My Reaction to Our Manifesto and Portrait

Partners: Tabitha Ricketts and Andrew Steinbergs

Our manifesto reflects my thoughts and feelings pretty perfectly. I especially identify with the beginning part of it that talks about fooling around with technology when I was younger. The manifesto speaks of Microsoft Paint, which I loved as a kid. I also like to solve problems with Legos, and in middle school I happened across my older brother’s Web Design textbook from school and decided to go rogue and make a very simple website (hint: it did not do much. It was pretty stupid). And I enjoyed every second of it. Solving those problems was my livelihood as a child.

I would not characterize our manifesto as a warcry, but rather as a look into how we developed, what we went through, and why we decided to become what we are today: problem solvers. We love to use our curiosity and our computer skills to figure out tough problems. We love to spend late nights trying to figure out why our solution won’t work. It may suck at the time, but we love the rush of finally getting the correct solution to a problem.

To be completely honest, the portrait is almost a direct representation of who I am as a computer science student. One part I particularly identify with is the physical activities part. Most people don’t feel that computer science students are particularly athletic, but most that I have met are very athletic and love to get a quick game in at any time to relieve stress, myself included. One part that I differ slightly on is the reading habits part. I actually love to read novels, and spend a lot of my free time doing so (I’m currently churning through the Game of Thrones books).

I think that stereotypes are very significant in today’s world, so I do not think that the presence of a manifesto or a portrait is necessarily a good thing. I think that it puts us as a group into a hole, and it makes it tough for anyone to venture outside the “accepted” loop that is the typical education or career path that a computer science major will usually follow. This is harmful in my opinion, and I do not think that having a manifesto or a portrait adds anything that will help us down the road.

My Interview Process Experience

I’m sure that my interview process went pretty much like everyone else’s who has done a computer specific interview – some went better than others. Some of the interviews I crushed, and some I completely blew, with no seeming correlation hinting at how I would perform. Sometimes I thought they went well but apparently did not go well enough, and others I thought went much worse than they actually did. And that’s the reality about the randomness of today’s interview process: No one knows exactly what to expect, what’s expected of them, and how other candidates will perform on supposedly similar interviews.

Traditionally, one of the most important things to do for an interview is prepare by looking up the company and what they do and, in the case of a technical interview, review important computing concepts. Recently, we have also been lucky enough to have additional resources such as glassdoor.com that can give insight into exact past questions a company has asked. However, all of this can be for naught. Sometimes, I have found, a company does not ask about some of the most important computing concepts (maybe because they expect us to know that?), but rather form a question around an obscure concept that is nearly impossible to answer one hundred percent correctly. Now, this is not necessarily a problem if it’s asked to all candidates and then compared and I know that in most cases the interviewer just wants to know how I think and what my thought process is, but I have found that in some cases I grasp for straws and essentially am giving educated guesses. What happens if I happen to guess the right path and get much of the question right, while someone who grasps the concept better than I do struggles with recognizing the question? If the type of question is pertinent to the job, then the other candidate may have been more qualified than I am to do the job correctly. Unfortunately, that is just how the process has come to. It’s easier than ever to apply for an interview, and there are more computer savvy people than ever looking for jobs, so naturally there will be some well-equipped engineers who will not get top jobs simply because of the process. They could have an off day, or be thrown off by one of the “weird” interview questions that top companies like to ask, and that could be the difference between said engineer or a less-qualified one getting the job.

Now, those are simply my frustrations with the process. I don’t see a better way of doing, and since there are so many good candidates out there, companies need some sort of way to help differentiate them. I have never questioned the ethics of the process. In all instances, it may not necessarily be fair depending on one’s background, but nothing in life is. The process gets the job done – as one article said, Google would rather reject a good engineer than hire a bad one. In a perfect world, everyone would get their dream job. We don’t live in such a world though, and that just adds to the necessary evil that is the technical interviewing process.

What is a Hacker?

 

As many of us have experienced–whether in person or through movies and social commentary–the way in which a “hacker” is perceived is one of the biggest stereotypes in today’s society. Go ahead and try to picture your prototypical hacker. Nerdy. Glasses. Nonathletic. Not very social. Hard to have personal relationships and in person conversations with. Constantly trying to steal data and private information for malicious intentions. These, and many more, attributes are typically what come to mind when picturing a hacker. This may be in part to personal experiences with the IT guy at work, but this comes more from Hollywood movies and social media commentary that relegate computer-savvy people to this stereotype and the title of “hacker”.

If this stereotype was what a hacker generally was like, then this question would not have to even be considered. But these readings helped shed light on another breed of so called hackers, and it raises the legitimate question: What is a hacker? Sure, there are people that fill the Hollywood definition of one that was given above (and unfortunately the few bad apples give the entire population this stereotype), but there is much more to being a hacker, or a computer-savvy person. One thing almost always needed in order to be a hacker is to be smart–sometimes to the point where school bores the hacker so he/she is seen as lazy, or stupid, or some combination of the two. An obvious characteristic of a hacker is to be computer-savvy and have a fascination with the power and limitations of working with a computer. These characteristics should go without saying, and then there also may or may not be some combination of the stereotyped characteristics. But perhaps the biggest and most important characteristic of a hacker, one that is quite often missed and not portrayed by Hollywood, is the intense curiosity that a hacker possesses. They have an insatiable appetite to experiment with and discover what their computer can do, what they can access, and what this means for the future world. This curiosity and this alone is what separates a hacker from other people. A hacker may spend 18 hours a day in front of a computer trying to break through security firewalls, or they could simply spend a few hours writing a program to help make a certain everyday task that much simpler.

I identify as a hacker, but in this second definition of one. I, by no means, can physically get myself to sit in front a computer for a super prolonged period of time. I wouldn’t even know where to start in breaking through a security system. There are many people out there who fit the “hacker” stereotype much more closely than I could ever even pretend to. However, I still identify as one. I have the curiosity to want to know what my computer can do for me. I like to write programs and software that can make certain calculations or predictions more practical. So yes, I am a hacker, but not in the traditional sense that may come to mind. I like to learn what capabilities lie in my hands every time I open my laptop. I like to code. But I like to play and watch sports. I am very active. I like to maintain personal relationships. So, in my mind and based on my experiences, the stereotype of a hacker is wildly inaccurate and completely misguided.

Why study Ethics in the context of Computer Science and Engineering?

Ethics is a very gray area in terms of computer science. Since comp sci is relatively a new field (or at least becoming popular in the last couple of decades), there is still much up for debate when talking about what is right and what is wrong in what to do. One of the most pressing issues is what to do about data mining. Everyday, we give more and more of our information out to companies all around the world to sign up for their services and products. What many people don’t realize, at least not yet, is that these companies then use this data to figure out who you are, what you like, and what you might be interested in so that they can target you better and bring you better services that you’re more likely to purchase in the future. It’s been said that Google and Apple have virtually every piece of information about every person who’s ever subscribed to anything to do with them, and they’re just two of these tech behemoths. So, the ethical question in the face of this is simple: There’s some information out there on people that is very, very, very private. Is it right to categorize people as if they were simply objects based on this very sensitive info and then group them in with other people having similar qualities just to try to boost sales or market a little better? And is it right to then target these people, sometimes barraging them, with ads, popups, or suggestions that may or may not be what they would be interested in?

To digress a bit from that semi specific example, we should study ethics so that we can learn to answer these questions to the best of our abilities and then cope with our decisions. We, as comp sci majors entering the working force in the next couple of months, will be faced with many issues, sometimes even daily, that can raise very serious and tough ethical questions that are hard to figure out the answer to. By studying ethics in a computer science light, we will hopefully be a lot more prepared to make those decisions when they come to us. Sometimes, no amount of studying can prepare us for a certain situation that we might find ourselves in. But it can’t hurt to look at past examples, learn from them, and apply their lessons to future questions that we will face.

Intro

I’m Kevin Epp, and I am a senior Computer Science major. I chose computer science because in the Intro to Engineering course freshman year, the comp sci section of it was my favorite and really got me thinking about the problems I could solve. So, I gave it a shot. My interests are sports (watching, playing, fantasy football) as well as reading and watching TV.

I think that the most pressing issue comp sci people face is data security/privacy. For example, what info to use and what info to even access when attempting to data mine.