I'm getting happy: I'm 70 miles north of
Wall Street and that means really close to
Vassar and not far from Princeton, Yale,
Harvard, and more. So find some bright,
humanities major coeds who otherwise
would have to start in retail or go to
law school or for an MBA and get them
started.
So, they have great SAT
scores, know how to study and learn,
know what high quality work is,
are good at working with people,
are really good at reading comprehension,
can knock out an A+/A+ term paper between
10 PM and 7 AM with just a quart of
coffee, can give a good presentation,
etc.
So, teach them about Volts, Amps,
Watts, Ohm's law, DC, AC, resistors,
capacitors, inductors, basic electronic
signals, the basic conceptual principles
of how a processor core works, a little
on caching and main memory,
data representation 101,
how a
disk drive works, the basics of
an NIC, Ethernet, a LAN switch,
and TCP/IP, and IP router,
a little
on memory protection, an 'embedded'
operating system, virtual memory,
virtual machines, a file system
with locking and security,
console sessions and command lines,
text files and a good text editor,
the Internet from DNS, SMTP, POP3,
to base 64, MIME, HTTP, HTML, and
CSS, the basics of programming languages,
e.g., Visual Basic .NET and its
memory management, classes and instances,
the .NET Framework, relational database,
SQL, SQL Server, how to use Microsoft's
MSDN, about Stack Overflow, HN, and
how to Google/Bing to get answers to
questions, how to use our technical
support account at Microsoft and
Cisco, all in about one afternoon,
with some exercises, and then have
a graduation party.
Then get to
work on some basic stuff, say,
plugging together another 20 servers, repairing
a server with a busted hard disk,
etc.
Clean, indoor work, no heavy lifting,
and better than grass mowing or retailing.
So, they have great SAT scores, know how to study and learn, know what high quality work is, are good at working with people, are really good at reading comprehension, can knock out an A+/A+ term paper between 10 PM and 7 AM with just a quart of coffee, can give a good presentation, etc.
So, teach them about Volts, Amps, Watts, Ohm's law, DC, AC, resistors, capacitors, inductors, basic electronic signals, the basic conceptual principles of how a processor core works, a little on caching and main memory, data representation 101, how a disk drive works, the basics of an NIC, Ethernet, a LAN switch, and TCP/IP, and IP router, a little on memory protection, an 'embedded' operating system, virtual memory, virtual machines, a file system with locking and security, console sessions and command lines, text files and a good text editor, the Internet from DNS, SMTP, POP3, to base 64, MIME, HTTP, HTML, and CSS, the basics of programming languages, e.g., Visual Basic .NET and its memory management, classes and instances, the .NET Framework, relational database, SQL, SQL Server, how to use Microsoft's MSDN, about Stack Overflow, HN, and how to Google/Bing to get answers to questions, how to use our technical support account at Microsoft and Cisco, all in about one afternoon, with some exercises, and then have a graduation party.
Then get to work on some basic stuff, say, plugging together another 20 servers, repairing a server with a busted hard disk, etc.
Clean, indoor work, no heavy lifting, and better than grass mowing or retailing.