Well, in all fairness, there wasn't a next slide.  Unfortunately, when I copied slide5.html to slide6.html, the link had to go SOMEPLACE, so here you are

I think the thing that people liked about the talk, at least judging by the kind people who caught me later that evening, was that industry demand really has become a "problem".    Of course, I'm always happy to have my students get good jobs and this "problem" is certainly better than the alternative.

Coming from a background in which I was taught that a good computer scientist is different from a well trained computer technologist, I'm uncomfortable with the trend in recruiting that I'm seeing.  Recruiters call me and tell me that they could hire all of the students that we could produce and suggest that we speed things up a little by skipping some of the "less useful" theory and background and just teach them to write C++ under windows.  To me, that's a frightening short-term optimization that will only make the problem worse.

It's not a simple problem and I won't pretend to believe that there's a simple solution.  I do believe, however, that it should be the desire (if not the responsibility) for many of the bigger companies to support the programs that are producing the students they need by offering more scholarships, helping equip modern labs, providing guest speakers and etc.  All of these things can help good programs produce larger numbers of better prepared students while still allowing them to hold on to a few good students who can be taught to help educate the next "window of data".

As a probably necessary disclaimer, much of the material in this quick talk consists of inside jokes that will probably be lost on those who weren't at SIGCOMM or who don't attend occasionally.  In the interest of scientific integrity, for lack of a better term, I've left in all of the material from the talk (that I could remember) even when it pokes fun at a particular subset of the community or our technology.  During the talk, I hope that these references were taken in the correct context; the reader may be forced to be a little more understanding...
 

And finally, of course, send those ACKs care of:

Shawn Ostermann
Ohio University
Athens, OH

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