At 06:37 2013-04-24, Stephen Russell <[email protected]> wrote:
On Wed, Apr 24, 2013 at 7:05 AM, Virgil Bierschwale <[email protected]>wrote:
> That is what we are told by the media.
>
> One of these days people are going to realize that the media is owned,
> controlled, and shackled by six multinational corporations.
> ---------------------
Or your ability to have new killer ideas at a young age, act upon them and
make change is easier than the non youth.
You may come up with the new killer idea but the passion to make it through
completion is not as strong as what the youth are capable of. Why?
Seasoned workers know when an idea is going to get killed when run up the
flagpole. The youth will do it anyway.
And sometimes even if it is not workable. How many of these
startups fail?
Now back to the reality. Paying for a senior engineer with 20 years of
experience is costing a firm 80-120 K a year + benefits. Grafting a new
kid out of college can reduce that wage down to 40-60K and benefit costs
are FAR LESS.
And those numbers are very visible.
What is not visible is when an experienced IT person uses his
wisdom to avoid a bad design, create a good design, debug a unusual
difficulty (that maybe he ran into before), etc.
New kid has little baggage where the seasoned worker may have a lot.
Not in my experience. The younger folk have *different*
baggage, and theirs can be crippling. So can ours, but we tend to
recognise that.
1) I finally got my Bachelor of Computing Science degree in
2010. Time after time in class, I would have totally different
questions from my classmates. I was looking at how to apply the
material and asked accordingly. I noted several times where people
were working on an assignment, cursing about something, and I
recognised that the answer to one of the questions I had asked
covered that. A pity they had not listened.
2) Younger people (or maybe it is most people) do not ask enough
questions. I remember one case where the instructor said something
on a Monday that seemingly contradicted something he had said the
previous Wednesday. When I queried this, that triggered a
five-minute flurry of him looking through his notes. Finally, he
asked if he had covered four slides (showed them) on Friday. No, he
had not, and when he did, the problem was solved.
As far as I could see,no one else had twigged to the problem.
Really, it often felt as if I was taking a different course
from my classmates.
3) I do some tutoring. IME: Younger folk seem to think that they
do not need it and can bull through or that the matter can be dealt
with in only a couple hours. (If you are that confused in the area,
do you really think that many hours of confusion will get cleared up
in just a couple hours? It can happen, but they often think that
from the start.) Older folk (say, 30s and on) are more receptive.
4) In one of my later courses, the instructor mentioned the
possibility of students being able to use computers (but no Internet
access) in the midterm or final exams. We were already allowed to
bring any notes we wanted. Computer use did not happen for the midterm.
About three weeks before the end of the course, the instructor
brought up the topic again. Those who sat in the back row were all
for it and were talking non-stop. I was waiting for an opportunity
to speak. Finally, one said to me to not argue against laptops just
because I did not have one.
I replied not to argue for using one just because of having
one. Then, I made my true point. I did not see why I should have to
spend several hundred dollars [more] in order to write a final exam
and that I was concerned that the exam could be written in such a way
to favour computer use. The instructor said that that would not
happen. As he was straight-shooter, I was reasonably satisfied: I
had made my point.
Come the exam, I brought my course materials and three related
textbooks. No laptop though. The exam cover had a question about
whether one used a computer for the exam. I found the exam to be a good one.
Now to wait for my grade. About a week after, I happened to
meet the instructor in the hall and asked him how it had gone. His
words were (close paraphrase): "I've got two things to tell you. One
is that, in general, the students who did not use computers did
better than those who did, and 2) you got the only A+."
I puzzled over why this might have happened. The explanation
that I came up with is that if one has easy access to references, one
tends not to go very deeply into the material (and thus does not know
it so well) whereas if you do not have it, you have to learn more in
order to make use of the information. This fits in with my
experience in Math (my minor). I was working with another student
studying for a midterm in linear programming. We were working
through the procedure and hit a problem. We ended up figuring where
we had gone wrong so the midterm was not a problem. Had we simply
assumed that we knew the material, we would have blown up on the midterm.
Sincerely,
Gene Wirchenko
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