Woah! ADD my friend. Apply that intellect of yours to one thing at a time!

I dunno, I think that's why you learn insertion (is there really a case for bubble in some cases? Would be interesting news to me). You learn bubble as a basis for understanding other algorithms. Both are important.

Bah! Well first, thank you for a real response backed up by knowledge in the field, but still, bah! This is exactly the type of thing we don't like! Isn't it obvious that "assholes" are poison to a workforce? Was all this studying really necessary for that conclusion? If not, then the relevant portion of the study is how to "detect" assholes. So what's the answer from management types (I'm not trying to offend, just give a perspective) - paperwork! We'll make everybody take the same impersonal test asking dumb, subjective questions for which most people will just throw out whatever answer they think management is looking for. And this is astounding? Color me unconvinced. Everybody knows who the assholes are...or is the goal of these new-fangled psychological techniques to remove the necessity of a manager to actually interact with their employees and know who they are?

I agree with you wholeheartedly, but I also don't understand what you mean. You say that managers need "constant training" but you don't say what kind of training. If you're talking about a willingness to keep learning about your employees and growing your leadership skills by analyzing which things you do that work and which that don't, then I understand. But this is more on par with building skill in a single technology, learning all the little quirks slowly. What I'm interested to know is if there is any analogue in management to a techie learning something completely new - we do it all the time to stay relevant, but what about managers?

Hi! (I'm trying to start with a friendly vibe because otherwise I'm afraid my comment might come off as sarcastic.) I think that the reason the slashdot community generally considers management to be a no-brainer (as evidenced very recently by your extremely underrated post) is that we all believe, often from first-hand experience, but also from hear-say, speculation, and exaggeration, that many of the "skills, techniques, and tools" that managers try to stay up on are merely bullshit to make them managers seem busy and justify their continued employment. I'm curious (seriously) what things you think managers need to keep up with that don't fall into that category.

We don't know what people would do if piracy weren't an option. It very well might be that the sales of games and movies might be significantly lower.

I'm not gonna say "fixed that for you" because it could be either your way or my way based on the evidence in your post. If you're going to say something like "we have no idea", you can't then posit that one thing "might very well be" without recognizing that the other thing could also very well be. If you think one way is more likely than the other, then you have to say why that is.

Pardon, what I meant was, the should *just* be using Matlab - what does FORTRAN do that Matlab can't?

Seems to me that if those are really their only requirements, they should be using Matlab.

I don't think universities should end up being glorified trade schools, which is in essence what you are suggesting. I don't like the idea of only learning things that we will "use" in our "careers", because I think that's the road to being very single-faceted and unable to adapt. We'll never be able to teach or learn everything that we will confront outside of school, so learning only one thing will cripple us when the new things come along. Higher education should at its core be about teaching people to think critically, independently, and creatively, and I think many engineering curricula utterly fail at this, largely because they *only* require 25% of those extra classes. The hard part is figuring out what else is worthwhile to teach. You think finance is worthwhile because it will be useful in a career setting - I think finance is bullshit because it's all about memorizing what the system is like so that you can exploit it to your own advantage, and not at all about education. You think things like philosophy and psychology are bullshit, probably because at most schools they aren't taken seriously, particularly by the engineering students, and the expectations of what will be gotten out of those classes are absurdly low. I think that psychology and philosophy could be some of the most useful classes when done properly. What could be better for anyone in any field than a truly deep understanding of human behavior? Wouldn't we write better software if we knew our users better? Most schools take a policy of allowing the students to choose where they spend their extra time, which I think is the right policy, but most students choose to spend their extra time taking easy classes where they won't learn a thing. This is another aspect of our entrenched anti-intellectualism, even those of us who don't reject math and science have a tendency to arrogantly reject everything else. True anti-anti-intellectualism embraces all learning.

Have you ever thought about how as software engineers, if we are completely replaced by software then that means we have hit the singularity and the whole world will be in upheaval one way or another? Because once computers can completely program themselves, nothing will be the same.

Geez you've got me there. I haven't even been able to convince a few of my closest friends who are part and parcel to this mindset. They just think I'm weird.

I would rather we start funding them like schools. I would also suggest that we suffer from a quantity vs. quality problem that the quotas in places like California, while good-intentioned, are worsening. Higher education needs to be cheap and available, but highly selective. While I'm being idealistic, I might as well also mention that we need to stop requiring college degrees for basically any middle class job. We've saturated the job market with highly educated people, while simultaneously diminishing the quality of that education. So now, as a society, we're paying inordinate sums for lowest common denominator education, that a large proportion of people don't need and won't ever use.

Correct - as long as they are for-profit businesses, we are doomed to mediocrity.

Maybe we should stop running schools like businesses and start running them like schools.

Nothing against the rest of your post, but I think you're wrong here. Grandparent wasn't talking about punishment (or thought police!), he was talking about preemptively limiting power; that is, taking power away from an entity before that entity proves that they have been corrupted by it. This is very different than preemptive punishment and it is a Good Thing. Thus we have the checks and balances of the US government and other various power limitation mechanisms throughout governments and organizations all across the globe. You don't need proof that they have been corrupted by their power, only the usually correct assumption that they will be.