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[Mongrel]

Well, the reality is also that not everybody can be a manufacturing powerhouse.

[sei]

Former manufacturing powerhouses are apparently no exception.

[Thad]

College tuition is such a complicated issue, further complicated by the growing uselessness of the college degree.

Consider how many people are majoring in shit that doesn't make them more marketable, vs STEM and things more directly applicable to their desired field.

I think a lot of the "college graduate" bitching about how employers aren't kicking in their doors is coming from people with BAs in psych, history, communication, etc..

I'm sure that's part of it, but...guy with a CS degree working a temp job where he images laptops all day over here.

[Brentai]

Guy with no degree doing senior/lead level engineering work over here, getting paid like a temp who images laptops all day*.

I guess that's the real reason these guys don't want people to get an education - it's not so much that they want people to be ignorant, they just want to maintain any excuse they have to not pay people what they're actually worth.


* Okay not quite.

[TA]

College tuition is such a complicated issue, further complicated by the growing uselessness of the college degree.

Consider how many people are majoring in shit that doesn't make them more marketable, vs STEM and things more directly applicable to their desired field.

I think a lot of the "college graduate" bitching about how employers aren't kicking in their doors is coming from people with BAs in psych, history, communication, etc..

I'm sure that's part of it, but...guy with a CS degree working a temp job where he images laptops all day over here.

Guy with a law degree working a part-time job where I just spent a couple weeks running updates on various Steady State and Deepfreeze laptops, here.

[Mongrel]

I'm pretty sure law degrees are now all-but-worthless without upper-class connections.

...

Okay, I'm being glib, they're better than a random arts degree. But not by a lot. And maybe not actually by enough to justify the difference in tuition costs.

[Shinra]

As far as the IT issue goes, I suspect a huge part of the problem is that the major IT firms don't want to pay a premium for any kind of college graduates. I work for hewlett-packard EDS as helpdesk on the Pfizer account. With few exceptions, almost everyone in our high level support groups is based in india, south america or the pacific islands and works for beans. For the most part, all of HP's "skilled" domestic jobs are supporting HP's internal operations - given that these jobs aren't directly generating profit for HP (like mine does) there's not exactly a ton of them to go around. On top of that, the few domestic jobs there are with the major IT providers, they figure out they can hire an uneducated person to do the job for a fraction of the wage and just train them for it, so you end up with a field where a degree does not give you a real competitive advantage (if anything, they have to pay you more so it's a liability) and even when you do find a job there's very little chance that the job is actually going to pay off enough to rationalize having gotten the degree in the first place. Especially if you were employed by a temp firm that does not pay out benefits.
 
 

Sorry Thad.

[Shinra]

Oh, yeah: also, a lot of major IT companies are now starting to ship immigrants over from India because they attach less value to their educations and experience. I guess they see it as cheaper in the long run to put up an indian guy and pay for his green card then to hire an American who is used to being paid fairly for the industry he's in.

[Brentai]

IT is not Computer Science though.

The real problem is that Computer Science is also not Software Engineering, and most software companies are starting to realize that as well.

[MarsDragon]

I guess I'm lucky to be in the part of HP that makes profit and needs college educated people. I'm safe for a few years, at least.

[Shinra]

I guess I'm lucky to be in the part of HP that makes profit and needs college educated people. I'm safe for a few years, at least.

EDS is the part of HP that makes profit. Last I heard, the hardware production end was doing so poorly they were considering liquidating it. If you're on the enterprise data side, by 'domestic internal support jobs not making money', i mean, they can't bill another company hourly for the labor of someone who manages HP equipment so HP can manage other people's equipment. Like the guys who run the servers in my building.

[MarsDragon]

They're not getting rid of the hardware side of things (yet), since that rumour destroyed stock prices. Reorganizing, yes, but not getting rid of. Apparently we're still doing well in the PC market, at least. I'm not actually in hardware anyway, I just make the stores we sell it in. (I'm ecommerce) Incredibly replaceable, but right now we're actually growing our US team instead of the overseas one we relied on for the last release so I'm probably safe for awhile. Apparently we are making money, just not as much as we should since the China business side is incompetent.

Like I said, I'm probably safe for a few years, at least enough to get the vital 'five to ten years of experience'.

[Shinra]

the China business side is incompetent.

Yeah, it's the same on the EDS side. The people we have supporting China are dumber than a box of rocks. I guess their education standards aren't as high as advertised?

[Classic]

It could also be that China has laws and customs (both kinds) that keep them from actually doing stuff the way the west would like, but none of these really preclude one another.

[Shinra]

No, I mean, I've looked at the knowledgebase articles they've written and their understanding of how computers work is limited at best.

[Büge]

I just watched the first thirty seconds of a video of Dennis Miller trashing the May Day protests. I suppose I was asking for trouble, since it was an excerpt from Bill O'Reilly's show, but still.

I can't believe I used to like that guy.

[Mongrel]

Could be worse. Could have been THE NUGE.

[François]

First time I knew anything of Dennis Miller, he was on Jay Leno, talking about the US debt. Gist of it was, "who are we even owing this money to? let's just not pay them back. what are they gonna do, we're the effing united states of america".

That pretty much made me file him under "god damned moron".

[Disposable Ninja]

The best thing about Dennis Miller is that he doesn't do interviews. Whenever he's on The Daily Show or whatever talk show, he just does his stand-up routine, except sitting down -- often times from the very stand-up special he's on the talk show promoting.

[Büge]

I just don't understand. He used to be okay, a bit reactionary, bordering on Libertarian, but as soon as 9/11 rolled around, he seemed to spiral into conservatardation.