Tech Outsourcing and the Dwindling CS Major

In my discussion a few days ago about the Anita Borg get-together at Google, I discussed the impact of outsourcing, the loss of tech jobs, and parents refusal to pay for science degrees as interconnected.

Karl Schoenberger of the Mercury News SF Bureau actually decided to drill down on some of my assumptions. So for those of you who wanted more, I’m going to let him cross-examine me for your reading pleasure:

Karl: I can see how taxpayers subsidize free trade when the US Treasury and the Fed have policies in place that weaken the dollar against foreign currencies, making our merchandise trade more competitive.

Lynne: As seen with such stars as Enron, you can do a lot with clever macro economics. Lots of fast, little transactions add up fast. And it can take a while before the accountants with the eyeshades see the net conclusion.

Remember when “design” meant “reliable”

Dennis Rockstroh of ActionLine in the Merc attempted to handle the frustration of a Sony Vaio user recently. Turns out the poor man continually had the power just blit out on him while working on his laptop. Back and forth to the factory it went, never seeming to get any better. Dennis helped the gentleman get a replacement laptop from the factory, but no one seemed to understand why such a problem was occurring and why it required a complete replacement to rectify. Sony didn’t wish to discuss it, and the frustrated user couldn’t figure it out other than noticing that wiggling the power connector sometimes worked.

How do I know this? Because I bought a Vaio PCG-FX-310 for my husband a few years back, and soon after acquiring it, the power connector began to fail. But since I’ve been putting together systems since the days of Symmetric Computer Systems, plus all that work on 386BSD and X86 systems from lunchboxes to desktops to laptops, we didn’t just sit around griping about the problem – we tried to figure out exactly why this happens – both as a good little example of the importance of design in a consumer product, and as an illustration of the difference between American and Japanese audiences.

Hey, why don’t we just turn off that pesky congestion control…

Alex Cannara loves to push those “why don’t we just turn off that pesky congestion control” papers my way. I think he does it just to annoy me. Which is correct, because I can’t imagine ever getting such a paper approved. But, as Britney likes to say, “Oops, they did it again…”.

It seems like every other CS grad student thinks he can get away with “disabling of TCP’s congestion control” and suddenly he’s solved the problem of congestion. Or, to put it in medical terms – it isn’t the disease, it’s the treatment. Everything is wonderful if you just stop treating the condition – even if the patient dies? Very much like a physics student thinking he’s gotten around energy conservation, when he doesn’t get what total energy of a system means, and wow, he’s invented a perpetual motion machine.

Google, Tech, and Dinner

Last week I attended the It’s Never Too Late: Careers in Computer Science gabfest at Google’s main campus organized by the newly renamed Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology (aka Systers). Google was in high-paranoia mode, given their pending IPO, but I wasn’t there to hear about the rightness of Dutch auctions or the Securities Act of 1933. I was there to hear about women in technology and sample their famous conference snacks – not in that order.

“According to the U.S. Department of Labor Women’s Bureau” stated the introduction to the event, “high-paying occupations for computer workers and IT specialists are projected to have some of the steepest gains over the next several years.” This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone – tech always needs to innovate. However, they go on to say that “Despite the doom and gloom headlines about outsourcing, prospects for meaningful jobs in these fields is bright.”

“Doom and gloom” is right – it sure doesn’t look good for tech people right now. Karl Schoenberger wrote about a steep decline in CS majors several months back in the Merc, and I wrote a lead business page article last year for the San Francisco Chronicle while attending Anita Borg’s memorial service, Paving the Way for ‘Systers’, which explored the declining numbers of women in technology, especially at the managerial level. “The numbers from Berkeley of the 1980s indicate that our technology workforce should have a considerable number of women in management and CTO positions by now” I wrote in September of 2003. “Where have all the women in technology gone?”

Lessons Learned in Massive Video Production for University Alumni Outreach

Today I am scheduled to present my paper at 4pm on massive video production from work done with Berkeley at the ACM SIGCHI Advances in Computer Entertainment 2004 (ACE2004) Conference held this week at the National University of Singapore. The paper is entitled Lessons Learned in Massive Video Production (MVP) for University Alumni Outreach.

Abstract: In this paper, we describe lessons learned in creating a Massive Video Production (MVP) mechanism and filmography environment for the University of California at Berkeley. The goal was to provide a university department mandated to expand alumni outreach with personalized university-branded alumni VideoGreetings using a convenient and dynamic alumni outreach tool with modern multimedia production standards coupled with commonplace digital camera raw clips with no intervention on the part of the alumni coordinator and department other than editorial approval of the finished production. The actual mechanism consists of a hosted production engine, filmography and search environment, review and editorial functions, and subscription and protection.

Unfortunately, I had to inform the committee chair that I would not be able to present due to a death in the family today after several months of decline. So I am posting the paper in the hopes that others can enjoy it and send me comments at my website. I look forward to hearing from all those great people who I will miss today, and I hope they will understand.

Is Linux “GNU”?

Last week Griff Palmer thanked me for not getting all worked up over nits in his article on Linux, but wondered if he’d hear from Richard Stallman (RMS to those not in the know) because he called it “Linux” instead of “GNU/Linux” (those difficult editors, again).

Well, sure enough, just as Griff predicted, RMS struck back with exactly that complaint – “For months now, my home machine has run nothing but Linux. but that cannot be true. Linux by itself would not run without the GNU operating system. He must be talking about GNU/Linux and calling it Linux, as often happens.” But are we being a bit loose with history here?

Auctions and Women Entrepreneurs

Last week I was one of the many busy volunteers who helped pull-off the once-a-year Forum for Women Entrepreneurs auction and fundraising dinner in Palo Alto. I was in charge of the “for the family” items – things like hand-knit afghans, photography sessions, and crafts projects. Got a lot of VCs and lawyers I know to “bid up” – I wasn’t satisfied until I got at least double the “suggested list price”. More fun than a term sheet, since there isn’t any triple liquidation preference on a scrapbook – or maybe they just haven’t thought of that yet.

Susan Hailey, FWE CEO, is a real kick – fun, sharp, and quick-witted. I met her at a Buck’s lunch in Woodside, and was impressed at how she’d taken a pretty much bankrupt organization that had lost direction after the bubble burst and suffused it with purpose and cash. You’ve got to have a lot of confidence to inspire confidence in others, and she has all that and more.

So, what were the real neat items that the VCs bought?

UC Berkeley Students Collateral Damage in Budget Cuts

After 44 years, the UC system has decided to give up and winnow out qualified students, bumping many to the overloaded community college system. These students, in turn, will bump out qualified students hoping to work themselves into the Cal State and UC system in Kind of a “Survivor” meets “Goodbye Mr. Chips” reality show – but with a real downside.

Berkeley Chancellor Robert Berndahl expressed the concern in April’s Cal Monthly magazine that “everything Berkeley has achieved over the past half century as a university could be lost within a half decade”. Is Clark Kerr’s vision finally vanquished?

What is the impact of these higher education budget cuts on the Silicon Valley high-tech industry? Will the next generation have the skills to compete in a world economy? Join me in my next installment of In the DataCenter as I explore The High Cost of Innovation.

Is “Free Culture” Under Siege?

Dan Kusnetzky, VP Systems at IDC, found my piece on Free Culture “an interesting analysis”, which is high praise. But Dan also took issue with Dr. Lessig’s premise that copyright and fair use is under siege.

Dan wondered whether we were seeing the impact on copyright and fair use as less “a concerted, planned effort…underway to control culture” and more a “side effect of a piecemeal effort to control ‘intellectual property’ for commercial purposes”.

RMS, SCO and 386BSD

Griff Palmer over at the Merc is an interesting guy. And his take on the SCO-IBM legal feud is pretty simple too – “More than once since the SCO mess came up, I’ve heard people say, “No problem. If SCO wins, we’ll just go to *BSD.” I guess open source types are “glass half full” kind of guys.

Griff notes I’m pretty nice in not nitpicking his essay – “I’m glad that someone of your technical stature doesn’t find fault (or, at least, not fault enough to mention) in my piece.” But I’m also a writer, and we all have got to stick together, especially when you write anything about a subject that people feel so emotionally about.