Should we call Mr. Dvorak as a Czech or a Russin Spy because his name is form the East Block ? If he is so obsessed with Indian and Italian Mafia, may be he should go back to his native country and deal with the KGB !

Moreover, Malik admitted that he really only knew as much about Kundra’s educational background as was dictated to Malik by an anonymous Whitehouse spokesman.

Seems that Om’s bashing of Dvorak on Om’s blog was a bunch of hot air.

Here, I’ll let you prove it. Take all your MBA money (you guys do tend to be overpaid, after all) and buy 2 local restaurants. Hire one of your MBA buddies to run one place for a month and hire a bus boy – yes, a not-even-high-school-graduate – to manage the other one for the same month. After 30 days, check your balance sheet. Both restaurants will be in the red because ALL restaurants lose money the first 60 to 90 days, with virtually zero exceptions. That said, the losses selling the same food in similar locations at the same prices (barring one of them thinks of running a special) will be more or less even.

So yes, if being a 22 year old college dropout who sees through your thinly veiled attempt at being “educated” makes me a snob, I will wear my new found title with pride, but don’t sit here and complain because you opted for a field which wouldn’t even merit a Sunday school class, much less a college degree.

And now I will recite an on-topic comic (because that’s just how I roll…)
Ted: Hey, Dilbert, would you mind stopping by my house after work and seeing if you can fix my computer?
Dilbert: Sure, and while I do that you can be at my house cleaning the grout in my shower.
Ted: That’s crazy talk.
Dilbert: Hey, I’m not the one who majored in Comparative Literature.

Nice to see you finally speak up, Ted.

If you’re hiring now (what with the economy and all) and your company is anywhere near east central Alabama, hello. I’m a 22 year old college drop out who has never taken a sip of alcohol and writes PHP code for fun. If I sound like your kind of candidate – i.e. someone who actually does a tech job because I like it instead of just for the money – reply and I’ll stick an email address out here.

Seriously, all any college degree these days does in the first place is tell the interviewer two things:

How much disposable income you have.
How much help you really need to change a light bulb.

Just saying, a college degree means nothing. As far as the story at hand, I don’t care where he got his degree from. I don’t even care that he has one. What I want to know is what part of TCP/IP he invented or which contributions to the Linux Kernel the man wrote? I can understand the argument that he needs to be a good manager, but there are plenty of geeks who are ALSO good managers, and I think those are the ones we should be looking for, not just a good manager who thinks twitter is cute. I don’t care if he got his degree from the University of Timbuktu, if the man can’t write AT LEAST a basic “Hello world” in SOME language (I’m not picky, JAVA, C, PHP, anything!) WITHOUT a manual then he is not qualified. Hiring this guy is like hiring someone for Attorney General who has never actually tried a case in his life. (Well…except we actually did that under dubya, but that was to be expected under dubya.) Or like hiring a Secretary of the Department of Energy who genuinely does not understand how solar power works and is receiving monthly cash payouts from Exxon. (Ok, another bad example, dubya did that too…)

To put it simply, a good salesman doesn’t just know how to sell, he knows his product. Appointing this guy would be like hiring last year’s top Avon rep to run a Ford dealership. If they don’t know the difference between a V6 and a V8 they’re not going to sell any cars, no matter how much hand lotion they sold last year.

The short answer is that America quit really educating people in the 1950′s. Ever since that time, unless you’re an Ivy League graduate, you basically had a set of professors spit a large volume of facts at you and then hand you a multiple choice test and get a piece of paper called a degree if at least 70% of those facts stuck. That’s the American educational system at every level these days. Critical thinking? Logic? Reasoning? The ability to figure things out for yourself? Seldom is any of that taught here any more. The US educational system now serves one purpose: to be sure you are ready to produce a certain minimum amount of bitchwork upon graduation. We no longer create an informed citizenry, merely one which is capable of doing work and living paycheck to paycheck.

I am 22 now, I am a computer geek and have been since the age of 4, and I live 2 blocks from the campus of both one of the most prestigious universities and for that matter, one of the select few to go heavy into computing as early as the late 70′s. That said, I still wish I had been born in the 20′s and died in the 50′s, because though my life would be short and I would have no contact with computers at all, I would have lived and died in a time when people weren’t so damn stupid because the intelligent survived, not the brutes.

Anyhow, glad I could inform you. We would have been much better off had we lost the revolutionary war, I’m afraid.

Same holds true for our friends at Cambridge, consisting of several university colleges within the university system of Cambridge (check for yourself).

By indicting the U of M University College as sub-par or anything less that a legitimate college, one would assume you are assailing the reputation of the entire University of Maryland as a whole. At least that’s the way we view it from our perspective on academics here in the UK. Does the quality of education in the American collegiate system really degrade so dramatically from one school to the next? I always thought Americans somehow prided themselves in the quality of college-level academics… Thoughts?

Thank you for clarifying the importance of a prestigious school’s degree. OBTW, Comp Sci degrees have a shelf life of about two years on average, so your prestigious graduate’s degree will be worth nada and he’ll probably have to go back to night school like Vivek to earn a more current degree anyway. Sorry.