Topic: Fuck dance, let's code

[Cursus]

Government sparks anger with ad campaign suggesting ballet dancer 'rethink' and 'reboot' job

[Captain Z]

Like it's that fucking easy. Can barely get a job in the industry I'm skilled and experienced in.

[Butchers Blind]

So, are they saying Fatima should set up an OnlyFans account and get busy with the adult content?

[Better Midlands]

Thanks for the info.

Like it's that fucking easy. Can barely get a job in the industry I'm skilled and experienced in.

Won't many of the entry level jobs start to be outsourced to workers in cheaper countries now that companies have got comfortable with people working out of the office anyway?

[touchingcloth]

I'd love a job in cyber, me.

[idunnosomename]

Are people laughing at this because "to cyber" used to mean awkward roleplay "cybersex" in chat apps or does no one say that anymore

[touchingcloth]

Are people laughing at this because "to cyber" used to mean awkward roleplay "cybersex" in chat apps or does no one say that anymore

I had forgotten that that was a thing! I found it funny because "a job in cyber" is laughable nonsense on the level of "I call app Britain".

[Pingers]

When your peers get to be Chancellor of the Exchequer or edit a newspaper without having any relevant experience, just because they went to the right school, it must all seem so easy.

[touchingcloth]

From the What's On Stage article:

LRNPage @ Spoopy Season
@LRNPage
#SaveTheArts I'm not seeing nearly enough people on art twitter talk about this! This ad has popped up on our gov website shortly after Rishi Sunak swore blind he didn't suggest artists retrain into other jobs... If you're not angry, you're not paying attention.

I hate this person because of "spoopy" and "art twitter".

[Zetetic]

Updated to reflect latest claimant figures release:

[buzby]

I had forgotten that that was a thing! I found it funny because "a job in cyber" is laughable nonsense on the level of "I call app Britain".

Our IT network security team calls themselves the 'Cyber Team', which means I can't anything they say remotely seriously.

[touchingcloth]

Our IT network security team calls themselves the 'Cyber Team', which means I can't anything they say remotely seriously.

You could forgive an author in the 80s or 90s talking about how one day your grandchildren could have cyber jobs. But fuck me.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Our IT network security team calls themselves the 'Cyber Team', which means I can't anything they say remotely seriously.

Do they use the godawful us 'infosec' terminology that makes them sound like they're playing laser quest. Blue/red teams etc?

[Bernice]

The cumdog gets all his policy inspiration from an old vhs of Johnny Mnemonic.

[bgmnts]

STEM STEM WE NE NEED STEM

What about the cultural, emotional and spiritual development of our species using art and play?

FUCK THAT WE NEED TO QUANTIFY EXISTENCE THROUGH THE METRICS OF STEM.

STEEEEM

[Blumf]

'Learn to code' is the 21st century equivalent of 'Let them eat cake'

[Glebe]

"I should have become a ballerina while I had the chance!"

[Cuellar]

I'd love to reskill in cyber - let me just find 30k for a computer science degree

[Norton Canes]

^ Precisely the conclusion I reached after many attempts to transfer to our Uni's IT team.

[Sebastian Cobb]

You shouldn't need a CS degree to be a general IT bod, a lot of it is having an encyclopedic knowledge of various Microsoft corporate stuff (e.g. Active Directory) plus maybe some Unix adminy stuff too.

Traditionally cs was largely theoretical, a lot of maths, logic that overlaps with philosophy and then some low and high level programming concepts. Although these days some of them have dropped some of the theoretical stuff in favour of teaching more software engineering (because that's what employers and students who want a degree for a job rather than academia think that's what they want) practices.

[Fambo Number Mive]

Not sure if "she doesn't know it yet" is more patronising or sinister.

If we hadn't had the Tories in power during the pandemic, Fatima wouldn't need to look for a "next job" at all, as her industry would have been properly funded under Labour until there was a vaccine.

[touchingcloth]

You shouldn't need a CS degree to be a general IT bod, a lot of it is having an encyclopedic knowledge of various Microsoft corporate stuff (e.g. Active Directory) plus maybe some Unix adminy stuff too.

Traditionally cs was largely theoretical, a lot of maths, logic that overlaps with philosophy and then some low and high level programming concepts. Although these days some of them have dropped some of the theoretical stuff in favour of teaching more software engineering (because that's what employers and students who want a degree for a job rather than academia think that's what they want) practices.

I think getting a job in tech requires either a computer science degree or something more vocational from a coding academy, or else a LOT of experience. You don’t need to have a degree to be an Active Directory admin, but you need to have experience working on corporate networks, or to have got there in increments by being a hobbyist PC builder or something. I reckon to go from zero tech experience beyond knowing how to use a smartphone, you’d need a solid three months or so in a boot camp to become employable. Which is fine, but it’s expensive and the posters don’t suggest the government has laid on any schemes or anything for people to actually retrain, so I imagine for a lot of ballerinas the reality of retraining for a job in tech is about as plausible as me training for one in ballet. Sure I could have a go if I was arsed, but I’d bankrupt myself before I found out whether I was any good.

[buzby]

Do they use the godawful us 'infosec' terminology that makes them sound like they're playing laser quest. Blue/red teams etc?

They mostly just CC the latest phishing scam notice from the Government IT security website or security patch notices from Microsoft. A complete waste of time.

[Sebastian Cobb]

I think getting a job in tech requires either a computer science degree or something more vocational from a coding academy, or else a LOT of experience. You don’t need to have a degree to be an Active Directory admin, but you need to have experience working on corporate networks, or to have got there in increments by being a hobbyist PC builder or something. I reckon to go from zero tech experience beyond knowing how to use a smartphone, you’d need a solid three months or so in a boot camp to become employable. Which is fine, but it’s expensive and the posters don’t suggest the government has laid on any schemes or anything for people to actually retrain, so I imagine for a lot of ballerinas the reality of retraining for a job in tech is about as plausible as me training for one in ballet. Sure I could have a go if I was arsed, but I’d bankrupt myself before I found out whether I was any good.

There are hnd/hnc courses for system/network admin stuff though and apprenticeships.

[Sebastian Cobb]

They mostly just CC the latest phishing scam notice from the Government IT security website or security patch notices from Microsoft. A complete waste of time.

One of our customers got some 'pen test' consultants in, they were charlatans that tested against the top 10 vulns and that was about it. Presumably a skiddie using the 11th most popular exploit is something that would never happen.

The people commissioning it used to not understand what they sent us so they'd point to things like 'iis server leaking version' and go 'why's that?' and we'd go 'this is a java app running on tomcat, you tell us'.

[buzby]

I'd love to reskill in cyber - let me just find 30k for a computer science degree

TBH, back when my team consisted of more than just me, we always found that the CS graduates ended up being not the best at writing practical, efficient code for embedded work at least. Graduates from EE backgrounds seemed to get their heads around the realities of the hardware limitations a bit quicker. The CS grads we have had come through the department recently have all run a mile as the ancient stuff we work on is totally alien to them.

[steve98]

I imagine for a lot of ballerinas the reality of retraining for a job in tech is about as plausible as me training for one in ballet. Sure I could have a go...

Have a go man, Sadlers Wells are cryin' out for folk like you; what have you got to lose?

[touchingcloth]

TBH, back when my team consisted of more than just me, we always found that the CS graduates ended up being not the best at writing practical, efficient code for embedded work at least. Graduates from EE backgrounds seemed to get their heads around the realities of the hardware limitations a bit quicker. The CS grads we have had come through the department recently have all run a mile as the ancient stuff we work on is totally alien to them.

I’m a CS grad, and I’m absolutely not a coder. I wasn’t a coder before starting the course and I didn’t learn it during the course, because it wasn’t designed as a vocational thing.

The best developers I was at university with were good coders before they arrived at university, and with the exception of a couple of Cambridge grads[1] the best developers I’ve known in the places I’ve worked have either been self-taught non-graduates, or grads from other fields like physics where knowledge of coding has practical applications.

Whether graduates or not, everyone I know of with strong skills in CYBER - whether that’s development or admin - has quite obviously got a fuck of a lot of hours under their belts. Like ballerinas, really. “Hey, you know your job which you trained for thousands of hours for? Fancy doing that again for something else?”

1.	As I understand if, the syllabus there is closer to EE.

[Sebastian Cobb]

TBH, back when my team consisted of more than just me, we always found that the CS graduates ended up being not the best at writing practical, efficient code for embedded work at least. Graduates from EE backgrounds seemed to get their heads around the realities of the hardware limitations a bit quicker. The CS grads we have had come through the department recently have all run a mile as the ancient stuff we work on is totally alien to them.

This ties into what I was saying about CS degrees becoming more like 'software engineering' degrees, so will mostly teach high-level languages (it was java in my day but probably python now as it requires less boilerplate).

In my day we didn't do much embedded stuff either, just one robotics modules programing a handy board based around a m6800 and that was in 'interactive c'. There should've been more really, the only thing we did with assembly was around writing our own recersive-descent compilers.


My last place wasn't that strict on the degree thing and we found some of the self-taught people were better than some of the degree staff.

Although some of the worst code I've seen recently is from experienced oop developers trying to shoehorn unnecessary enterprisey patterns into python.

[touchingcloth]

This ties into what I was saying about CS degrees becoming more like 'software engineering' degrees, so will mostly teach high-level languages (it was java in my day but probably python now as it requires less boilerplate).

In my day we didn't do much embedded stuff either, just one robotics modules programing a handy board based around a m6800 and that was in 'interactive c'. There should've been more really, the only thing we did with assembly was around writing our own recersive-descent compilers.


My last place wasn't that strict on the degree thing and we found some of the self-taught people were better than some of the degree staff.

Although some of the worst code I've seen recently is from experienced oop developers trying to shoehorn unnecessary enterprisey patterns into python.

Snap. We learnt in Java and C#, but really only for the rudiments of how algorithms work without needing to get bogged down in garbage collection and whatnot. We did a bit of assembly on 6800, but again only to get the idea of machine language across. I was annoyed that my dissertation was enforced as a piece of software, because the course hadn’t taught us the methodologies in a way we could apply practically.