You don't need to be turned away to be discouraged from entering the program. A department filled with hormonal 20-year-old brogrammers is not my idea of a nurturing setting for a young woman. Add that with the condescension from the faculty, the peer pressure, and limited job prospects after graduation (after all girls can't possibly be any good at programming) and you have a proportional shortage of women in the field.

Oh, grind your ax somewhere else.

Nothing makes you look like a reactionary idiot faster than stuffing "Lol librls r dumb" into a conversation where it's completely irrelevant.

Also... I can't think of any organization that actually needs several hundred services piped to each workstation... I'm trying really hard to think of what those would all even be...

Your lack of imagination does not negate the possibility.

Okay... lets say the company has 10 databases because they're too lazy to integrate them.

Why would they integrate them? What's the business advantage of doing so? Do you really think the suits are going to allow you to spend the time doing this when there's virtually no benefit, and it's much more important to fix the shade of red on the landing page?

Then lets say they need email? In my experience they tend to actually need a way of passing information around the organization rather than accepting and sending information out of it.

This is pure bullshit. Companies need to communicate just as much with the outside world as they need to with each other. Have you ever actually worked in a corporate network environment? Your 99% number is invented from whole cloth.

Then what else... a web browser with access to a finite and specific number of domains.

Who's going to manage that? What's keeping the end users from using another browser?

Anyway, I don't know why you'd need users to be able to access that many sites. At least not in a high security environment.

You're delusional. The suits are never going to stand for having to ask permission every time they need to go to a site not on the whitelist. You're better off using one of the filtering services that's out there (blacklist).

I'm pathological about controlling EVERYTHING. And I do.

And when someone with "Chief" at the start of their job title tells you that they control something, not you, what are you going to do? You can quit or be fired. No, you make the exception. I've worked at multiple Fortune 500 companies that allowed the C levels to do pretty much whatever the fuck they wanted.. and one of them let the users do whatever the fuck they wanted, including porn. You can try to control everything, and you might succeed, but sooner or later someone with hire/fire over you will make you make an exception.

The likelihood of something people don't have any experience with falling to hackers is "less"...

Have you ever heard of a zero-day vulnerability?

it seems like most of your premise is that low security is the only way to go in unskilled environments where even the IT department doesn't understand their jobs. I suppose but if your security department doesn't understand security then you don't have a security department. :D

IT incompetence is a thing to be sure. But, it's more likely that IT is only about 50% staffed for the workload they have, and also that they will not be allowed to implement security measures if the suits don't like it. Very often their hands are tied. Without executive buy-in, they're bullied into doing whatever the fuck the users want, security be damned.

I'd like to live in your world where you never run into idiots that have power over your policies and basically make it impossible to do your job sanely. "Do it or you're fired" is a thing.

You're also assuming the attack comes from outside the organization. Any infosec worker worth their copy of Wireshark knows that the biggest threat comes from inside, not from outside.

Pays off for your corporate masters, you mean. You still need to get back to work before they fire you.

Meaning employees must be taught which activities are correct, which are wrong, and then be refreshed on a yearly basis.

You can do all that, but if there are no consequences for breaching security policy (the "wrong" activities) then your average mundane has no incentive to do their part to improve security.

If one in every twenty employees that was caught breaking security policy were given an all-expense-paid trip to the curb with all their shit in a box, the rest would start taking it seriously and not just bitch about having to change their password every 90 days.

Chip and PIN != RFID.

It's not that people don't use their problem solving skills, it's just made very clear to them early on that using them is not in their interests. Solving problems, no matter how difficult or potentially lucrative, does not have any impact on your status in the workplace, especially with regards to your compensation. In the USA, you can change the world with your innovative thinking, or you can do just enough to not get fired, your status (especially with regards to compensation) remains the same. Recently I had a wage review in which I was given a 2.5% raise for a "meets expectations" performance review. I asked what I could expect for an "exceeds expectations" (highest rating) review, so I could try for that. I was told 3%. The difference between busting your butt 90 hours a week and warming a chair is a half of a percent. You quickly learn that your hard work solving problems gets you exactly nowhere, while your manager takes credit for your work and gets a bonus (especially if they keep your salary low).

So it's not that we can't solve problems, it's that it doesn't get us anywhere. For those of us motivated by money (and that should be everyone) it's a losing proposition.

Just remember, if you're not in the family in a family owned business, you'll start at the bottom and by God, you'll stay there.

Keep your resume handy. Big Biz will be along shortly to either buy you guys out or crush you.

In my experience you still need to tell Amex that you'll be traveling. When I went to Europe last year, I made sure Amex knew before I left.

This was a Blue card, so maybe the "regular" card does it differently.

Yeah, try getting past HR in any company of appreciable size without a degree. It's the first thing they do to narrow down the pile of resumes; no degree, in the bin you go. If you want a job that doesn't involve a paper hat and a nametag, you need a degree. Not for the skills or information that you learned while getting the degree, nor for the demonstrable ability to do mindless busy work without killing yourself. No, they want you to come through the door with six figures of debt, so that they can make you do three jobs for half a salary.

If you find something that you enjoy that actually makes you employable, NEVER let your employer know that you enjoy it. They will use that to give you smaller raises and skip over you for promotions, because they know if you enjoy it, you're less likely to leave when they treat you like shit.

If you study something you do not like, you are most likely not very good at it. So you won't get a lot of money.

If you study something you like, despite being good at it, you most likely will not make any money at all. Twenty-five years ago, some well-meaning idiot told me that I should study what interests me and not worry about what happens after graduation. It took me 15 years to get into a career with any potential for steady employment and good salaries. I had to delay buying a house, having kids, all sorts of stuff that is really important in a consumer-driven civilization. Yes, I'm bitter about that. I hope my kids learn from my mistakes (wrong major, public university, stubbornly refusing to admit when you've made a horrible mistake.)

Furthermore, going to university is NOT about getting trained for a specific job.

It didn't use to be, but it's so freaking expensive to go to college these days (even a public university will cost you about $100k for a four-year degree) that you have to consider ROI. Employers want easily interchangeable cogs that cost as little as possible. Training costs money, so they don't do it. Then they complain that there are no trained workers. The cognitive dissonance is shouted down by profits at any cost.

You are trained (hopefully) in scientific and critical thinking, working self-controlled, and be able to solve problems on your own.

All of which will serve you well working at Starbucks. None of those are valuable to an employer. They don't want you thinking too much, they can't conceive of any other management style than suffocating helicoptering micromanaging, and if you can solve problems on your own, then you have a degree of independence that won't be tolerated.

there is no big difference between the sciences and most arts.

Very true. NOBODY can get a job these days.

However, they are both capable to learn the other stuff in no time (iff they do not have an psychosocial issue with math).

If they can find the time between searching for a shitty "entry-level" job that requires 3 years' experience and their second job that they need to be able to make their student loan payments and eat.

At least some of those with the laundry list of required skills as long as your arm are not really job postings, but a company going through the motions of trying to hire domestic workers before they whine about not enough H1-Bs to fill positions that they can't find Americans to do. That job description is custom tailored to the H1-B they want to hire. Nobody has the exact same skillset as someone else, so of course they won't find anyone that EXACTLY matches that list of skills. So they get their H1-B at 60% of the salary an American worker would command, as well as an abuse sponge that can't complain or face deportation.