I wouldn’t make actually mastering it compulsory. But definitely exposure to and learning about such things should be. Some people are happy putting their entire being into their vocation.
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I didn’t mean that you were guilty of that stereotyping - perhaps I should delete it.
I find myself at the moment either misunderstanding or being misunderstood a lot, so apologies.
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i hear you. i was cutting it short because it makes me so bitter. as much as i appreciate bitter as a flavor, as an emotion it sucks 
seriously, i make recommendations for talented female students going to jr. high to get into pre-ap classes as well as for talented black and hispanic students. sometimes there’s crossover between those categories. then i get to hear the jr. high teachers complain that i’m doing too much “affirmative action” and not sending enough information about the white students. i have even had a teacher accuse me of reverse discrimination.
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/me-raises-hand
School did not know what to do with me at all. I excelled at math AND art. Bored to tears by everything else. My report cards were Ds and A+s. I frustrated everyone (and had no ambition, OG slacker for the win!)
I remember being told I had to choose math/science or art/music/drama in GRADE EIGHT. The guidance counsellor told me there was no career that combined everything, and that I had to choose now because we started picking career courses in grade fucking eight. (Which honestly explains my resume, theatre to manufacturing to education.)
Hilariously, I’m now the administrator for a University program (the first of its kind in Canada) that merges business and arts. “Where business savvy meets creative passion” - because suddenly we’ve realized we need graduates that understand the culture of arts but that can also balance a budget. Crazy talk! You can’t do both! Only one! /s
Oh, and just to stay on track: our program is 90% female. My thought is this is where the girls who were “good at math” but didn’t want to jump into the poison well of STEM, but also who were interested in fashion/theatre/etc - this is where they all came because we’re the only ones who have said “you can do both”. (our applicant to acceptance ration is 10:1, funny that eh?)
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JESUS FUCKING CHRIST WHAT IS THIS OMG DID SHE JUST INTERVIEW ME AND ALL MY FRIENDS!
Yes this is a complete sentence goddammit!
“thwarted by boomers who can’t afford to retire and threatened by the prospect of leap-frogging millennials…49 percent of Gen Xers feel stalled in their careers.”
OH GOD THIS x100000000 THIS!
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I was just shocked someone remembered Gen Xers exist. All you ever hear about is boomers chasing that sweet millennial advertising money – for stuff millennials always say they can’t afford.
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I’ve never heard it put so well!
All my bosses have been boomers.
Everyone I’ve ever hired, and are now coworkers are millennials.
Its getting rarer each year to find another GenX. And when we do, we flock together so fast.
We’re so outnumbered!
There’s so many more of both sides!
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And the one thing the boomers do that I CANNOT STAND is this whole “ohh, but they’re digital natives, they do things DIFFERENTLY” BS. Every time I hear about how “millennials are doing X” it’s something me and all my Gen X friends and my boomer but tech savvy mother all do too. It’s not really an age thing, even though the marketers want to make it that way.
My Gen X friends and I are sick of hearing about how the office environment is going to change to WHAT WE’VE BEEN ADVOCATING FOR YEARS because millennials like it better that way. I keep hearing about “disruptive change” and when I get particulars it’s things I got in trouble for advocating for ten years ago.
Okay, rant off. But sheesh.
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Where do the social sciences fit into that? What about cognitive science, philosophy of technology, or history of technology? Law? What about education itself?
If I had to choose between non-interdisciplinary liberal arts and non-interdisciplinary STEM, I’d choose STEM in a hot second, because I would be a drudge but I’d be an employable drudge.
However, it turns out that in the real world, not only are liberal arts grads employable because they are disciplinary, but STEM grads are as well. Any STEM grads who do not adapt with the times and only do whatever is on their diploma find themselves stuck doing the same grunt work until that grunt work is declared obsolete.
Yep. Right now, I’m surrounded by Boomers and Millennials. The Boomers are really fucking depressing, and have basically been hanging around in the same job for 20+ years for various reasons. They have no passion and no creativity left, assuming they ever had any. The Millennials have passion and creativity, but they don’t know how to do anything, because not only are they young, but they can’t really think for themselves. There are a few GenXers here, and we get most of the stuff accomplished, but we don’t really fit in anywhere, we just kinda exist.
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No idea how they were handling other students, I was in grade eight. I was good at math and I liked to draw. Apparently that was confusing for everyone.
This!
They don’t! They really really don’t! Its mind boggling! They don’t know they don’t know stuff too, its so weird. I spend a lot of time coaching kids into NOT reinventing the wheel. “we created an event ticketing website for your phone!” “oh, is this different from Eventbrite?” “…whats Eventbrite?” (actual conversation I actually had with students) - now to be fair to youngens, I also do this for my bosses.
Honestly 99% of my job is “knowing how to google”.
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Very true. When in the early 1980s I was asked where I had learned to design industrial data acquisition systems, I used to reply “this stuff did not exist when I was at university.” And it was true. The principles, yes.
I think I made my first pitch involving what we would now call “cloud computing” in around 2000, and ever since I’ve been encountering people telling me why it can’t possibly work for big IT projects. Many of those people had BlackBerries in the early years and then iPhones, but they didn’t see the disconnect.
This is partly why I think women have more chance in “technology” companies than they realise, provided they find the right environment. In my experience women focus more on what is to be achieved, men more on the hardware. (Or a particular software approach). The former approach (find problem, identify tool, solve problem) is better than have tool, find problem, try to apply tool to problem.
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I was once in a job interview and the interviewer kept asking me questions about the process of buying a server farm, how much a server costs, etc. and I was totally flummoxed. I am not an IT guy or a sysadmin or whoever is in charge of buying servers, and I don’t claim to be.
Apparently, the guy asked me these questions because I had the phrase “data acquisition” on my resume 
Designing these things is hard work. Everything, from the filters and impedance matching to the scheduling and control, needs to be designed specifically for the sensors and the phenomenon you’re trying to sense. Most of this stuff they don’t even teach in school. Each part of it, yes, and all the parts together would make a good graduate program, but the overall theory behind data acquisition systems isn’t covered in nearly enough depth.
…is actually a decades-old concept labeled with a fancy little buzzword to make it sound modern. If you were pitching cloud computing in 2000, you were way ahead of the buzzword, but right in the middle of the development of actual cloud computing technology.
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Gad, what a stupid comment. Creativity is universal. That way of thinking is good for both the arts and STEM and they complement each other.
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You know what the saddest thing is?
I wanted to be an architect.
Or you know: art with math.
Why on earth could they not think of that? Bonkers!
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Math is very creative. It’s just taught in a stultifyingly uncreative way.
At levels beyond the plug-and-chug formula stuff, math is definitely as much of an art as it is a science.
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Well, not all of us! 
Actually, I think my best work was in my last few years before I retired. But I think that was partly circumstance. Now it’s all funneling into hobbies. When I’m not having a doctor’s appointments that is.
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True story: a couple of my millennial coworkers were leaning against one of the tables when the wheel came off. Everyone was shocked when I got down to check out the extent of the damage, then a GenX coworker and I cleared the table and he helped me flip it over so that we could determine that it had just become unscrewed and could be put back together. Boomers just muttered how it needed to be replaced (as if that would ever happen) and millenials just had no clue what to do other than “don’t touch it”.
I think what it more shows is that Boomers have gotten cemented in thinking things are like they used to be when people thought stuff mattered (it’s broke, order another), and millenials haven’t had time to get the experience. Us X’ers have learned to cope along the lines of “no one gives a shit” which has made us remarkably flexible at figuring things out. Plus, we’re cynical as fuck, so, no, we ain’t gonna reinvent the wheel, but we’ll give you something that works even if it’s not what you expected. After all, the entire world isn’t the one we were told to expect, and we just got told “deal with it. I got mine, fuck you.”
Personally, I have more hope for millenials than boomers. Millenials need to learn, but boomers think they already know, despite the fact that they fucked up everything.
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Yeah, it’s constant learning. We were told that basically the half-life of scientific knowledge is five years. I imagine in computer science it’s even shorter.
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True, definitely not all.
But it’s hard to work for a big faceless company 30-40 years and not feel like said company chewed you up and pooped you out.
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I first learned about this in an electronic music course – they had a set of analog to digital/digital to analog converters for a computer to talk to the synthesizers. A few years later I got to use one in the lab. Now that’s Art and STEM interacting.
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