Back in the late 90s / early 2000s, training companies were making tons and tons of money funneling people with zero computer experience through MCSE certification bootcamps. Basically, they would do the entire set of certification exams in 2 weeks, and not all of them were 100% honest to students about their chances of passing or even getting a job once they were done. These bootcamps still exist, but from what I've experienced, they're only for people who actually know the material and just need to update their skills quickly. The earlier iterations of these were definitely certification mills though. I went to one around 2001 because I wanted to update my certs. The class was split -- some of us were there to just do a quick skills upgrade, and others had obviously been suckered in by a dishonest recruiter. To get these folks to pass, instructors would give them copied exam questions to study and pay for these students' extra chances to pass the exams. The school would then be able to tout their super-high pass rate for the exams. And these weren't cheap either -- some were $7K or $8K in 1990s dollars. Even when you factor the cost of a hotel stay, meals and an instructor, the profit margin is huge.

Now it seems that the focus is less on system admin skills and more on "web coding" like these schools are offering classes in. Seems like a perfect hook -- young students who use their iPhone or Android mobile constantly get sold the dream that they too can be the next great app writer and make millions. And it really does seem doable -- with all the web frameworks out there, there's very little a "coder" has to know about what's actually going on under the hood to make something that works. Problem is that paper MCSEs didn't work out so well when they got on the job, so I doubt these classes will help mint genius developers either. My boot camp class back in the day had a former bus driver and someone who was fresh out of the army in an unrelated field.

Libertarians will say it's OK for businesses to take advantage of people, but I think education is a little bit different. Selling someone thousands of dollars in classes and telling them they're equivalent to CS graduates just isn't honest, and these schools profit off peoples' naivete and sell them dreams. The state gets to regulate educational institutions, so it makes sense that they're taking a look at them. And what if it was something simple like needing to publish student outcomes or pass rates? The libertarian free market would be all excited then, because the bad ones might be weeded out if students could be bothered to do research on statistics available from regulation.

It took ages to weed the paper MCSEs out of the workforce, and it's still not 100% complete. Every time I meet an "IT professional" who has no troubleshooting ability, I think back to these bootcamps.

Microsoft isn't giving their server designs away out of the goodness of their hearts. They have a huge interest in getting people to move their workloads to Azure. The first step for most places has to be getting them off of VMWare or KVM onto Hyper-V/Windows Server. Next step is convincing enterprises to buy these whitebox server designs to save money on their on-premises stuff. Finally they'll make Azure too good a deal to pass up for the CIO crowd with the usual argument that you can fire most of your IT department. It's already super-easy to publish your applications right from Visual Studio to Azure...again, not an accident.

I actually think the whitebox design method is a good thing...IF...you have a dedicated staff working 24/7 to repair/replace sickly boxes, and the workload is such that a box is a box is a box. This works perfectly for large scale web apps backed by a SAN, or hypervisor hosts. It doesn't work as well for standalone application stacks that have semi-permanent physical server dependencies. Renting 3 servers in the cloud doesn't make as much sense as renting 3,000.

My company does a lot of standalone deployments of applications around the world, in places where network connectivity doesn't permit easy cloud access. It's getting harder to find vendors who aren't trying to steer us to the cloud. Microsoft is making it very difficult to purchase perpetual licenses of software, with the price of a negotiated Software Assurance deal being set less than the equivalent one time license fee [1]. Now that IBM just bailed out of the x86 server market, HP is pretty much the only vendor left making decent hardware for non-cloud applications.

I totally get why AWS, Azure and public clouds make sense. When you're running the back-end for an iPhone app, and need 40,000 web servers all cranking out the same content, it makes sense to rent that. But a lot of companies don't seem to get that it's more expensive to do the cloud thing if the servers are going to be permanent and you're hosting one of those boring line-of-business apps. Hopefully people will realize this before the last decent x86 server vendor quits selling non-cloud-optimized servers.

[1] Licensing SQL Server on multi-socket physical boxes is insanely expensive now compared to VMs. I had to add ESXi to our solution for a recent deployment just to save thousands of dollars on the database license for a low-powered app.

I'm getting older and now have 2 little kids of my own. The oldest is 3 now, so just about ready to really get going with learning. My history with computers starts with the Commodore VIC-20 around 1982 or so, then the Apple ][. then DOS, then Windows/Linux. So I've had the privilege of seeing the evolution of personal computing through a very interesting time period. In my opinion, anyone starting out with Windows or MacOS as their primary OS has lots of the early complexity of PCs abstracted away. Linux is a little more connected with the actual machine, but modern distros do a really good job with this same abstraction.

I was thinking about this very thing last week. It was in the context of dealing with lots of legacy tech at work (I work in the air transport business...the core of everything is positively ancient with all the cool stuff layered on top.) I think the answer has to be yes -- so much of our technology builds on basics. Plus, a lot of early decisions regarding computer hardware, etc. only truly make sense in a context of a previous era (examples from the PC side include serial communications, the 640K real mode memory limit, the architecture of BIOS, and all the backwards-compatibility stuff that modern people just learning this would scratch their head at.) It's almost like you have to start out at the DOS level to just explain that the actual machine doesn't do all that much without a complex OS. The current crop of students doesn't have to deal with stuff like serial port settings, memory management when writing software, etc. On one hand that's actually a good thing but on the other hand, it's hard to explain stuff like that when you actually need to know why something doesn't work.

I'm a systems person rather than a software developer, and jumping back into dev at this point would be a big shift for me because of this fact. Every time I look at a language, Web framework, etc. there is so much abstraction from what actually happens that it's confusing. And I know that's funny since all the object oriented stuff was meant to make things easy and hide that complexity. But lately, unless you're writing raw C++, so much is done for you in libraries and the language itself that you find yourself asking what you actually have to write. Facebook is insanely complex under the hood, sure, but the end users don't see any of that. Even on the back end, it's written against frameworks that do so much for the programmer.

This same thing transcends computers. It's amazing what ingenuity earlier technology employed to get around the fact that cheap, ubiquitous computing resources weren't available. Things like signaling systems, electromechanical telephone switches, etc. come to mind. I read a particularly interesting article about how Readers' Digest used to run their direct mail advertising campaigns without the aid of computers, and it involved a mechanically controlled system that picked up stamped name-and-address plates to print peoples' information on envelopes. From my area of expertise (airlines,) the carriers had a mechanically controlled filing system to reserve and release seats on aircraft. A lot of the logic behind stuff like this directly translates to solving problems with computers, and having a good grasp of stuff like it can only help people be better problem solvers.

I know I'll be modded down for this, but whatever.

I just don't see the big deal over any of the surveillance going on. I guess that now the data is structured and easily searchable rather than having to stitch together random analog phone conversations. But in a country of 300 million people, no one is interested in your text messages, emails, etc. unless you're using them to actively plan something. The Internet is a collection of semi-public networks, always has been. And spying has always existed; that shouldn't be a surprise to anybody.

Everyone loves to bash the president, but I'll bet it's not an easy job. Imagine what it was like for Cold War presidents...when the Soviet Union was actively planning our destruction and we were planning theirs. Coming back from the inauguration party, you meet with your top generals and are told of every threat that hasn't been made public. On top of that, you're ultimately responsible for nuclear weapons AND you somehow have to make everyone like you. I imagine something like this happened with Obama...once he got the job he was briefed on what's actually happening outside of the public eye, and chose to continue the spying programs. Post 9/11, there were many people who didn't want to see that relatively minor event repeated at any cost, which is why these programs were put in place to begin with. An entity that was determined enough and had enough resources would be able to cause way worse devastation if they wanted to.

So call me an ignorant sheep or whatever -- I just don't see why so many people are up in arms. I'd expect the rabid anti-government crowd to be shouting their protests from within their mountaintop compounds, but not the average citizen.

"That's fine, right up until 1 airline allows it, and you start seeing their flight prices just a nudge below everyone elses. "

Very good point. I'm in the airline IT business. Airlines may be deregulated in the US, but every time one does something, the others follow. If Delta raises or lowers their fares by $10, United will do the same thing, often the same day. Same thing goes for inflight service changes -- if something that was free suddenly becomes an "ancillary revenue stream," you can bet that the other carriers will do this as soon as they can make the systems changes necessary to collect said fee. There are a couple of low cost carriers (Southwest, JetBlue) that don't exactly follow this model, but service is so homogenized that all the carriers might as well merge. So if one carrier starts allowing calls, everyone will, but i don't know if people will take that one lying down. The airlines have all been cutting capacity and stuffing more people into coach for years -- this would be a pretty big slap in the face IMO.

Thankfully I have a shorter commute these days, but my last job involved an hour-and-a-half trip each direction on the train. The thing that bothered me most wasn't the time, the crowded trains, the hours i had to get up in the morning. No, it was the people yapping on their phones. Imagine a 5:50 AM commuter train with totally dead people half-asleep, then some idiot starts screaming into their phone and doesn't shut up for the entire trip. Now imagine that same scenario, but now you're inches away from that idiot crammed into a coach seat for a 14 hour flight to Japan. I fly a fair amount of these incredibly long trips for work, and I think I'd rather poke a hole in my eardrums with a sharp instrument than listen to 14 hours of inane banter or some exec screaming at his subordinate or assistant.

People just don't get that (a) you don't need to shout anymore, and (b) no one wants to hear about the divorce case you're working on, the colon polyp you had removed, your escapades out at the bar last night, your cat, your dog, your kids or any of the large number of conversations I've heard.

The other thing that's nice for the truly crazy business people I know (I'm not one of them) is that airplane time is dead time -- no one is sending you messages, no one can reach you, etc.

I'm saying the choice shouldn't exist, and the appropriate level of resources plus those otherwise spent on the choice should be put into the broken system to fix it.

Having charter schools is like giving parents access to "private school lite" in that their kids will get some, but not all, advantages that the kids who go to elite private schools get. The problem is that not everyone benefits. Only the most vocal and caring parents who push for their kids to be taken out of the bad public schools will get the advantage. The parents who don't care, aren't around or have their own problems keep their kids in the public school, and things get worse as a result.

In my mind, the real answer is to correct the problems in the existing system rather than trying to build a parallel one around it. Fixes would be extremely controversial and wouldn't work until things got intolerable:
- Pay all teachers in all districts well. Make it a lucrative profession -- there are too many places that pay teachers less than flight attendants (and starting FA salaries are insanely low.)
- Introduce more rigid tracks into schools -- academic track, vocational track, sports training track, warehouse track. Basically, do the most good for the most people and realize that not everyone will achieve at the same level. (Of course, society would need to provide jobs for everyone at all levels, which is a way bigger problem.)
- Put enough money into poor districts to bring them up to the same standards as better ones. Yes, that's a lot of money and represents a huge transfer of wealth. No, it's not palatable in the current climate. Just spending double on the students isn't enough, you need to take inflation into account.

So yes, I think that if the situation were bad enough and there were no alternatives, adding more money would fix the problem. With the alternatives, you give enough people the option to say "Oh, that's not my problem anymore."

People in my school district complain bitterly about taxes, but their kids get a good education out of the deal. I think a lot of them don't realize that many other parts of the country charge a pittance in taxes per year and return a predictable result in school achievement. I also think a lot of people are bitter about the "evil teachers' unions" just because their private sector employment has been taking away wages and benefits for decades almost unchallenged. One real world example of the disconnect -- my old job wanted me to relocate to Florida a while back. Even the real estate agents showing us around said we would need to factor in the cost of a private school to get a comparable level of school quality.

I also think things will have to get really bad before anything changes. Look at the political will and control China has -- they realize their economy is out of balance and too reliant on exports. Their solution? Manufacture a domestic consumer economy by picking up people and physically moving them to cities. They're moving hundreds of millions of people to cities over the next decade, because subsistence farming peasants don't buy stuff, but city dwellers do. I think you can safely assume that nothing like that would happen here. But, it has the potential to instantly fix that problem.

I live in a relatively nice area with good public schools. We pay a lot of money in property taxes for the privilege, of course. I also have 2 little kids who aren't quite ready for school yet, so this debate will become pretty real for us soon.

The idea of a charter school on its face seems like a good one -- take the smart students who would be poorly served by a bad public school and put them in an environment where they can succeed. There are a few problems with this idea IMO:
- Taking out the only students who care (and/or have parents that care) from the public schools will only hollow them out further and make them worse.
- Charter schools don't have to worry about things like special ed, kids with behavior problems and other stuff that public schools do. Public schools have the mandate to graduate mentally handicapped children from high school. Public schools are forced to deal with disruptive kids up to the point they commit criminal acts, and beyond. Charter schools have hand-picked student bodies whose parents give a crap about their kids. Those students are going to be the ones who take the extra effort and do well on their SATs or spend the time to get their homework done, and that's why charter schools are held up as models.
- Charter schools are run by education companies. Any /. nerd of a certain age remembers the Simpsons episode with Troy McClure doing the voiceover for the Pepsi Education Channel. (If you don't, look it up...it's funny.) That's a little over the top, but look at what for-profit "colleges" like University of Phoenix or ITT Tech have done in the higher education world.

The only thing that will fix bad public schools is:
- Money -- Even if the local community can't support a big tax base, money needs to come from other sources to fix the existing public system. Teachers need to be paid well and have good working conditions. Students need at least a tolerable learnning environment.
- Parental involvement -- Even living in a decent area, I see so many parents who need their parent license revoked. Crap parents --> Crap kids --> Crap school. This goes across economic lines too...poor parents might be using drugs or abusing their kids, but some rich parents totally ignore their kids or let them do whatever they want.

Throw money at the public schools and the problems will be fixed. It just takes more money than people are willing to contribute right now, and it would take a huge mind shift to change that. Add on the libertarian agenda that gets pushed on us, the push for smaller government, etc. and it's going to be very tough indeed until the problem becomes so bad it can't be ignored.

I don't know, I think he might be on to something, but the red state/blue state map doesn't make any real world sense. Part of it seems like the typical NYC/California hipster bubble ignoring the rest of the country but the idea might be right.

Don't forget that in the 70s/80s, only real gearheads/nerds were doing anything with computers. This changed in the 90s with the Internet, and changed even more with smartphones in the 2000s. Now, the camps skew a little differently:
- True gearheads who want to know every little scrap of technical information about a technology product -- increasingly small percentage
- "Prosumer" users who like nice tech toys but aren't obsessed with the "how they work" part -- Small pecentage, but more than gearheads
- "Normals" who use technology on a daily basis and care even less about how it works -- Basically, the same surface area on that map redistributed across the continent

Part of the reason Apple is so successful is because the iPhone interface is accessible to normals. Everything complex about it is hidden. Android does this to an extent, and different phone/tablet manufacturers abstract the complexity even more. Any normal can pick up an iPhone, use the Facebook app, SMS, tweet, send old fashioned emails, etc. with a very low learning curve.

It sounds like Yahoo wants to be the 2010s version of AOL -- universally accessible content at the risk of alienating the gearheads, who don't read Yahoo for tech news anyway.

"What are you worried about? The changes in technology mean that we can make the same stuff with much less work. In principle, that means either that people can do other, more interesting and productive work, or that they are going to have more leisure time."

Just because you can do more interesting work, or have more leisure time, doesn't mean everyone in the economy can. I grew up in the Rust Belt in the early 80s, when the big domestic manufacturers were moving to unregulated Southern states or overseas. Large steel mills and factories in Cleveland, Buffalo, central PA, etc. provided stable jobs at good wages for tons and tons of people. One plant would employ 10,000 people on a shift doing basic work that didn't require a degree, or even much training. Those same people pumped millions of dollars into the local economy. They bought and fixed up houses. They bought cars when they could. They went down to the local bar at the end of their shift. They had kids and bought stuff for them. Now, most of that is gone and these former members of the middle class are unable to find replacement work at suitable levels.

I understand what you're saying, and it's what everyone says, but that thinking is only applicable to the high end of the middle class. Now with automation in office work and IT, a lot of the former knowledge work is going the same way as the factory work did. Not everyone is going to benefit the same way they did when agriculture was mechanized or during the industrial revolution. The reality is that there is going to be massive structural unemployment that our current society and economic system isn't equipped to handle.

What new, exciting innovative high-skill job would you give a factory worker who was putting the same rivet in the same hole on the same product for the last 10 years? There's a lot more of these types than you think....

I do worry about what's coming next for the middle class, and that's coming from someone who's firmly in the "knowledge worker" camp. The reality of this is that the traditional "corporate drone" job is rapidly being replaced by software automation or cheaper labor. Futurists who see a bright Star Trek-style utopia at the end of this change, in my opinion, are overlooking some very big problems:

- The loss of safe, stable corporate employment is going to cause a huge shift in people's standard of living. There are millions of people who get up, get in their car, go to an office, take a stack of input work, perform some process on it, forward it to the output queue, and repeat this 5 days a week. I think most IT people can relate -- we support lots of people doing these jobs. All of that is going to disappear. Now you're going to have a chunk of the population who is suddenly unemployed, broke, and has no way to support itself to the same standard. Think about the office environment of the 60s vs. now -- no more secretary, no more typing pool, way fewer bookkeepers, way fewer middle managers. All those workers in the 60s made enough to buy houses, cars, vacations, etc. and keep the economy running. Now most people who want to consume are forced into debt.

- There's no getting around the bell curve. It's impolite to say, but not everyone is or can be a knowledge worker. (I'm no genius either, so I'm not trying to be snobby or elitist.) We've already hollowed out the lower end of the curve by killing manufacturing jobs. Someone with an IQ of 98 is much better suited to performing a repetitive assembly line task with no independent thought. Those people used to be able to work in factories at a wage that at least allowed them a few nice things once in a while. Now, all those people are working minimum wage jobs or unemployed.

- Right now, there is no appetite for ideas like providing everyone a subsidy. Unemployment insurance in the US is a joke and the idea of a universal income will never fly with those who have more than average.

I definitely don't want to go back to a world without computers and automation, but I think we need to seriously consider the problems that complete automation of all routine tasks will create for society in general. The standard answer when anyone brings up concerns is that better, new jobs will get created. What will these be? I can't see a future form of employment that takes the full spectrum of people's abilities into account and makes everyone's lives better. When you can't even fall back on fast food, or driving a taxi, what's next??

All things considered, I think I want to stay an FTE. I don't really need to be - my wife works and we have much better health coverage through her employer. However, one thing I've noticed with contract work is the lack of stability. Even with the high bill rates and the ability to call just about everything you purchase a business expense, there's something to be said for sticking with a company and building/fixing a product throughout the lifecycle. Also, if you can't sell, drumming up business is a lot harder than landing an FTE spot...you either have to do your own marketing or hire someone.

I've seen contractors used in 4 scenarios:
- Contract to hire -- which is the situation at my current employer now. Because there is such variability in "IT professionals" out there, companies don't want to spend the money to find out if someone's not worth keeping.
- Prostitute/mercenary model -- You're expert in the new hotness buzzword of the month, and jump from company to company all over the country/world implementing said hotness. Your employer is left dazed and confused with a little bit of documentation and a skeleton crew of permanent staff to take care of what you built.
- The Fixer -- very similar to the mercenary model -- you parachute in from nowhere, clean up someone's mess, and disappear just as quickly.
- Abuse/meatgrinder model -- No permanent employees, just a revolving code monkey/IT tech door...cycle through them and move on to the next one.

The mercenaries and the fixers end up making tons of money at the expense of a personal life. I know a couple of these guys who have tried to get me to join them (I'm a halfway decent fixer...) and they literally work 3/4 of the year or blow their copious amounts of money on expensive toys/hobbies. Only problem? I'm married and have a life outside of work.

Contract-to-hire looks good on the surface, but only if you control who you get to interview for the jobs. If you leave it up to the recruiters, you get the meatgrinder fodder who has no desire to stick with the company and watch what they built get used. We've had interviews lately where we've had to say "when we say contract-to-hire, we really mean hire."

Unfortunately, once you get that life outside of work thing, that permanent job starts looking pretty good. I've had good luck, and I tend to choose employers who don't treat their FTEs like disposable contractors. I know I'm leaving money on the table, but I think that if you pick companies that are in it for the long haul, staying on and building up institutional knowledge makes it even less likely they'll throw you out. As long as you're not the highest paid person there and still demanding more, there are still stable FTE jobs outside of government.

I couldn't believe this when I saw it. What really got me was WHY a PR "professional" would post something like this. She gets paid to put positive spins on corporate communications. Was alcohol involved? Did she think she was posting something for only her Facebook friends to consume? Did someone guess her supersecret password "password123" and decide to have fun? Turns out she was just being dumb. Don't they teach this stuff in college communications classes? (I guess that's why the communications majors were at the bars 6 nights a week while us science nerds were studying our butts off for little gain.)

True PR people can be amazingly good at what they do. Look at all the bad press heaped on BP after their drilling rig blew up, or the banks when the economy almost collapsed. The PR people were churning out positive spins on stories for all these companies...I really think they just live in an alternate reality and believe 100% in what they write.

I'm not a big Facebook person -- I only use it to keep up with family and old friends -- and I don't have a Twitter account. Maybe I'm old but I really don't understand the point of Twitter. Facebook I get, sort of. Twitter is a complete mystery to me, and it only seems like it appeals to people who want to stalk celebrities...excuse me, celebrities' PR departments. :-)

The permanent nature of Internet communications is very real -- once something is said, it can never be unsaid. It's what stops me from putting up the casual IT blog I'm interested in doing -- I'm paranoid about some employer somewhere taking offense with something that was said years back.

Unfortunately, people still don't understand the concept of the totally public nature of social media. Even if this person didn't understand the privacy settings, sharing with "friends" doesn't necessarily mean those friends won't tell their friends who have their entire lives posted on Facebook.

I have no idea about the facts of the case, but I know I wouldn't want someone who was willing to post things like that on a public forum making a determination that meant I would never get a job, never be able to rent an apartment, etc. without difficulty again. I would want at least a shot at an impartial hearing, which it doesn't sound like this person is capable of giving. I'm sure people who deal with this stuff every day get jaded, kind of like veteran police detectives after 20 years of non-stop criminals. But, those same people expose their beliefs online and think it won't come back to bite them. When your job is to hand out the electronic Scarlet Letters, you shouldn't post/tweet that you're not going to give people a fair shot.

This is going to be interesting over the next decade. Either people will really start getting themselves into bad situations with their oversharing, or the next generation of MBAs/politicians will roll in and expect 100% posting of your life online. Public figures (teachers, judges, police, etc.) are under a lot more scrutiny than the average citizen also...and they should realize that.

I know if I were in that situation, I wouldn't want to be kept alive any longer than necessary. I'm not even sure why these anti-suicide laws exist, even for healthy people. If someone is miserable, has a crappy life for whatever reason, and doesn't want to be here anymore, then they should be allowed to go. Better yet, they should be allowed to go in a controlled manner. So many suicides are violent or messy -- jumping off a building, gunshots to the head, bleeding out...you name it. That's no fun to leave behind for your family. I'd like to have the option of a non-messy suicide, no questions asked, if I ever found myself in a hopeless situation. Suicidal people are miserable, depressed, whatever...let them go peacefully. No amount of mental health treatment is going to make someone better who's come to that crossroads in their life.

I know it's going to take a few more generations for religion to be completely marginalized, but this is one of the things that should change ahead of time. If I ever end up with dementia or a terminal illness with no hope of a good outcome, I don't want to have to sit around waiting until my body just can't keep going.