The US Economy Needs More "Cool" Nerds 453
Hugh Pickens writes "Steve Lohr writes in the NY Times that the country needs more 'cool' nerds — professionals with hybrid careers that combine computing with other fields like medicine, art, or journalism. Not enough young people are embracing computing, often because they are leery of being branded nerds. Educators and technologists say that two things need to change: the image of computing work, and computer science education in high schools. Today, introductory courses in computer science are too often focused merely on teaching students to use software like word processing and spreadsheet programs, says Janice C. Cuny, a program director at the National Science Foundation adding that the Advanced Placement curriculum concentrates too narrowly on programming. 'We're not showing and teaching kids the magic of computing,' Cuny says. The NSF is working to change this by developing a new introductory high school course in computer science and seeking to overhaul Advanced Placement courses as well. The NSF hopes to train 10,000 high school teachers in the modernized courses by 2015. Knowledge of computer science and computer programming is becoming a necessary skill for many professions, not only science and technology but also increasingly for marketing, advertising, journalism and the creative arts. 'We need to gain an understanding in the population that education in computer science is both extraordinarily important and extraordinarily interesting,' says Alfred Spector, vice president for research and special initiatives at Google. 'The fear is that if you pursue computer science, you will be stuck in a basement, writing code. That is absolutely not the reality.'"
The Onus Should Not Be on the Nerds (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm going to make some statements with absolutely no sort of proof, weight or even statistics behind them. Statements which need no proof because if you've gone through the American educational system, you know that what I am saying is the truth.
Football (really sports in general) is more important to teenagers and parents than computer science.
Computer science is far more practical/pragmatic (and really productive for society as a whole) and monetarily rewarding later in life than football.
This isn't pressure from the kids. Kids don't develop these hierarchies of what's more important than other things on their own. They get this from their peers who in turn get it from their parents, teachers and--most importantly--the media. Football is the entertainment industry. There are a small percentage of high school football players that go on to hold all the wealth. All the wealth is controlled or pushed through a single league--the NFL. Kids don't realize that their chances of playing in the NFL are equivalent to winning the lottery. And they pass up much more applicable things like math in order to be better at sports. This is what's wrong with the picture. Don't blame nerds for not being iconic enough or cool enough or social enough.
This has slowly turned as shows and parents have realized that the brilliant nerds they graduated with--the ones that spoke Klingon--actually went on to do really cool things with technology. Not only are they really cool but the whole world is trying to throw cash at them in exchange for their services. Compare that to captain of the football team.
I don't want you to write off sports entirely, a healthy body is necessary to live a long life and moderate exercise is actually good for your intelligence. What I'm asking people to do is when they sit down as a father and spend three hours cheering for their team, they should realize that in order to instill a more pragmatic value in their child (who watches and mimics their every move) they should turn around and spend an equally amount of emphasis on how important math, academics, computer science, etc is to their child.
That's not happening. Our economy is suffering from irresponsible parents breeding a generation of gamblers. And by and large they lose--there's just not enough money in entertainment to go around to every high school football player. There is, however, more than enough money in technology to go around to every high school hobbyist that got out in the real world and applied their knowledge.
I'm not a parent but I'd like to ask all the Slashdotters that are parents that have pushed their children in sports and physical abilities to devote more time to that than reading or studying: why do we do this to our kids? And secondly, do you realize you're creating an ecosystem for other people's kids when your kids reinforce the idea that sports are more important than knowledge and they are the path to success?
Oh really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah. The reality is that you will be stuck in a small cube writing code instead.
Solution is easy (Score:3, Insightful)
It's quite simple. Give the technology classes to people who actually understand the subject and can teach interesting aspects of computer science.
All of my computer courses were either run by secretaries "Learn excel!" or mathematicians "Learn esoteric matlab graphing!"
Teach kids something more entertaining for a broader swath of students like visual effects. Write a renderer in a compositing application. or Teach kids Torque Game Builder. Something simple but creates a product the students actually are interested in.
Cool? You don't know cool. (Score:2, Insightful)
What about Turing? Tesla? Archimedes? Einstein? Hawking? Those guys from 'Big Bang Theory'?
How much cooler do you want?
We have enough. (Score:5, Insightful)
We have enough raw labor resources in this country to meet any technology demand. Don't blame the culture or this lame-ass idea that people are afraid of being labelled nerds. If I made six figures, they could call me the pink tutu goddess of networking and I wouldn't mind.
The problem is that businesses don't want to pay highly-trained and specialized workers more. They've tried outsourcing, right-sizing, downsizing, globalization, and every other way possible to screw people out of wages. And curiously enough, we keep coming back to the same problem -- no matter how big you make the labor pool, the required training and experience required to do these jobs demands a certain minimum income. Keynesian economics, I'm looking at you -- your adherents continue to believe that if they keep expanding the labor pool they'll reach a price point they want. Well, good luck with that...
Secretaries (Score:3, Insightful)
It wasn't *that* long ago that executives didn't type their own memos and letters. Ask one to use a typewriter or a word processor and they would have laughed or wouldn't know how to do it.
More and more computing skills are becoming basic skills. Maybe only the dinosaurs continue to use word processors and spreadsheets, but people still want wikis and PDFs. And by dinosaurs I don't mean the old schoolers, but those who still cling to the idea that in this age, the best way to disseminate knowledge is to print it on an 8" x 11", un-editable, fixed document stuck in a binder...
And that's part of the problem. In my day to day work I don't need a word processor or a spreadsheet except when a manager specifically asks for documentation in that format. So I gather my data and run it through a utility to convert it to a pretty Excel sheet, or convert it to a nicely formatted PDF, or make it into a web page. We're teaching kids to use tools that don't work all that well for the media-rich environment we have today.
Teach them to write a Facebook app or use a content creation tool.. That will be more useful than learning how to print mail merged letters.
Media Branding (Score:5, Insightful)
How about this, stop calling people who use computers to get things done as "nerds" ("geeks", "techies", etc).
Look at any magazine or television commercial, you think all that crap was hand carved out of stone and painted with the tears of virgins? I guarantee a computer was used at some point or another in the creative development behind it. Hell, music has been constantly fusing with new technology for ages, was Les Paul a "nerd"?
Technology, computers especially, penetrated society long ago, the only thing that creates this "us & them" rift is constant stereotype re-enforcement through the media.
Now, if you'll excuse me I have to go re-alphabetize my D&D collection while being bad at sports, good day to you sir!
That's me! (Score:5, Insightful)
Happy to see somewhere out there someone believes in the cool nerds. (i'm also the gay one, and at work that means i'm triple times fabulous ;). I no longer work in IT but i work in regulatory compliance. Where do i find still my undergrad degree in computing sciences useful? EVERYWHERE and EVERY DAY!!! I believe the biggest mistake of this century is for businesses to isolate their "tech" employees to an IT department. This structure ensures that all computing knowledge is isolated from the rest of the business that could use it to increase productivity! I've written countless scripts, reports and other programs to perform simple otherwise labrous tasks and free business workers to focus on important things. People think i'm some sort of miracle worker. The reality is that i'm simply an anomaly at the firm - a person with a computing background who works in the business side. There needs to be more of us - many more!! When i'm CEO - there will be people with computer science backgrounds positioned everywhere in the company. They are the key to connecting the business with technology needs and making business far more efficient. An "IT" department, no matter how good, isn't as good as mixing knowledge of technology in the business side directly.
Re:Oh really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Since that question is framed in a way which is both extremely awkward and does not have a correct answer, "?????" is an appropriate response. There are usually several former Vice Presidents of the United States of America -- even if you restrict it to living former Vice Presidents, otherwise there have been more than one since the second VP left office and that will always be the case -- at any one point of time, much less in any eight year period. Except when there is only one such person, none is "the" former Vice President at the time.
I've seen things swinging the other direction. (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't get me wrong, the whole nerd chic thing has been great to me, but guys who used to beat up guys like me calling themselves nerds just to get laid is a bit annoying.
Re:Solution is easy (Score:5, Insightful)
And how, exactly, do you get those people to accept the combination of pay and working conditions given to high school teachers?
Re:The Onus Should Not Be on the Nerds (Score:5, Insightful)
Then people can do what the fuck they want without society telling them they fall into some particular clique.
Loans... again? I would love to but... (Score:2, Insightful)
At the moment in a purely IT role (some management, some hands on, etc), I make about the same amount as an average doctor and work less hours. Granted I'm sure that some specialists make a lot more, but the simple fact is that there isn't a motivation to move.
To be honest, I have considered pursuing a medical degree -- not for the money, but for my own interest. Looking at the amount of time I have to invest, looking at the amounts of loans I have to take out, looking at the long term gain -- it's not worth it.
The way government controls behavior is through taxation. If they want people to drive hybrids, they can tax gasoline. That's why europeans drive smaller cars -- because gas costs more due to taxes. If they want people to stop drinking, or stop eating McDonalds or whatever -- they can tax accordingly. But unfortunately in the last few years of our economy, it's become abundantly clear that people with a finance degree and the ability to reap rewards on a short term (bonuses) while screwing other people out of the long term is what is valued in our country. Do we value educators? Do we value doctors? Not really -- many articles surrounding healthcare debate lie in the idea that "doctors make too much", when given the lifestyle and hours they work, they should honestly be paid more.
Making a person like me jump from IT into healthcare or be crosstrained in order to better the country as a whole to me, is a great idea. I just can't burden the expense -- again. I have gone through the system that is there, and wound up many thousands in debt due to school loans. If we want more 'cool nerds', then somebody has to start putting the emphasis back on aspiring to be a doctor, a teacher, a scientist (the kind with beakers, not computers), etc. Not having kids aspire to be the next Michael Jordan or Jay Z.
Unfortunately it's a myth that is perpetuated and we keep buying into it. Sadly, other countries see our folly and already accelerate ahead of us (the US) in many, many areas. We are the best at a lot of things, but for how long? Hopefully our behaviors can change so that a person like myself that actually wants to contribute in a meaningful way, can.
Re:Fear of Being Stereotyped? Really? (Score:3, Insightful)
Along those same lines, I'd agree with the summary (RTFA? Me? Never!) that early computer education needs to be divorced from only the dull and pointless (MS Office training) and the specialized (programming) to include a wider range of activities that use computers as a tool. Computers have advanced in usability to the point where interacting with "the computer" is overshadowed by interacting with software, websites, and people. Frame computer literacy not in terms of "computer classes", but in terms of art, writing, design, engineering, yes-- programming, and all the creative endeavors that use the computer as a tool.
Re:The Onus Should Not Be on the Nerds (Score:5, Insightful)
Its not the media's fault.
Damn right. There's a serious lack of personal responsibility in our culture.
Re:The Onus Should Not Be on the Nerds (Score:5, Insightful)
Computer Science is just a problem-solving tool (Score:4, Insightful)
... just like Mathematics.
It means nothing by itself, except as a means to an end of solving practical problems.
That said, it makes all the sense in the world for most Computer Scientists to learn other domains of knowledge to apply to.
The more disciplines you are familiar with, the more adept you will be at applying your programming skills to solving real-world problems.
Re:No.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The Onus Should Not Be on the Nerds (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not just football, of course. There are a lot of misappropriated priorities.
And parents appear to not care. They would rather feed their kids entertainment to keep them happy (and out of their hair) than to actually take the time, effort, and "pain" to instill the correct priorities and education and whatnot in them. It's easier to give them $3000 in entertainment gifts per year (you know .... ipod, xbox, games, car, etc) than to take the effort to try to influence their priorities.
And then there's the whole thing that we should just let kids do wha tthey want and what comes natural and not "force" our "beliefs" on them... which apparently includes education, drugs, religion, morals, ethics, family values, holidays, food choices, etc. Basically, kids should grow up by themselves! (and "by themselves" we mean "by the government/public school system")
Re:The Onus Should Not Be on the Nerds (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm 23 and know a bunch of people who are into football. Football isn't about going outdoors and getting exercise, it's about sitting on a couch, getting drunk, and yelling at the other team and refs for being unfair (no, it isn't that your team sucks). Instead of working on homework, they are practicing intoxication, anger, tribalism, and blaming others for personal failure.
Worse yet, they have this idea that if they're stubborn enough, they'll get their way, even though they've spent their time watching sports instead of learning
Re:We have enough. (Score:3, Insightful)
Isn't that a little like saying that while living in Beverly Hills you haven't seen evidence of this "homelessness" thing that people talk about? Silicon Valley may not be representative of the U.S. tech-job market in general.
Re:idea (Score:1, Insightful)
employers don't want fresh-out-of-school grads
employers love fresh-out-of-school grads, as long as they aren't Americans.
Re:Fear of Being Stereotyped? Really? (Score:3, Insightful)
A lot of young people don't find reading, writing, or basic mathematics -- or general science, civics or economics -- interesting either, and we press those on people as educational requirements.
On the other hand, they don't like foreign languages, shop class, literature classes, or home ec class, so we dumped them.
Whats the difference between computing class, and German class? I don't think "computing classes" are, by and large, needed.
The biggest problem is the demand that kids learn something old, so that decades later they'll have amazing 'puter skills. Nothing could possibly be more useless than the time I spent in 1st grade learning "bank street writer" on a C64. Or my amazing "Winders fer Workgroups" sysadmin skills.
There is a willful blind spot preventing people from understanding how the hiring managers of future decades will view their amazing firefox 3.5 talents. If MS Office completely redesigns their UI every two years, then "training" usually solely based on memorizing the UI is useless within two years.
At least if you learn German, you can visit oktoberfest 40 years from now, in theory.
Re:'Cool' Nerds (Score:3, Insightful)
but I had to hide those talents as employers didn't like me having them and I had to take them off my resume to get hired.
I've noticed this is a peculiarity of the technical field. Hiring managers only want to hire people with precisely 2 years experience, nothing more, nothing less. If you thought the newbies had trouble with zero experience, trust me, its no better for the old timers, we have a nightmare of a time figuring out what to hide or delete so they won't either "have the wrong qualifications" or be "overqualified". If I slip up and include the wrong experiences, my resume is trashed.
Also as per the above poster there is a certain list of permitted hobbies, stuff like ham radio is OK, but you'll have a very difficult time being hired if you admit you do artsy or athletic things, which seems very strange. It would be like never hiring a doctor unless their ONLY hobby was dissecting the neighborhood pets or never hiring a graphics artist unless their ONLY hobby was doodling on a notepad.
Re:We have enough. (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem is that businesses don't want to pay highly-trained and specialized workers more. They've tried outsourcing, right-sizing, downsizing, globalization, and every other way possible to screw people out of wages. And curiously enough, we keep coming back to the same problem -- no matter how big you make the labor pool, the required training and experience required to do these jobs demands a certain minimum income
This is a good point and it highlights a problem with current government attempts to encourage more youngsters to pursue careers in STEM. We say that we want "smarter" high school students and more interest in STEM professions while at the same time we continue to see outsourcing, visa fraud, and even less savory tactics used by employers to avoid paying for skills and expertise they say are needed to compete in the 21st century economy. The smart high school students are going to ask, "Why should we bust our butts to earn an engineering degree for a job that is underpaid, relative to the time, effort, and expense required to train for it, and is under constant threat of being cut, outsourced, or downsized"? They will choose to go into law, business, or medicine (although poorly implemented health care "reform" may soon ruin that career path too) instead.
A career in STEM is in many ways a lifelong commitment requiring high levels of ongoing participation both to stay current and to grow in one's chosen area of expertise. People are reluctant to make these sorts of commitments where employment is no longer guaranteed, jobs get outsourced at the drop of a hat, and STEM gets little or no respect from upper management. In fact, many upper management types are actively hostile towards STEM and resent the "high" wages earned by "skilled" workers (especially in IT) who are not, in their eyes, involved in "leadership" roles. This is compounded by the fact that many R&D oriented STEM careers require higher levels of independence and creative freedom than most MBAs are comfortable granting.
How then can we convince a "smart" student that STEM are great career choices? Given the present reality, I am not sure that we can.
Re:Fear of Being Stereotyped? Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
We no longer need computing class, and we should avoid attempting to mass produce "geeks" because the more of them there are the lower wages they will command. We don't need more Cool Geeks to impress the public.
Fuck the public. Let them pay for what they want from us.
Re:And here is the counterpoint (Score:3, Insightful)
Industry knowledge is simply not valued (Score:3, Insightful)
Many of my fellow techies have observed that "domain knowledge" is simply not valued. It's always a specific set of tools and IT buzzwords companies are looking for, not domain knowledge. One time industry knowledge on my resume helped me land a contract, but it was still the tech tools/languages that got me on the review list. If companies value domain knowledge more than tool knowledge, they don't act like it. This article simply contradicts my multi-decade experience in the IT field. Something is out of whack.
Maybe the article is simply a big euphemism for "nerds need more people skills". That may be true, but they seem too timid to outright say it. Sure, every company wants somebody with A+ people skills and A+ tech skills and wants to pay them D wages. And I want a Ferrari that runs on water.
Re:The Onus Should Not Be on the Nerds (Score:3, Insightful)
Forget that it is less than 50 teams, with 53 roster slots each and so landing a job in the NFL is like winning the lottery. Now take $770,000 dollars per year median salary in the NLF times the three and a half seasons your career is actually going to last according to the NFL Players Association.
$2,695,000 before taxes. That may seem like a lot, but unless you save or invest it, it isn't going to last, and generally these guys don't have many other skills to fall back on.
Now sprinkle on knee/ankle injuries, head injuries and back injuries you are guaranteed to get. Add in any possible career ending injuries on the field, and tell me that IT doesn't win hands down.
There is a reason the NFL is looking into all the head injuries, and that so many former players are broke and the Players Association is taking up collections to help them get surgeries when their body breaks down 10 to 20 years later.
They also have to try to keep guys active when they leave the league because a lot of them get huge from eating the way they were trained to when they played, then when they aren't exercising hours a day they can't metabolize all that food.
Re:The Onus Should Not Be on the Nerds (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't get it. In the USA, football is Serious Business. People spend hours a day training and practicing, even at the high-school level. This is the underlying reason for the dichotomy: you can't play high-school, college, or professional football without using time for training that you otherwise could have used for studying. So while many people have the talents for both football and academics, it takes someone extra-gifted to get great at both in the time constraints.
Re:The Onus Should Not Be on the Nerds (Score:3, Insightful)
It all depends on how far you take "being good". Many football coaches here want to raise a star player, and in order to do so they'll drill the living snot out of the players they have who look good. Your average teenager needs 10-12 hours of sleep a day, has a homework load that runs 2-3 hours minimum after a 7-hour school day. That leaves 4 hours for eating dinner and any other activities. When the coach wants daily 3-hour practices and twice on Saturday and Sunday, something's gotta give. Maybe one in 1000 of those kids is actually going to go on to a football career, if that, but in the meantime there is a pull to specialize in a sport at a cost to academia because, well, you want the school team to win, right?
When I was growing up, many of the most talented football players were pretty much guaranteed at least a minimum passing grade regardless of actual academic merit or effort, simply because a good football team was a form of PR to the community and garnered support for the school. The coaches were directed to drill the kids hard, and the teachers were expected to ease off on the homework and academic load for the best football players so they could focus on the game. Some of the players reacted by working really hard academically, but some just took advantage of the opportunity to coast their way through, putting in just enough effort to keep from being held back, and in some cases intentionally being held back so they could have an extra year or two in the high school athletics program.
Just in terms of hours in the day, there is at least partly a dichotomy between being good at sports and being good academically. Players who genuinely want to succeed academically find themselves constantly torn between practice, homework/study, sleep, and downtime/personal time/social time. Their major influence (second to their parents) is probably going to be their coach, and his priority is to build good players and a good team, so he's going to want them to put in a LOT of practice.
Re:Secretaries (Score:3, Insightful)
It wasn't *that* long ago that executives didn't type their own memos and letters. Ask one to use a typewriter or a word processor and they would have laughed or wouldn't know how to do it.
And it wasn't that long ago when even first-level managers were in the same boat. And it's a shame those days have passed. No longer do you see cute young female secretaries and file clerks with pert bosoms and short skirts roaming the hallways, ready for a little bit of office work. It is a sad era we live in, indeed.
Re:Solution is easy (Score:3, Insightful)
ummm, I've known many engineers who left the field to be teachers.
Teaching is not a poor profession. In places like New York you can reach 6 figures with a pension and job security.
If anything, this kind of article misses the point entirely.
You do not need to make science *cool* or hire *cool* teachers or make science *fun*.
I've seen colleagues leave the field. They love the cool part of their job. They just hate their actual job. They feel underpaid, overworked, no job security...
You know the things you eventually find important after you get out of the naive student stage.
So if these people who *love* science would probably choose a different career path if they could redo everything... is the problem really about making science *cool*?
Indeed, I would say there are more than enough people interested in science. The difference is in terms of actual working conditions.
In India/China... getting into tech is a world full of riches and opportunity. Hence, their best and brightest go into it.
In today's America/Western World, getting into tech is a middle class job with no job security. Hence a *perceived* shortage of talent. It is not a real shortage, as their are plenty of capable people. They are just choosing other fields.
If you are talented enough to be a good scientist/engineer... you're smart enough to be a doctor, lawyers, teacher, nurse, banker... and that is where the talent goes. ... I got my B of Education, but unfortunately, where I live (Ontario, Canada), teaching pays very well and such the jobs are hard to come by. If I could get into the school system, I'd leave my engineering career in a split second. Pay, pension, lifestyle, vacation... oh hell ya. And yes, I taught and I've done supply teaching. It's a great job to be a teacher.
As a matter of fact, paying teachers more will only make this problem worse. As it makes another profession even more appealing than engineering. Case in point... me
Re:Horrible Idea (Score:2, Insightful)
Hanging around too many football players? (Score:3, Insightful)
"If we really want "'cool' nerds" we need to eliminate any idea that someone else is going to earn/provide a living for us."
I guess you're confusing football players with "nerds". I don't think I'd be going too far out on a limb to claim that "I deserve it" is a mantra much more adopted by athletes than CS and IT folks.
If being "cool" is about working hard and making the extra effort, I'd say we're pretty cool already.
Re:We have enough. (Score:3, Insightful)
It seems to me with everything being run by large corporations, you are essentially living in a manorial type society [middle-ages.org.uk]. You plead fealty to your lords, and they give you wages in return.
The problem with this is it you create a massive top-down hierarchy where you are totally dependent upon the honesty of those at the top. If anyone in the management structure wants to siphon most of the wealth into their own pockets, there isn't much to stop them except the manager above. At the top, there is no one above, so they don't have any one person to stop them.
This is where communism fails. You can't really depend upon people to be that honest, plus most normal people don't want that level of responsibility, so only people who want to take advantage of the situation strive for the top.
It seems to me the only obvious solution would be to just get out of their game. Find a way to run your own small business, so if one of your clients is screwing you, you can just drop them when you can. This has more risk (you don't get a steady paycheck) and requires more effort, but if you can do it, in the long term it could be the best way.