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The creeping IT apocalypse

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Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#261

Post by MRD85 »

0xffff2 wrote: post #259
MRD85 wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From your perspective, what is the issue with a lot of the current college graduates? I'm a college student studying computer science, and I feel like I'd be ready to start work really soon. I'm also the sort of CS student who reads Hackernews, participates in CTFs, maintains a perfect GPA, has side projects, etc.

To be a good developer, you have to understand how computers work. You have to understand data structures. When you interview and you're asked to write a breadth-first search, or what the big-O complexity of accessing a hash map is, it's not because the company is going to have you writing your own custom hash maps right out of school. It's because you have to be aware of the general characteristics of the tools you'…

I feel I'll be fine, this is the stuff I love. I'm incredibly interested in understanding how things work, to the point that I've considered changing my degree to maths/physics/compsci. With zero revision I could explain the hash map, it's big-O, how to implement, use cases, etc. I figure that once you understand something it simply makes sense. I haven't looked into it but I'm sure there is some interesting statistics on the probability of collisions, optimisation, etc.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#262

Post by geggam »

eldavido wrote: post #149
geggam wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interviewing college graduates is depressing. No way the current education system will create people competent enough to keep this going

Don't generalize. Are you interviewing graduates from the top 10-15 programs or lesser-tier? I think this is a big error people make. Some colleges are great. Others are horrible. It's very hard to say, "College is a waste" or "college is great".

Did the interviews in Silicon Valley. MIT UCLA Stanford Berkley are some of the grads I interviewed.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#263

Post by geggam »

nradov wrote: post #242
eldavido wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't generalize. Are you interviewing graduates from the top 10-15 programs or lesser-tier? I think this is a big error people make. Some colleges are great. Others are horrible. It's very hard to say, "College is a waste" or "college is great".

It's not even a matter of tiers. There are plenty of great candidates coming out of lower rated schools, although the hit rate is lower. In general interviewers just have unrealistic expectations for entry level candidates. They forget how incompetent they were at the same age. Or they have ridiculous notions that everyone should know how to write a quicksort algorithm or whatever, when some students may have focused…

I expect you to know fundamentals about things like TCP networking and how to install, configure and manage Linux Distributions.

I find many people who can install Ubuntu and run the canned commands or curl foo.sh | sudo bash or docker / k8s scripts they download, think they know what they are doing.

They dont.

Its getting to the point someone who can install windows is more technical than someone who can install linux

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#264

Post by geggam »

jimbokun wrote: post #222
geggam wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Competence is reducing per capita. The market is saturated with IT people who dont know what they are doing

...said every generation ever about the next generation.

Sysadmins used to be able to compile a kernel and some could even hack a kernel module together.

Today ? Not happening.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#266

Post by taude »

MRD85 wrote: post #249
taude wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, there's outliers. But Not all college grads are capable of operating at that level. Which is why companies have a lot of regimented hiring practices and tests to filter out all those not making the cut. I've been on the college recruiting circuit to help my company hire, and I'm often severely disappointed by a good portion of those I meet. There's occasionally the standout who really impresses me, but then I t…

From your perspective, what is the issue with a lot of the current college graduates? I'm a college student studying computer science, and I feel like I'd be ready to start work really soon. I'm also the sort of CS student who reads Hackernews, participates in CTFs, maintains a perfect GPA, has side projects, etc.

It sounds like you're on the right path, combined with a decent personal passion project and some summer internships.

Some things I see that give me pause: 1) No project work. Lack of interest in building things on their own, researching frameworks, building out small apps, etc. I'd like to see even a small attempt at learning tooling and frameworks used on real world projects (it doesn't have to even be close to the toolings we're using, just anything).

2) Lack of reading the technology-centric, software engineering centric internet sites. Even attending a Meetup or two to start seeing what's going on outside academia (again, I live in a tech hub, so lots of opportunities).

3) Just general feeling of "hey, I got this CS degree, I'm ready to work", but not really showing much enthusiasm that they actually want to be software engineers as a career (it's a tough career that requires a lot of self-driven learning and curiosity to do it well). Believe it or not, I've seen students come through summer internships, and decide they actually don't like the real world day-to-day software development for a career.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#267

Post by nradov »

geggam wrote: post #263
nradov wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not even a matter of tiers. There are plenty of great candidates coming out of lower rated schools, although the hit rate is lower. In general interviewers just have unrealistic expectations for entry level candidates. They forget how incompetent they were at the same age. Or they have ridiculous notions that everyone should know how to write a quicksort algorithm or whatever, when some students may have focused…

I expect you to know fundamentals about things like TCP networking and how to install, configure and manage Linux Distributions. I find many people who can install Ubuntu and run the canned commands or curl foo.sh | sudo bash or docker / k8s scripts they download, think they know what they are doing. They dont. Its getting to the point someone who can install windows is more technical than someone who can install lin…

Your expectations are unrealistic and counterproductive. Bachelor's degree programs shouldn't be teaching students how to install Linux. That's just job training, not education.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#268

Post by magduf »

taude wrote: post #212
lordCarbonFiber wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's demonstrably false. Hell you can just look to startups created by new grads and dropouts to confirm your view point is inane. Today's college grads are better equipped to do a wider breath of work than any other time in history precisely because of the efficiency gains of automation.

Sure, there's outliers. But Not all college grads are capable of operating at that level. Which is why companies have a lot of regimented hiring practices and tests to filter out all those not making the cut. I've been on the college recruiting circuit to help my company hire, and I'm often severely disappointed by a good portion of those I meet. There's occasionally the standout who really impresses me, but then I t…

>There's occasionally the standout who really impresses me, but then I think they're never going to want to stick around at my place.

Maybe companies need to stop thinking in terms of employees sticking around for a really long time, and get used to the idea of employees going from place to place when they get too bored or want to do something different. It seems insane to me, the idea of expecting an extremely intelligent, high-performing person to want to come to the same workplace day after day, for years or decades, doing mostly the same work.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#269

Post by illumin8 »

jimbokun wrote: post #226
munin wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The author obviusly doesn't realize that the company making the wafers for Raytheon ISN'T ALLOWED TO USE THE CLOUD. This is probably going to change. People like you said the same thing about health data, and student data. The savings were so tantalizing that the regulators and stakeholders figured out how to make it work. What do you think GovCloud is for? C2S and "Secret cloud"? Our university had a 3-4 person de…

And at some point, AWS or Azure might be considered more secure than servers configured and administered by an organization that doesn't have that as its core competency.

This. Who beat every single private organization with Spectre/Meltdown mitigation? Amazon Web Services.

There is a pervasive myth that servers run by private organizations are more secure than those run by the public cloud providers, and the opposite is actually true. Does your organization receive embargoed information from Intel to mitigate side-channel 0-days before they are publicly announced?

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#270

Post by illumin8 »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #256
Ruxbin1986 wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at the cloudification or automation in Windows Products - Windows Updates are pushed through Intune over the internet, Exchange, SharePoint are all through Office 365. Entire On-Premise Datacenters are pushed to Azure. Yes, someone still needs to manage all of this but you need a lot less people. Or you ship these "trade jobs" to low cost areas like India.

People keep stating "you need less people" with the cloud like its an objective truth, when there's really no evidence of it, and I'd argue its patently false. You end up paying both your own IT and the cloud providers' IT, for a product that also doesn't work when your internet is slow or down. The main thing moved to the cloud where I work leads us receiving and handling the same number of support tickets as when i…

You need less people with cloud is objectively true, as long as you do it properly.

If you're simply running EC2 instances with your same off the shelf software, you're not doing it right, but you'll still eliminate your entire datacenter physical facilities team and server install/rack & stack/replace failed disks team.

If you do it properly, it's incredible what you can do. I have a client with applications running in Ireland, Frankfurt, Singapore, Tokyo, and the US, totaling around 50 EC2 instances running containerized workloads that automatically heal, APIs that are accessible globally and won't go down unless 6 AWS regions simultaneously fail, about 30 static websites, DNS hosting for a dozen domains, monitoring, auditing, and log analytics for all of the above. I set it up in about 3 months as a single engineer and manage it all with about 8 hours a week of total effort. The cost to my client is basically the same as hiring a single senior engineer, but they're running infrastructure that would have taken a team of 3 shifts of IT professionals without the cloud.

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