Higher Education Reaches for the Moon on Price October 29, 2011
Posted by Peter Varhol in Technology and Culture, Uncategorized.1 comment so far
I’m a big supporter of higher education. In my own case, I believe that my formal education has paid off well. I have degrees and substantial coursework that I’ve never really used, and much of my career has been shaped by things outside of formal education. But I have a good memory, and the things from my education that I remember have made me better and more engaging at what I do.
In the aggregate, I believe that more education makes us as a society able to do a wider variety of things. It may also make us more versatile. If I’m undereducated, it’s difficult to aspire to be a doctor or engineer. If you’re well-educated, you can still choose to pick crops (although it seems like few of us do). My brother-in-law, with a BS in economics, chooses to drive a delivery truck (and it was a career choice, not a necessity).
That said, I am every bit as big a criticizer of the cost of higher education. The cost part of higher education is really screwed up. For example, in my time in academia, circa mid-1990s, my institution made the decision to raise tuition by 18 percent. Not because they needed the money, but because apparently there is a direct perception correlation between price and quality, and my institution wanted to be thought of as having significantly (18%, I guess) higher quality than the previous year.
Crazy? Not in the twisted world of higher education.
Further, I don’t get the general acceptance of society at large of the clockwork-like increases in the cost of higher education. We don’t view cost and value in the same way as we do other purchases in our life. Our natural reaction toward education is that it cost what it cost, and that it is the role of government (at least at the state and federal levels) to make education more affordable.
Many respond that the list price doesn’t correspond to what the average person pays. True, but that simply means that higher education effectively obfuscates its prices. And the price, whatever it may be, includes a heavy dollop of loans, which are becoming increasingly larger as that list price increases.
Education as a practice hasn’t changed very much in the last fifty years or so (or much longer). It still involves a teacher in front of a (usually smallish) room of students, on at least a weekly basis. It’s odd, no, inconceivable that the practice of education hasn’t changed and become more efficient, as everything else around us has.
Online education has made this basic process somewhat more efficient, but it hasn’t prevented colleges from continuing to raise prices.
Kid Dynamite has said that the cost of education is a bubble that will burst sooner or later, just like housing. I would like to agree, if only to see academia adapt to the world around it, but I don’t know what will push costs over the edge.
My own personal experience places the blame for the unending and unreasonable cost increases on a hidebound culture that sincerely but unreasonably believes it is immune from the forces of the rest of society. I acknowledge that my own experience may not be generalizable, but at the very least the cause can be at least partially attributed to the wacky incentives created by the complex myriad of financial aid offices and offers. But higher education costs must come down, and it won’t be through continually rising costs and increasing government financial aid, and it won’t be pretty.
I am not the 1%, to use a term in popular vernacular. However, it appears as though I am around the 89th or 90th percentile, in terms of annual income (while growing up in a household considerably closer to poverty). It’s a nice neighborhood in which to reside, and I credit my education in part for having the opportunity to attain that level. But while my education provided some information and a modicum of tools that helped enable me to reach that neighborhood, it’s by no means a guarantee. The onus remains on me to make the most of all of my strengths to achieve professional and a small amount of financial success.
Further, my education didn’t include networking with alumni and fellow students. Even if I had the social skills to do so at the time (or even now), I didn’t go to those types of institutions where it played a big part in educational or career development.
The lesson here is that unless you go to one of the top schools (Harvard, Dartmouth, Stanford, and a handful of others) with the intent of making and leveraging those contacts throughout your career, you should shop around for the best deal in higher education. The deal shouldn’t include loans offered; those defer the cost, not make it less expensive. And look for innovative steps intended to control costs. In 99 percent of the real world, no one is going to care where you went to college. Really.
Some Things Never Change October 22, 2011
Posted by Peter Varhol in Uncategorized.add a comment
I spent the first six years after college as an Air Force officer (circa early to mid 1980s), in weapons systems acquisition and as an ROTC
instructor. After separating as a captain, I did another three years with one of the service and support contractors working at Hanscom AFB. Except for a small consulting gig shortly after that (with a couple of good stories to go with it), I was done with defense contracting. My life, and my careers, went in a different direction.
A point of order. Despite the fact that I flew a desk, and was not a particularly good fit for military service, I was proud of that service.
I’m especially proud when I hear misconceptions of the military by others, and have the ability to correct them. I was not a “Yes, Sir” kind of person, so I say this with some measure of emotional detachment.
This past week I got to relive much of that, at the TechNet Aero conference in Dayton, Ohio, where I spoke and did booth duty. Much of my time in the past was with the Electronic Systems, now Electronic Systems Center (ESD versus ESC), while the featured program offices here were a part of the Aeronautical Systems Division, now Aeronautical Systems Center (ASD versus ASC). But I could recognize the organizations and their acronyms. It was almost as though I had never left, and a little bit scary.
I had forgotten just how insular that world was, and how much relationships count in that world.
I want to emphasize that point. I don’t have good social skills. I’m self-aware enough so that I know it, and I’m able to compensate with
a certain amount of effort and experience, but it doesn’t come at all naturally. I probably didn’t realize it at the time, but I didn’t do as well as I was capable in the military precisely because I lacked those skills (well, to be fair, there were probably other reasons, too).
Defense software and systems contracting is a boom-and-bust industry, and it’s about to fall into a bust. Thousands of engineers and production workers from the likes of Lockheed Martin and Northrup Grumman are going to get the boot over the next several
years. But those individuals who recognize that the number of people they know, and who might be willing to do something for them, is by far the most important qualification they possess, will continue to press on successfully.
It’s like real life in private industry, only much more so.
In Memory of Dennis Ritchie October 14, 2011
Posted by Peter Varhol in Software development, Software platforms, Software tools.1 comment so far
I woke up this morning to the news of the passing of Dennis Ritchie, computer science researcher at AT&T Bell Labs and inventor of the C programming language (he actually passed away last weekend). The C Programming Language, a language manual by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, was the bible for several generations of professional programmers.
The early 1970s saw the rise of multiprocessing, where multiple users shared the same computer in a timesharing arrangement. The research state of the art at that time was MULTICS, an MIT research project. Bell Labs took those concepts and Ken Thompson developed the Unix operating system (with Ritchie’s assistance). Ritchie then designed the C language as a high-level language married closely to Unix and its underlying API and commands.
However, C was also created as a platform-independent language, a nod to the fact that Unix would eventually be ported to dozens (probably more like hundreds) of different processors and hardware architectures. For example, it lacks a string library, because strings are implemented differently on different OSs. So C programmers got used to doing an array of char to represent a string (third parties eventually came out with custom string libraries for different computers).
C has elements of both a high-level language and a systems programming language. It had high-level constructs, but could also directly access memory locations through pointers. It does no automatic allocation or deallocation of memory; malloc and free are among the first constructs learned by aspiring C programmers. Further, C does essentially no type-checking; programmers could essentially copy data from one type to another, irrespective of the type size, at their own risk.
Functions are generally called by reference, by establishing the memory location of the function (called a pointer), and are called by referring the calling function to that location (called dereferencing the pointer). This can make possible some extremely convoluted programming constructs.
These characteristics and others made C extremely flexible, but also extremely prone to programming errors. When I was the BoundsChecker product manager at Compuware NuMega Labs, we determined that a large majority of C (and its object-oriented extension C++) programming errors were memory errors. It is simply too complex for most C/C++ developers to fully understand and control how they are using memory.
C programs eventually became so unmanageable that many development teams now use managed languages such as Java or C#. Both languages (as well as niche languages like Lisp and Smalltalk) automatically allocate memory when you define and use a variable, and reclaim that memory when there are no longer any links to it through a technique called garbage collection. But many commercial applications still use C/C++, either for legacy or performance reasons.
I was a C programmer for a brief period of my career, and occasionally taught C++ as an academic. During my time as an academic, I wrote a discrete event simulation application in Pascal (invented by Swiss computer scientist Nicolas Wirth), a similar language that provided much stricter type checking. Despite the popularity (and to large extent necessity) of managed languages today, I still firmly believe that you can’t truly understand how to program a computer unless you have a clear picture of how your code is using memory. And we owe that view of memory to Dennis Ritchie and C.
I Still Own My Original 128K Mac October 6, 2011
Posted by Peter Varhol in Software platforms, Technology and Culture.add a comment
My first computer was an original 128KB Apple Macintosh, purchased in 1984. I still have it. It still boots.
There, I got that bit of history out of the way. As the news of the passing of Steve Jobs before his time crosses the planet, I can tell my own story of Apple. Circa 1984, I had access to an academic discount, and had a choice between a Mac or a DEC PC, the latter of which might have been the smarter choice for someone hoping to latch on with the preeminent technology employer in New England at the time.
Of course, the so-called PC standard was already well on its way to becoming a mess, and DEC left the PC business and, in terminal decline, was acquired by first Compaq, then HP.
But who couldn’t look at the Mac and know that its graphical, mouse-driven user interface wasn’t the future of computing? Bill Gates, for one, who even as he struggled to come out with a lame, barely-graphical Windows product still insisted that businesses demanded command line operation. Later revisionist explanations insist that Gates also saw the future correctly, and simply obfuscated the discussion until Windows was more mature, but I’m not so sure.
So I chose wisely, and used my Mac productively for years. With a developer discount available, I almost bought a Lisa for $5000, half the list price, which was the only way Apple had to develop Mac software. But third party providers came out with very nice integrated development environments that enabled me to continue working on Macs.
(The Lisa and to an even greater extent these third party tools (THINK!, for example, which was acquired by Symantec) radically changed software development, but that’s a story for another day.)
Despite the hoopla and steady if lackluster sales, the future of Apple and the Mac wasn’t assured until the arrival of the laser printer. Married to the Mac’s WYSIWYG interface, the combination became the de facto publishing standard almost overnight.
Still, the Mac was largely a niche product, not highly used outside of publishing and similar creative industries. I don’t have creative skills, so by the mid-1990s it became clear that I couldn’t make a living by being a Mac expert. Today I have a Windows Server network in my basement with about half a dozen PCs.
Jobs was eventually forced out of Apple, and the decline continued under a succession of uninspiring leaders. He went on to found two companies, the wildly successful Pixar and the barely surviving NeXT. Salesman and promoter that he was, he was able to convince Apple to acquire NeXt for an incredible $400 million, and the NextStep operating system became the basis for today’s OS X.
During his time outside of Apple, I had the uneven pleasure of working with one of his better known unauthorized biographers, Jeffrey Young, who authored The Journey is the Reward. He was able to meet with Jobs only once, at the end of his writing. Nonetheless, it was a compelling an instructive book, even though it encompassed his life only through circa 1990.
Under Jobs, Apple made highly successful forays into the consumer market, with the iPod and iPhone. It may even be true that Apple more or less single-handedly made consumer electronics relevant and even important to every facet of our lives, including our business lives.
It should also be noted that there were failures galore along the way – the clunky Newton and Apple TV come immediately to mind. But failure serves the important purpose of learning from our mistakes and directing our efforts to more productive pursuits.
There are certainly events in Jobs life of which he was probably not proud, and I think his infamous dichotomy between his public and private lives was driven by his desire to be known for his results, rather than how he led his life. It’s an understandable sentiment, although it has perhaps led to part of the cult of unquestioned worship that exists. None of us are perfect, but I think it’s better to be known as a whole person rather than the persona we choose to project.
It’s not clear the Jobs or Apple truly invented any breakthrough. The Mac UI was based on work done by Alan Kay and Xerox PARC years earlier, and the technologies that comprised the iPhone were already well-established. But both man and company had the unique ability to bring together different technologies into a package that truly pushed the boundaries of product design and implementation. Of all of the possible creative and business skills, that may be the most highly valued.
