The downside to this is that it's hard. This kind of service requires a sprawling infrastructure with many dozens of servers and tens of thousands of dollars in costs per month. And the amount of programming work to take that code-base and make it just work, plug-and-play, on someone else's machine for individual use, or in a larger set-up for shared use, is pretty serious. Not to mention that the many individual services powering such a service are often reused and tangled up in other (critical) services run by a company, and it's not always possible to separate out the intellectual property.
This is only a sampling of the issues - open-sourcing huge projects is actually much trickier than you might think!
Releasing their source does not imply that they are providing a working turn-key product that another company or individual could just one click install and have Digg back. Put it out there so the next generation has the opportunity to learn from their experience as well as their mistakes.
That said, you are absolutely right. Software at scale is complicated and often difficult to deploy and maintain. I just feel that this is not a barrier for open-sourcing their product.
> Releasing their source does not imply that they are providing a working turn-key product that another company or individual could just one click install and have Digg back.
Except that exactly what most people will want and get mad if it's not easy to run. The backlash from that isn't worth it.
> I just feel that this is not a barrier for open-sourcing their product.
IP alone can be a bitch and that coupled with the fact that a number of companies have secrets (key/tokens/passwords/etc) in their code and cleaning those out (AND removing the git/svn history) is no small task. Lastly there are number of open source RSS readers out there, I seriously doubt Digg was doing anything particularly innovative in this space and I don't imagine many people care to build on something they made 5 years ago and probably didn't update much since then. Especially if it's not built with the "New hotness".
Typically it is a whole lot of work to open source a private service, because the code is intermingled with code for stuff that you either want to keep private, or would be impossible to get working outside of your environment.
This game designer only open-sourced his code for the player object. As I am not a seasoned game developer I have enjoyed going through this code and learning some of the techniques.
Maybe Digg can help bring up the next generation based on their techniques. Or maybe it helps foster a discussion around how not to implement something.
Has anyone seen an articulate defense of this legislation?
I can clearly understand the opposition, but I am having trouble figuring what is driving the introduction of the bill in the first place. I do not want to fully judge it until I understand what the other side is thinking.
Has anyone seen an articulate defense of this legislation?
I can clearly understand the opposition, but I am having trouble figuring what is driving the introduction of the bill in the first place. I do not want to fully judge it until I understand what the other side is thinking.
Generally the "other side" is law enforcement. The more power they have, the easier it is for law enforcement to do its job. People inside law enforcement may be less concerned about giving more power to law enforcement, because they can think "Hey, I know I won't abuse this power, so it's ok."
This article is referring to Navy Corpsman. They are medics, closer to an EMT than a surgeon. After boot camp at Naval Station Great Lakes, they go to "A" School (basically, their specialty school) in San Antonio.
It is my understanding that this training at a hospital trauma center would be after their school in San Antonio, before they were attached to a Marine unit and deployed.
The name soccer came from Britain, not the US. It was used to differentiate Association Football (soccer) from Rugby Football (rugby). Ireland, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand all still call the sport soccer. Even in England, it continued to be a popular name for the sport until the 1950s.
Love the idea and I definitely see the problem and need. If you are able to answer, I have a few questions:
1) You say that you will track every data point to hold yourselves accountable. What metrics do you intend on tracking to prove the value of your service to potential customers?
2) Do you screen the customers prior to accepting them into your program? If so, what kind of characteristics are you looking for in an applicant?
3) What experience/skills/connections, etc does the company bring to the table for the customers?
1) Some of the metrics we are currently already tracking:
Response and follow up rates from cold emails
Response and follow up rates from referrals to hiring partners
Technical interview score over time (measured by internal rubrics we design to be very close to what is actually used at companies)
Success rate per interview over time (hard to see trends for an individual, but kind of starting to see trends for a batch)
The classic feedback form, 1 to 5 in how much did you learn after every session
Average gain from negotiation compared to the base offer and to industry standards
Pretty basic stuff for now, but still able to prove value. For example, like I mentioned we're seeing a response rate from under 5% to over 20% after applying cold emailing techniques. This is theoretically already a 4x difference in the number of opportunities you receive. Another example is average raise as a result of negotiation through the program can be thought of as literally money we get you.
2) Yes. We mainly look for a fundamental conceptual understanding of your field (since we don't do technical training besides interview prep) and a high level of motivation.
Surprisingly, we haven't found the need to look for anything else. This lets us ignore something that might increase implicit bias like trying to evaluate culture fit. We can focus on finding each individual candidate the company that's the right culture fit for them instead of the other way around.
3) We have about 10 hiring partners right now as well as an advisor and alumni network we use to make referrals on behalf of students to top companies like Facebook, Google, etc.
In terms of experience: my co-founder and I are unique in that while we have past founding experience and have worked at top companies like Facebook, Salesforce, and Yelp, but we are also young enough that we are not decades separated from the problem of figuring out your early career.
There aren't many people working on career services that understand both sides of the table when it comes to what it feels like to be a university student looking for a job and what it feels like to be a hiring manager evaluating a university student. This would describe us though.
We like to think we understand what a student is going through and how to help them better than anyone else because of this.
I know working as a consultant(salaried full-time for 5 years) helped me get experience to get another job. Seems like a temp agency for only college students would be interesting for companies to bite on. So, they can minimize legal risk from hiring(and firing quickly)
You said you are measuring gain from negotiation as one of your metrics. Will you be teaching the customers about negotiation techniques or actually negotiating on their behalf?
It is frustrating how widely applicable this book is. Universities across the country are struggling to adequately prepare students for software engineering jobs.
It is also frustrating that this book from 2012 is still applicable in 2018. I'm not sure what the solution is or what would drive change here.
In my opinion, it is not the mission of universities to prepare students for jobs. Universities are research institutions that prepare students for research. That's why all professors have to do research. Vocational schools exist for the purpose of job training. Big companies can also train their own workers.
In Australia, we intentionally collapsed most of our vocational schools into our public universities a couple of decades ago. I guess that was fairly unique because it was such a conscious decision. Universities in the modern world _are_ in fact vocational schools for many professions. Class sizes and student numbers alone often show this.
And while big companies can train their own workers, many choose to off-load that competency to the universities as well. In Germany, many of the largest export employers have a symbiotic relationship with local (to the factory) Universities. The companies help determine the course structure and syllabus, and in return the graduates are offered good living wage jobs straight out of university with continued training and certification.
Australia is a long way off of the German model, so all I know is what I've read in the Economist and a couple of other publications, but there are certainly murmers of moving to such a model in Australia as well.
"University" just doesn't mean what it used to mean.
As I say elsewhere, just look at other disciplines taught by universities. This is a totally untrue view of what universities are.
They are learning and research institutions. They've never just been research institutions. And the vast majority of fields don't really bother teaching any R&D to under-grads, they just teach them the subject and practical application of it in the real, job, world.
In the UK we used to have vocational schools too, that all got changed to universities. It didn't mean no vocational training went on in universities.
In France it's not so clear cut, but there have been more and more “professional” studies set up in universities. Many studies are actually not clearly « pro » or « recherche » but in between, and give you insights into both worlds. My Master's degree is like that and I ended up doing an industrial PhD after being sure I wanted to work in a company. In that context the teachers do their best to give some training specific to software engineering but it has to be balanced.
That's the theory that hasn't been true in years. It ought to be as you describe, but it isn't - universities nowadays are glorified vocational schools with an extra option to go on a research sidetrack if you really don't like money. It's visible across the board - from the reason people choose to go to a university, to the focus universities have on attracting students and teaching, vs. supporting actual research.
The problem isn't with the universities, it's with the lack of vocational schools with any depth or rigour for intellectually-demanding fields like software engineering.
Sure, my local vocational school does offer a certificate and diploma of software development - a 2/3-semester program which teaches a couple of Java and C# courses and how to use a database. Which is to say, it teaches you the bare minimum you need to know to become the most junior level of applications developer in an enterprise IT department - vastly, vastly underqualified to go into many of the kinds of jobs that expect CS degrees.
The other problem is that, well, I actually liked the theoretical and conceptual side of doing a CS degree, learning from lecturers who were researchers in the field. I, and most of the good software engineers I know, would have regretted just going to a vocational school.
IMHO, there's a third option worth considering. Here in Australia, lawyers start off by obtaining a law degree (a Bachelor of Laws or a Juris Doctor) from a university. However, before they're admitted to practice, they have to obtain a Graduate Diploma of Legal Practice - a 6-month course which focuses on the practical skills of being a lawyer.
I don't see why there couldn't be a similar type of program to teach practical software development workplace skills - obviously, not as some kind of mandatory licensing program, but as an optional extra.
> many of the kinds of jobs that expect CS degrees
... most of which don't actually need CS degrees, but in the absence of the rigorous vocational programs, it's a reasonable filter to get candidates who have a clue.
They are both research and training institutions, and quite obviously so if you look at another discipline.
The architects don't all learn abstract obscure theory, they spend a(crazy) amount of time doing drafts and models. The engineers don't all learn irrelevant and out of date techniques. The pharmacists spend half their time in labs. As do the chemists. The doctors have to do rounds on real wards.
So why in CS is your defence that a university is a research institution?
That's simply not true, and looking at any other discipline shows how wrong you are.
It used to be true for all subjects when universities as we know them today were founded. It is still true for the hard sciences. Physicists train to become researchers, no data scientists at hedge funds. Computer Science is not Software Engineering and shouldn't be forced to become that. Computer science is imho a branch of mathematics and the focus should lie on theory. To steal Dijkstra's words, I don't think it's any more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.
I don't think it's a good idea to teach students whatever is currently en vogue in the industry. If you for some reason need to have an applied subject at a university instead of a vocational school you should call it Software Engineering or whatever.
You're focusing on the theoretical fields while conveniently ignoring the doctors, engineers, pharmacists, chemists, biologists, architects, etc.
All of whom spend all of their degree on practical, applied learning. And have done for decades/centuries.
If you then want to go into research in those fields you do a PhD. The vast majority of their graduates go into industry.
And of course, the vast majority of CS students go into industry, just woefully under-prepared, unlike other disciplines.
There's no reason for CS to stay theoretical only. The field of computer science/engineering/making/whatever you want to call it doesn't need loads of researchers, it needs loads of practical, professionally trained, programmers.
The ridiculous defence that it's computer science not engineering is so over and dead and that ship sailed decades ago. It's just a name. Just like a PhD, a Doctor of Philosophy, in History doesn't make you an expert in Philosophy, it's just a name.
I'm not against training loads of programmers, I just don't think that we should kill CS as a theoretical subject to do so. I believe vocational schools are better suited for the task.
IMHO computer science degrees should primarily teach computer science, but they should also weave in practical tools/skills into course projects, especially testing, debugging, version control, and a few classses of programming languages.
FWIW I think the “software engineering” course was the most useless “CS” course I took.
