduated from Yeshiva...I would never have guessed that one.
Just the same in the world of IT.
A degree helps IT people about as much as they do for an auto mechanic. Useless.
As a matter of fact, during my experience working in IT, the more “educated” people I’ve worked with have been, the more useless they tend to be. (generally speaking)
I sit across from a guy that has a Bachelors in Mechanical and Industrial design and a Master of Science in the same and he didn’t know the difference between an internal and an external tooth lock washer.
Very true.
I’ve had people with advanced computer science degrees works for me. Then I have what I call mutts, people with no degrees at all. I’ll take the mutts almost 100% of the time. The funny thing is that big companies won’t hire these guys who usually can do twice the work in half the time without making one error.
This brings up the subject of coders that are odd. I have had a few of those, one guy never seemed to consume anything but Mountain Dew. Another was a little bitty guy that was very diabetic and would eat enough for 2 guys at lunch and never gain a pound. Then there were the guys that thought they were telepathic. The list goes on.
I heard, however, that there was so much squabbling over the use of the White House tennis court that Carter personally took over that duty. He was micromanagement at its worst.
The Iran hostage rescue disaster was a more deadly result of Carter's micromanagement. He wanted the operation scaled down and backup/redundancy plans eliminated so as not to get the Iranians overly upset.
We came within a hair's breath of a repeat on the Bin Laden operation because BO had the same mindset.
Yeah, I worked with a guy with a Masters in Computer Science, and he didn’t know how to map a network drive, or install an operating system.
That’s GROUND LEVEL type stuff.
He actually didn’t seem to know or do anything. He just had a nice job title, kept an office occupied, and had everyone else do everything for him. Much of the time he didn’t even really know what he was asking for. He got paid more than us too....
Good on you. You can always go back to college when the kids are grown, if you want to. Whereas the late baby seekers may be out of luck on having late babies.
I did the opposite of you— got my degree, worked, married in my 30s and then wanted my family. I got two kids before my body said my time expired. Some of our friends were not so lucky. Some never found a spouse when they looked around in their 30s, and some found one, but had fertility problems. Some of them adopted children, in harrowing experiences, foreign and domestic.
I hope there will always be a mix of young parents and older parents. One size does not fit all.
I gotta say, nearly everyone I’ve worked with, especially the younger people with high level degrees have been morons. I believe the education systems have been so dumbed down and polluted by Leftism, degrees are no longer a measure of any proficiency or intelligence.
Just about ANY ‘warm body’ that can write big checks or mire themselves in debt for years can get a degree these days(NOT like it used to be). It doesn’t matter that you’re as dumb as a box of rocks, with not enough common sense to scratch your ass if it itches.
Certain assumptions are made about people with Masters/PhD’s - gets them jobs they may not deserve.
I actually warn people about getting a PhD if they intend to work on production projects in private industry (not research), they’ll be over-qualified for many (still good) jobs. A Masters degree is the right balance imo.
I interviewed a CompSci PhD last month, huge let down. He had good knowledge on some esoteric aspect of software but was completely unqualified for anything we needed...this has happened a number of times.
His brother is a great guy as well.
I’ve run into a few and they were IT management.
One was a paper MCSE in a state agency. He told me in not so many words since I didn’t go to USC or Clemson and carry an MCSE to boot never bother applying even for the entry level jobs in the agency’s MIS department.
I later left, went the contractor route, and finally worked into a job that paid as well as his minions make and I am a couple of community college product.
>>The more you attack it, the stronger it becomes.<<
Isn’t there a comic book character or a character in fiction that grows more powerful the more ammo it’s hit by? I seem to recall that, but haven’t found anything with a search engine....except online gaming hits.....
“I gotta say”, I couldn’t agree and disagree with you more. Let me explain myself. I have a Master of Science in
Computer Science. I studied formal language theory, automata theory, information theory, operating system theory, database theory and queuing theory. I took as many formal math classes as an Engineer and theoretical math classes like Discrete Mathematics and I studied formal algorithms and Data Structures from classic textbooks like Knuths “The Art of Computer Programming” Vol s. 1 - 4. and I studied “Software Engineering”
I didn’t memorize material to obtain a Microsoft certified whatever certificate whose validity only lasts through Bill Gates next round of planned obsolescence. I studied the theoretical and mathematical and electrical foundations of computing. I did not want nor did I desire just a job. I wanted knowledge first and a career second. I had a burning desire to learn and understand how computers work in detail.
I read and studied the published articles and text books of people like
Donald Knuth,
Jeff Ullman,
Edsger W. Dijkstra,
Nicklaus Wirth,
Alfred Aho,
Gerald Sussman,
Ronald Graham,
Alan Turing,
Peter Naur,
John Hopcraft,
Bjarne Stroustrup,
Howard Aiken,
John Von Neumann,
Jon Mauchly,
Brian Kernighan,
Ken Thompson,
Dennis Ritchie,
Robert Pike,
Richard Stallman,
Linus Torvalds,
John McCarthy, and
Robert Metcalfe
and many others. Use google to search each of their names and read their biographies. With few exceptions there is not
a college drop out among them.
I have read Journals like the JACM and JASIS regularly since 1981.
This “study” has been over my entire adult life. My MS degree was from a second tier College. Not Stanford, not Cornell, not MIT, and not Berkeley and it only gave me a foundation from which I might begin to some day comprehend the absolute god given genius and talent of the true creators of the turnkey sweat shop industry of today that you call Information Technology or “IT”. My professors where colleagues of and in one instance the room mate of one of the men listed above. I was taught by the classmates and students of some of the men listed above who didn’t get tenure at their Alma mater.
In my day, most of the stuff that is taken for granted today had not even been invented yet. Unlike Algore, I studied under and helped the people who actually did invent the internet.I had the distinct privilege of
studying a field of academic and scientific and theoretical discovery in its relative infancy. I worked with the MIT X11 windowing software, the beta release, in college which was one of the first tools for research in “Human Computer Interaction” which was a highly pursued and prized area of “concentration” for CS majors which was also known by graduate students in those days as “The Idiot Interface”. Today it’s called a GUI . We had to choose 3 areas of concentration for an MS degree.
One of the first computers I had the privilege of “playing” with was one of the first 100 computers on DARPA net. It also had access to CSnet, BITnet and UUNET and USENET. They are parent networks or predecessors that eventually evolved into the internet.
Now I will discuss areas where I kind of agree with you but for a totally different reason than you expect.
In your post you said,
“I gotta say, nearly everyone I’ve worked with, especially the younger people with high level degrees have been morons. I believe the education systems have been so dumbed down and polluted by Leftism, degrees are no longer a measure of any proficiency or intelligence.
Just about ANY ‘warm body’ that can write big checks or mire themselves in debt for years can get a degree these days(NOT like it used to be). It doesn’t matter that you’re as dumb as a box of rocks, with not enough common sense to scratch your ass if it itches.”
The “education System” never gave degrees as a measure of proficiency and only to some degree as a measure of intelligence. Hard work and desire are just as important if not more important than native intelligence.
There are two kinds of degrees at the bachelor, master and Phd levels. There are Arts degrees and Science Degrees. Only the latter type of degree IMNSHO is worth while from an employers perspective without further training and a science degree only proves that you have a solid foundation in a particlular scientific discipline and the self discipline to follow a multi year complex sequence of steps from which a succesful career might be built. There is no way an individual can study in 4 years a rigorous discipline like CS and become “proficient”. In computer science that has become even more true and more rapidly true than in any other discipline, I was lucky. I got in on the ground floor and rode the elevator all the way to the top. I’ve forgotten more than most recent graduates will ever know!
So hear is where I agree with you, The younger people with higher level degrees probably do appear to be morons to you. They have just begun their career. What most of those students or “young ones” have is a proven ability to do a complex program over multiple years and complete it and a proven ability to learn material that most people don’t have a prayer of ever understanding, They weren’t taught how to map a drive in Microsoft. They learned how to calculate the time and space complexity of an algorithm that most people don’t even have the basic mathematical background to understand let alone figure out its “complexity” and then provide a proof of the algorithms correctness. They probably are bored to death with the trivial tasks they’ve been given and would re-think their major if they new what they actually would be asked to do when they got out into the quote “real world”. It’s kind of like sports. Many people have the desire to be a professional atheletem;Few people have
the talent. There is even fewer paying jobs in the big leagues. If you don’t make it to the big league you become an “IT” worker. Not that there is anything wrong with that,
Brick layers, masons, carpenters, drywallers, electricians become proficient at their craft. For example a brick layer
can lay a brick wall very well and efficiently but probably doesn’t know how to make a brick. ( Materials Engineering with a concentration in ceramics might help. A BS will do if you have to figure it out from scratch ). An MCSE fellow can probably follow instructions and install, configure and manage a MS operating system but I doubt that the MCSE can build (ie program or write) an operating system, modify an OS and debug an OS.
Most of “IT” work has become nothing more than a craft that is picked up at some technical school. It differs from most other “crafts” in that it has a rapid obsolescence that requires one to continually chase the latest fad pushed by a salesmen with great buzz words and bought by mangers with “not enough common sense to scratch your(their) ass if it itches.”
An example of the latest buzz word is the “CLOUD”!!!!!! The first quote “CLOUD” was invented in the 1960’s and ran on an IBM mainframe running the OS360/MVS operating system. Again, “Whats old is new!”.
I was a contractor, a private sector IT worker and a FED. My career lasted 31 years. I can run circles around most kids with their MCSE etc. certificates in assembly language or in any Object Oriented Programming Language. I’ll even let them pick the language. Pick one, any one from a 1st through a 4th generation language. You can even pick the methodology from Structured to Yourdin to waterfall, rapid prototype and even “AGILE” (LOL). In my day we also did our own Sysadmin, network admin, printer amdin and we were the effin help desk.
Roles and responsibilities had not been carved up and handed out to managers who had a vested interest in warm
bodies who didn’t ask questions as they built their empires.
The primary problem with “IT” industry employees is that few americans want to go beyond the certification process and put in real sweat equity to really know what their doing, and they all insist that they are a genius and that everyone else is a moron. They all want top dollar and they want it from a internet web based class in a few hours of cramming for an expensive certification exam.
The certification process is nothing more than a means of circumventing the labour laws which don’t allow an employer to ask even moderately technical questions in a job interview without the fear of being sued for “Fill in the Blank” discrimination allegations being levied. That way employers can make a certificate a condition of employment and make the prospective employeee or his/her (notice the Political Correctness) current employer pay the bill.
The primary problem with IT employers is an overly obsessive bottom line mentality run by managers who don’t know the difference between a copier and a computer. I kid you not.Why should they care! Turn around is so high amongst managers and staff that they won’t be around for the consequences of bad decisions anyway. Just keep it in the black and on schedule. No yellow or red allowed in their Program Management pert and ghant chart! Hell more tham 75 percent of software projects fail anyway! Right!
I retired a while ago and don’t regret it. I didn’t recommend a career in IT to my children and I wouldn’t recommend it to any one else’s children either. To many of my colleagues got dumped and were left high and dry. First for younger kids, then for h1b visa types who took less pay, and Secondly because they couldn’t keep up with the pace of technical changes and finally because they were to old to put in the unpaid hours demanded.
Computing has become a commodity. Every one does it and few have any idea or desire to know how its done or how it works. No Thanks.
I studied fuzzy logic as opposed to boolean logic during my information storage and retrieval classes for indexing and retrieving information from scientific journals with natural language queries fuzzy! The work eventually became
“Google!” Google it!
That was one of the more awesome postings I’ve ever read here.
Very long, so I don’t have the time to respond point by point; but just know that I agree with probably 80% of it.
One thing is for sure. I had a relative ask me if she thought it would be a good idea for her son to get into IT as a career, and my response was “HELL NO!”, for pretty much the same reasons you put forth! lol
Bless Mike Rowe, that was a brilliant reply. My only quibble is that it may be worse than that - our current President has only the illusion of qualifications and a track record of incompetency. That illusion has been nurtured and carefully protected by people for whom power is more important than truth. They've tried to do the same with competency in office and failed utterly. Anyone who trusts their eyes more than their fantasies knows what the guy is by now. There aren't enough of us, apparently. And that's sad.
Thanks KoRn,
I don’t want to offend anyone. All help is appreciated from me no matter the skill level as long as one is trying their best! As a short term career to build capitol and start your family I’d recommend IT. But long term it’s brutal unless you love it! I use to love it. I’ve been retired less than a year. I may go back in time once I’ve recovered my health and my sanity. Or I may do something else. Hell I’m not even 60 years old yet. One thing I can say about IT. If your good at it, it pays extremely well but it comes with a heavy load on all other aspects of your life. Think carefully before entering!
The comments about degrees, education, cost, its worth etc. got to me. I usually don’t post just lurk. I had a need to vent! (LOL)
In my personnel opinion the worst thing to happen to the US is the proliferation of worthless Arts degrees as a result of public funding of education ( ie supply and demand) subsidize it and they will come and the price will go up, Ivy league schools, and especial the Harvard School of Business and the way overvalued MBA degree!
The only thing worse is a .gov senior executive career track with a Phd in Political Anthropology. Google it!
Exact same here. I've come to realize that most IT operations are little more than digital sweat shops. They put you on what sounds like a great salary, then work you for 500 hours per week, and you're constantly on call. I was once reprimanded for showing up for work an hour late, because I overslept from working for damn near 30 hours without sleep, due to some server/storage issues. When my director gave me that paper to sign, that's the closest I've ever come to giving someone a severe beating at work. I somehow kept my cool. Damn my blood pressure is probably elevated just thinking about it. lol
Sounds like we worked in the same shop! (LOL)
It was a pleasure to read about your background - hope you’re having a good retirement! :)
I’m in the middle of my career and have had the honor of working under some very talented people. I’m 100% aligned with you on IT, I got out of that about 14 years ago - not because I thought it was a commodity (although you could see the landscape changing) but because I was bored with it and the people around me didn’t understand what was really happening under the hood (although they thought they were gods). After successfully completing several custom applications I could see it was always going to be more of the same. It was too far removed from where I started...
...coding at 12 y/o when the Sinclair ZX Spectrum came out (in UK, I think in the USA is was the Timex 1000), doing BASIC and immediately onto Z80A assembly, mainly because it was the only way to write cool games :) I would probably have given up on assembly (difficult at that age) but for my middle school math teacher, who went on to become a famous game developer in the UK...he made that little device do things people wouldn’t believe. He also showed me how, innovative algorithms and counting CPU cycles, reworking routines to save cycles here and there.
Once I was done with school the first jobs around me were mainly IT. They paid the bills but I felt it was all too high level, I wanted to be deeper. My love for graphics/algorithms/devices drove me toward the embedded software industry (and a leading company with loads of talent!). It is difficult work but far more interesting. Going from a schematic, to writing drivers, understanding the kernels, RTOS behavior, etc. while also knowing the insides of user-space frameworks and good application design has given me a basis to lead large and complex projects, even though it means not writing much code these days.
Many of the engineers I interview don’t seem to have a love for it. Some have gone into the industry because they thought it pays well, or their father expected them to be “an engineer” of sorts. That said, every once in a while, I come across somebody that really loves it and it shines through - but they’re tough to find. When we find one...hired! Even if there’s some gaps in experience against what we really want...they’ll do fine.
It sounds like you had a great and interesting career, during a special time in computing history. I miss the earlier days to be honest, when new devices had a leap in the “wow” factor, new capabilities not seen before. Much of today’s focus is better integration of available technologies, now we have “The Internet of Things”...so my fridge can tell me how many times I made toast this week ;)
Anyhow...glad you worked with fuzzy logic!! :)
Same here. I just retired from IT. Is there a problem? Of course you work all night to fix it and return after a few hours. 90% of non IT folks have no clue what it takes to keep everything working & your boss will likely be barely human and have no home life.
Howard Dean is lunatic and moron.
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