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Thread: Who Was Your Favorite Professor at NDSU

  1. #101
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    Default Re: Who Was Your Favorite Professor at NDSU

    Quote Originally Posted by TAILG8R View Post
    Good fast cheap, pick two. Those that can think for themselves and are truly problem solvers who can think at scale and with the future of the software in mind are the ones that eventually rise up as Sr engineers.

    Although the idea of having a team of 40 Sr engineers sounds nice in reality you need "everyday workers". Not everyone can be the king.

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    I wish you were right in your first paragraph but I disagree. Those who rise up as Sr. Engineers are those who are the most politically efficacious. It is always so in every vector. Unless machines are in control.


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  2. #102
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    Default Re: Who Was Your Favorite Professor at NDSU

    Quote Originally Posted by GreenfieldBison View Post
    I wish you were right in your first paragraph but I disagree. Those who rise up as Sr. Engineers are those who are the most politically efficacious. It is always so in every vector. Unless machines are in control.


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    Sure I've definitely seen that. I guess my use of Sr was less title and more skill.

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  3. #103
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    Default Re: Who Was Your Favorite Professor at NDSU

    Quote Originally Posted by GreenfieldBison View Post
    Yes the 2 yr tech school degree is exactly what business wants these days. Perhaps that is really the need as well. Back when I came out of the CS dept in the 80's in the business world we were wielding crude tools like C and C++ and we had to fashion our own low level library routines and in some cases even I/O functions etc. We were still constrained by slow processors and limited memory and so there was a fair bit of art woven into the science in order to craft solutions to problems. With those crude tools you were as likely to sever a limb as produce a useful system solution if you weren't well trained.
    I'm glad that I didn't get a 2-year degree to learn a certain technical skill in order to serve the short-term interests of an employer at the expense of my own long-term interests. Plus, I went to a university to get a liberal education as well as a marketable skill.

    Maybe companies that claim that nobody stays at a job very long any more are creating cultures that make that prediction into a self-fulfilling prophesy. Often, their attitudes come across as thinly-veiled contempt for their employees. I mean, you talked about hiring 50 programmers... what's your turnover like? Is your code base as disposable as your coders seem to be?

    We should be hiring a programmer right now where I work. All I know is that they better be able to demonstrate some serious problem-solving skills because technologies change and being familiar with our development system is only going to get them 5% of the way. They can be two-year, self-taught, or university trained, but they've got to be able to add to and maintain a huge, complicated code base (and, at some point, help completely rewrite it in a different platform that hasn't been invented yet.) We'd expect that the person could pick up any new language in short order - just like our current programmers have done.

  4. #104
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    Default Re: Who Was Your Favorite Professor at NDSU

    Quote Originally Posted by tony View Post
    I'm glad that I didn't get a 2-year degree to learn a certain technical skill in order to serve the short-term interests of an employer at the expense of my own long-term interests. Plus, I went to a university to get a liberal education as well as a marketable skill.

    Maybe companies that claim that nobody stays at a job very long any more are creating cultures that make that prediction into a self-fulfilling prophesy. Often, their attitudes come across as thinly-veiled contempt for their employees. I mean, you talked about hiring 50 programmers... what's your turnover like? Is your code base as disposable as your coders seem to be?

    We should be hiring a programmer right now where I work. All I know is that they better be able to demonstrate some serious problem-solving skills because technologies change and being familiar with our development system is only going to get them 5% of the way. They can be two-year, self-taught, or university trained, but they've got to be able to add to and maintain a huge, complicated code base (and, at some point, help completely rewrite it in a different platform that hasn't been invented yet.) We'd expect that the person could pick up any new language in short order - just like our current programmers have done.
    Not sure if you meant to reply to me or to Tailg8r but for the record I stepped off the treadmill nearly two years ago now. I’m not hiring anybody. I deleted my LinkedIn account. That was a freeing event!

    In any case in a subsequent post Tailg8r briefly described an organization that in the face of it seems to value its human capital. So perhaps those 50 acquisitions are still there?

    He was also expressing lament regarding the NDSU CS product and its sub-optimal fit for current business requirements. Makes me wonder how many of their undergrads are being placed and into what environments.
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    Default Re: Who Was Your Favorite Professor at NDSU

    Quote Originally Posted by GreenfieldBison View Post
    Not sure if you meant to reply to me or to Tailg8r but for the record I stepped off the treadmill nearly two years ago now. I’m not hiring anybody. I deleted my LinkedIn account. That was a freeing event!

    In any case in a subsequent post Tailg8r briefly described an organization that in the face of it seems to value its human capital. So perhaps those 50 acquisitions are still there?

    He was also expressing lament regarding the NDSU CS product and its sub-optimal fit for current business requirements. Makes me wonder how many of their undergrads are being placed and into what environments.
    Ha! Well, I wasn't paying much attention so, yes, it must have been tailg8r I was responding to. Mostly, I was responding to the thread in general and trying to put my thoughts in order because, man, we really need to hire another programmer.

  6. #106
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    Default Re: Who Was Your Favorite Professor at NDSU

    Quote Originally Posted by GreenfieldBison View Post
    I wish you were right in your first paragraph but I disagree. Those who rise up as Sr. Engineers are those who are the most politically efficacious. It is always so in every vector. Unless machines are in control.
    I can't think of a single senior engineer out of a couple hundred I've worked with where political skills were close to the top of the list of reasons they were in that position.

  7. #107
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    Default Re: Who Was Your Favorite Professor at NDSU

    Quote Originally Posted by LikeMothers View Post
    I can't think of a single senior engineer out of a couple hundred I've worked with where political skills were close to the top of the list of reasons they were in that position.
    Really? Would you say that any or all of those senior engineers are/were good at managing others expectations? At managing up? At communicating to business leaders and/or external partners? All of these things are what I would classify as political skills. They certainly are not technical skills.

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    Default Re: Who Was Your Favorite Professor at NDSU

    Quote Originally Posted by TAILG8R View Post
    Good fast cheap, pick two. Those that can think for themselves and are truly problem solvers who can think at scale and with the future of the software in mind are the ones that eventually rise up as Sr engineers.

    Although the idea of having a team of 40 Sr engineers sounds nice in reality you need "everyday workers". Not everyone can be the king.

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  9. #109
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    Default Re: Who Was Your Favorite Professor at NDSU

    Quote Originally Posted by Bison bison View Post
    Good, slow, with me. Pick two.
    Which two would your wife pick?

  10. #110
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    Default Re: Who Was Your Favorite Professor at NDSU

    So...what I've gotten out of this is that NDSU is trying to teach the theory behind this stuff so that these grads can continue to be valuable after changes in the industry wipe out technical stuff like languages?

    Also good, fast, cheap.

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