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At 12:05 PM 24/08/1998 -0400, Wrolf Courtney wrote: > >I have several times referred to myself as an engineer in discussions, during >the many years that techdiver has been in existence. And I have used that >description with an intent to appeal to my authority, rather than to reason. > >And I do not see it in the archives. > >I am a computer scientist. etc.... Wrolf. Thank you for sharing with us. Is your B.S. like a bachelors' degree in science? rgrds billyw Graduated 1986 from SUNY at Stonybrook, B.S. (cum >laude), major in Computer Science. > >Computer Science was regarded there, as at Imperial College, where I had >previously studied Computing Science (sic), as an engineering discipline. At >Imperial, the Department of Computing is in the City and Guilds College (rather >than the Royal School of Mines, or the Royal College of Science), and at least >when I was there, part of the orientation was that we were (budding) engineers. > >Does not sound controversial today, but back in 1980, everyone wanted a piece of >the pie. The mathematicians liked that Turing stuff, wanted it all as a branch >of applied mathematics. (Some of) the electrical engineers knew that computers >were just programmable logic arrays plus memory. That was their stuff, and they >wanted it all too. Heck, some universities divided Computer Science between the >two, to enrichment of neither, but killing the discipline. > >I was pretty into this, having been a teenage hacker who learned Algol 60 at >thirteen; helped a friend with his SCMP-II kit (he was good with the soldering >gun and the circuit diag, but he didn't even know what a register was!); and >picked up babes at a high school math conference at the University of Kent with >my ability to do some BASIC programming with the free accounts we were given. > >The faculty were much relieved that I had not picked up bad programming habits, >unlike about half the new class, who were getting BASIC programming in high >school en masse for the first time. But I had been turned on to structured >programming by a mentor, a former M.Sc.(Computer Science) alum of Imperial. His >thirteenth birthday gift to me was the classic, Structured Programming >(Dijkstra, Hoare, Dahl), still in my collection. > >My fellow students were amazed and perplexed when they would ask me how I had >mastered Pascal so quickly, and I would wave at them the Wirth's minuscule >Pascal Language Reference Manual. But I had Algol-60 and (most of, no one knows >all of) Algol-68 under my belt, the immediate precursors. I pseudo coded and >top down refined away (far better than every before I went to Imperial), and >after a while, I had "eaten" the LRM, and it stayed in my locker. > >Meanwhile, my personal and family life went south. A long way south. I did not >complete the second year. > >After bumming around for a while unable to find work (this was the early 1980s, >in Britain), I left for a new life in Israel. Leave it all behind, rediscover >my Jewish heritage. Which I did. > >I also discovered that I genuinely was really into computers. That once I had >looked outside myself, my family situation, my dead brother ... that then I >could look back in. > >And I did not want to do Computer Science for my family. I did not want to do >it just because it was such a safe choice, and my uncle had even shown the way. >Not for my teachers, nor even for my mentor who turned me on to it. Not for >Jeremy, my closest, bestest friend, my dead brother, whom I had sworn to protect >when I was 2 1/2 and he was 1 1/2, and had no one else to protect him. > >It was for me. I just liked this stuff. It was cool. I mean, like horn clause >logic does not have negation, but you really need negation by failure to make >Prolog useful at all. > >And as I learned at Stonybrook, there are very good reasons for that. > >During Stonybrook to help pay for it all: part time small business programming, >and net installation and configuration. > >Then a small (but now very successful) Wall Street software firm, to get into >the big time, programmer plus network guy (since I knew how, from the last job). > >Then two bulge bracket investment banking firms, originally as a programmer with >a net.sideline, but after a couple of years, full-time net.geek. > >Immediately before my son was born, moved out of the financial industry. I had >pretty much realized what the pattern was here, and since I was not female, I >could not do the hanging on to the glass ceiling that they could. And I wanted >to be able to not cry at my leaving party. > >I am serious. You never saw a harder worker than Dan. If you turned up at 2:00 >a.m. and Dan was not there, you were in the wrong place. And I certainly did >not see them significantly slack off after his girl was born. He was a lifer, >born to it. Swore that he would do what it took, he wanted to stay. Had our >boss behind him 200% - who else would do what he did to manage the Fixed Income >systems (I did the Equities). > >When the order came down to fire him, Bill had no choice. I could see in his >eyes. And then Dan cried as we walked away from the party. > >When my wife's due date was set, I knew I had only about two or three months >after the delivery. C'est la vie. The Street is no place to raise a kid. > >Bounced around a bit, trying management. But I am an engineer, not a manager of >engineers and associated staffs. > >I work now in a firm that handles back office processing of advertising orders. >I am one of three in the router group. Router configuration/troubleshooting; >performance monitoring and programming; internet access and security. > >Relevant? Not much. > >Was mentioning that I am an engineer relevant, or a chest pulling reference to >(one's own) authority, rather than to facts and the theories that can be built >on them? > >Yes. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. Peccavi. > >Now for your turn. If you do not have the data, just call for help on, say, >techdiver. Or even cavediver. Check carefully the photographs in Tom Mount's >"Mixed Gas", in the gear configuration chapter. I have already received two >fairly complete replies myself! > >-- >Wrolf > >Wrolf's Wreck: http://www.concentric.net/~Wrolf >Wrolf's Net.Wreck: http://www.concentric.net/~Wrolf/netmgmt.shtml > > -- Send mail for the `techdiver' mailing list to `techdiver@aquanaut.com'. Send subscribe/unsubscribe requests to `techdiver-request@aquanaut.com'.
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