16 thoughts on “The New US Security Risk”

  1. What for? Chinese and Indian techs are a dime a dozen. Better to get a Koran^H^H^H^H^H^H Law degree instead.

  2. Much of what I did back in the day to teach myself programming is illegal now under DMCA. CompSci schmompsci – how many competent auto mechanics would we have if it was a crime to take apart an existing engine and tinker with it to see what works?

  3. Or the long hours, or the having to come in at midnight, or being constantly on call, or having to constantly work to keep systems functional when proper design would prevent most manual intervention, or the poor raises when the economy is bad followed by hiring a kid just out of college for $20K per year more once the economy picks up, or … why did I pick IT again?

  4. The people in charge are too stupid to encourage geeks. They’d have to put up with kids who make all sorts of things that go BANG and make lots of smoke, and who will immediately succeed and doing anything you say not to do (like putting a bigger bit of Sodium in the water tank and soaking the class).

    I remember putting some dry ice in one of the plastic bottles and waiting through class with friends for the inevitable to happen. When it ripped the cap made it ceiliing to floor and back again at least twice.

    Of course that’s when I wasn’t making thermite, nitrogen tri-iodide or attempting to make TNT… or the time, just for fun, that I and some friends worked out what it would take to build a torpedo to hit a barge in the Ohio…

    All the future geeks are being sent for re-education these days, or else being arrested and locked up as if they were criminals.

    As I said, the people who run school systems these days are too stupid to have geeks in their system. They can’t deal with kids who are smarter than they are or will ever be.

  5. I’m confident American students would major in computer science if the rewards were similar to what they were 20 years ago. Then such folks would help design the Internet, write new oeprating systems, solve interesting problems. Now they just program Web 2.0 Javascript/SQL applications that shuttle between a Web site and a massive database. Blech.

  6. Oh, you mean to be a small cog in a giant soul sucking federal IT project that will fail 80% of the time?

  7. Let me say, HUH?!

    No geeks, why not? The community college and full university computer science classes are packed. Engineering classes too. Two kids we know had to wait a year to get into engineering school, because the classes were full. And they both had good SAT scores and all the “outside, human building blocks” crap schools want now. I believe the problem is one of GIFTED, INSPIRED and TALENTED people in these fields.

    One of my best friends sons just graduated from school with a mechanical engineering degree. 3rd highest in his class. He’s having trouble finding a job, as are his two buds at the top. Granted, the economy is down, but doesn’t that also show a glut of people working in the field? When the top three guys in the class are struggling?

    I’ve known this kid all his life, he’s smart, good looking, personable, and he, nor his class toppers, can get an interview to get a foot in the door. There’s much more at work here than just a lack of candidates.

    On a lighter side, there is the Wile E. Coyote factor.

    When I was growing up, we saw Wile E. build and design all sorts of fantasmagorical devices. We saw the space race go from ideas to the moon. We went from pencils and paper and logarithm books, to graphing calculators. From tail dragger airplanes to supersonic jets for civilian travel. And on and on.

    The kids NOW are living in an age where 99% of the products are consumer driven, entertainment, “fun time”, crap. Most of which is obsolete in 18 months when the new whiz-bang-whimmy-diddle comes out, with twice the speed and 4 times the bass volume. I don’t think, kids now, or for the last 20 + years have been taught, by schools or mom and dad, to reach very far or work much before graduating college.

    Ex-hack talked about taking an engine apart. You don’t HAVE TO take the engine apart on a BRAND NEW car. A NEW iPod doesn’t need fixing. You don’t fix brakes, tweek carbs, replace radios, replace capstans, rollers, motors etc. , on NEW stuff, they are GIVEN every new toy that comes out. And if it breaks, get a new one.

    I fixed and tweaked and got zapped by many an old radio, 8-track player and TV as a kid. I busted knuckles on plenty of bicycles and lawnmowers and old washing machines learning about stuff and looking for parts for ???. That was LONG before I ever worked professionally as a VW mechanic, or before I trained in the Navy in I &C, or before I then worked in computer controlled industrial machinery, and finally straight computer work. I partly trained myself, out of both interest AND need.

    Personally the need taught me more than interest. My interests lead me, my needs kept me going. I HAD to fix that crappy VW if I was going to drive. I HAD to fix the radio if we were going to play 8-tracks, then I HAD to install it and run the wires, drill holes mount the speakers.

    Now if kids want to listen, drive or whatever, mom and dad buy them a new, shiny, running, blaring, loud as hell, thumping, internet connecting, texting, sexting, go fast.

    Where’s the learning?

    The seven original astronauts, did NOT become pilots, because mom and dad BOUGHT THEM airline tickets. Nor did the ground guys, designers, technical support people at NASA become “those people at NASA” because mom and dad “bought” anything. Most of them started out as tinkerers.

    At heart they were Wile E. Coyotes or better still for their time, Rube Goldbergs. Cobbling new stuff from existing knowledge and stretching to create the new. You don’t learn to stretch up, or learn to climb a tree, if every apple is handed to you.

  8. No thanks. I won’t go into IT after seeing how a career in IT rewarded my Mom. She was the first woman hired in her division at IBM, can read hex like I read English, has patched binaries the source code to which had been lost for decades, and was for 15 years quite literally the person they called in when no one else could fix it.

    This year she gets to train her replacement, an Indian chappie who’s going back to Bangalore when he’s trained up so he can fuck things up for 1/4 the price of her doing it right.

  9. “I fixed and tweaked and got zapped by many an old radio, 8-track player and TV as a kid. I busted knuckles on plenty of bicycles and lawnmowers and old washing machines learning about stuff and looking for parts for ???. That was LONG before I ever worked professionally as a VW mechanic, or before I trained in the Navy in I &C, or before I then worked in computer controlled industrial machinery, and finally straight computer work. I partly trained myself, out of both interest AND need.”

    California seems especially unsupportive of those who would go the technical, vocational ‘hands on’ route, after high school…

    http://www.thespaceshow.com/detail.asp?q=1190

    Of course, there are still personal technical activities like Amateur Radio and Amateur Rocketry (or even building your own PC) for those young people who have even heard of them…

  10. It’s really simple, companies see technical people as cost centers, and so they constantly try to keep the costs (salaries) down for techies. Therefore, the average good wage years for techies is about the same as for professional football players, maxing out at about age 35. After that, techies demand “too high” a salary for companies to sink their profits into. So companies hire new grads and outsource in order to keep the costs down, and let the high-paid experience go, or persuade them to go into management, for which many are ill-suited by temperament or interest. Then, other companies use these excuses for not hiring the experienced techies: “Your experience is impressive, but you don’t have the latest technology that we’re looking for”, or “You do seem to have the technology experience we need, but you don’t have the experience we need in this domain”, or “It just doesn’t look like you’d be a good fit in our organization.” I personally had a recruiter tell me I was too old, because they were looking for someone “who would be hired in and grow within the project long-term”. Some managers will try to give an excuse (not to the techie) that “older techs just can’t come up to speed with the new technologies quickly” or “they only worked on one project, and that’s all they know or want to know”, which may be anecdotally true in very very few instances, but not across the board. The bottom line is actually the bottom line: Experience does not earn the company any more money, and the salaries that experienced techs should be making are too expensive for companies to justify.

    If I was in a position to do so, I would refer kids to go into technical sales, because that is the only position in a tech company that gets the respect and the high salary. If a kid is technically inclined, they can play with technology on their off-times, and be assured that they won’t be cut loose when they’re in their 30’s.

  11. One of my best friends sons just graduated from school with a mechanical engineering degree. 3rd highest in his class. He’s having trouble finding a job, as are his two buds at the top. Granted, the economy is down, but doesn’t that also show a glut of people working in the field? When the top three guys in the class are struggling?

    There’s a lot of truth to what you write. One of my coworkers graduated from a good school with a computer science degree about 7 years ago. He says he’s the only one of his class that actually was hired to work in the IT field. The rest moved on to something else.

    If we want to encourage young people to go into the technical fields, we need to actually stop destroying the careers of those technical fields. Back in the 1990s, Ed Yourdon wrote a then-controverials book titled “The Decline and Fall of the American Programmer.” His prediction was that between a perceived decline in quality of American programmer output and the lower costs of outsourcing programming overseas, American programmers faced dim long-term career prospects. A lot of people strongly disagreed with him at the time but it appears he was correct.

    There are still a few IT areas where outsourcing isn’t going to happen and people can make a good career. I work in the defense industry. There are a lot of restrictions about using foreign code in American military systems. So long as those restrictions are in place, the jobs will stay in America. Likewise, there is a large and growing demand for computer security professionals. Only the biggest fools in the world would outsource their computer network security overseas. Yes, there are some of those fools out there but fortunately most people aren’t that dumb. Another coworker’s daughter is going to school majoring in computer network security. While going to school, she’s working for a defense firm and doing quite well.

  12. Frank G.,
    here in central NC, the HS’s are just NOW putting back the dual track system. Believe it or not, they discovered that not everyone goes to college. But still, they are finding few interested kids who have ever opened a computer or changed a tire. So the “trades” instructors have to start from the bottom.

    “lefty loosie, righty tighty”
    .
    .

    Larry J.,
    computer security will get glutted too. My wife is still doing desktop support, right now they’re having trouble finding good, schooled and certified people. So I guess it’s the bottom of the cycle people wise for repair and support folks.

    Not enough to drive me back there for corporate America though.

  13. I agree with and sympathize with many of the comments here. I remember thinking many years ago when I was a young sprout starting work for an engineering software company, “How many times will I have to reinvent myself technically in this field in order to stay employable for 40 years or more?” The pace of change in the computer field is both its biggest draw and biggest challenge. I love getting paid to play with my toys, and I love the fact that there’s always something new to marvel at. But it’s the easiest thing in the world to get out of date and risk becoming unemployable.

    Outsourcing is a big challenge now. My company has hardly hired anyone in this country for several years. We now have a large office in Shanghai where almost all the programming new hires are. Our organization has managed to approach outsourcing fairly intelligently, understanding that the hard won expertise of our senior developers in this country is not easily replaced by hiring armies of fresh college grads in China. Therefore many of us here still feel relatively secure. But I worry about who the senior developers will be in ten years or so. It is hard to transfer expertise to a young, high-turnover team that is half a world away. Meanwhile, back here at home the youngest guy in our group turned 40 this year!

    In that light I want to make one point that I think has been glossed over so far. DARPA is probably most interested in ensuring an adequate supply of researchers, architects, designers and other innovators is maintained in this country. These are the people who come up with new technologies and start new industries. It is vital for our national security and economic prosperity that we continue to be technology leaders. It is probably less important strategically if some of the people who implement and maintain the software happen to live in India or China. But if all the people who write the software live over there, in a generation there won’t be anybody here who knows how to program a computer. And that would be bad.

  14. I’m very familiar with this having trained many replacements over the years…

    This year she gets to train her replacement, an Indian chappie who’s going back to Bangalore when he’s trained up so he can fuck things up for 1/4 the price of her doing it right.

    I worked with one guy who wouldn’t teach anything he knew to anyone (kind of counterproductive in a team environment, but that’s what living in this environment does to some people.)

    The enlightenment has not yet come to the programming profession. 99% of the people I’ve worked with, a tremendously smart group, have trouble seeing past the puzzle solving aspect of programming. They believe everything they’ve read in a book. They have never meditated on what it is they do. …and they’re managed by people that understand even less.

    My last job I got a phone call at 5pm friday saying I wouldn’t be needed on monday, they had hired two people to replace me… because I’d forwarded a salary survey webpage to the boss at her request a few weeks earlier.

    That was six years ago and I’m still waiting for my own enlightenment (I see glimmers but not the whole.)

  15. “The civilian adoption of GPS has grown considerably as the popularity of the Internet has increased.” While the previous statement might be true so is the statement, “The civilian adoption of GPS has grown considerably as the popularity of grey cars has increased.”. Was the author paid by the word? What links the Internet and GPS in the author’s mind? What other irrelevant links can the author offer up?

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