TITLE: Students, Faculty, and the Internet Age
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: June 10, 2006  3:29 PM
DESC: 
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BODY:
I've been meaning to write all week, but it turned
out to be busy.  First, my wife and daughters
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2006-05.html#e2006-05-24T14_09_34.htm">
   returned from Italy</A>,
which meant plenty of opportunity for family time.
Then, I spent much of my office week writing content
for our new
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/">
   department website</A>.
We were due for a change after many years of the same
look, and we'd like to use the web as a part of
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2006-05.html#e2006-05-31T13_07_31.htm">
   attracting new students</A>
and faculty.  The new site is very much an early first
release, in the agile development sense, because I
still have a lot of work to do.  But it fills some of
our needs well enough now, and I can use bits and pieces
of time this summer to augment the site.  My blogging
urge was most satisfied this week by the material I
assembled and wrote for the
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/prospective_students.php">
   prospective students section</A>
of the site.  (Thanks to the
<A HREF="http://www.lordofthewebs.com/">
   Lord of the Webs</A>
for his design efforts on the system.)

<IMG SRC="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog-images/misc/werner-vogels.gif"
     ALT="Werner Vogels"
     ALIGN="right">

I did get a chance to thumb through the May issue of
<A HREF="http://www.acmqueue.org/">
   ACM Queue</A>
magazine, where I read with some interest the
<A HREF="http://www.acmqueue.org/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=388">
   interview with Werner Vogels</A>,
CTO of Amazon.  Only recently I had been discussing
Vogels as a potential speaker for OOPSLA this or some
year soon.  I've read enough of Vogels's blog to know
that he has interesting things to say.

At the
<A HREF="http://www.acmqueue.org/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=388&page=5">
   end of the interview</A>,
Vogels comments on recruiting students and more generally
on the relationship of today's frontier IT firm to academia.
First, on what kind of person Amazon seeks:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
The Amazon development environment requires engineers and
architects to be very independent creative thinkers.  We
are building things that nobody else has done before, so
you need to be able to think outside the box.  You need
to have a strong sense of ownership, because in the small
teams in which you will work at Amazon, your colleagues
will count on you to pull your weight -- especially when
it comes to operating the service that you have built.
Can you take responsibility for making this the best it
can be?
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

Many students these days hear so much about teamwork and
"people" skills that they sometimes forget that every
team member has to be able to <STRONG>contribute</STRONG>.
No one wants a teammate who can't produce.  Vogels stresses
this upfront.  To be able to contribute effectively, each
of us needs to develop a set of skills that we can use
right now, as well as the ability to pick up new skills
with some facility.

I'd apply the same advice to another part of Vogels's
answer.  In order to "think outside the box",
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2005-05.html#e2005-05-16T15_41_16.htm">
   you have to start with a box</A>.

Vogels then goes on to emphasize how important it is for
candidates to "think the right way about customers and
technology.  Technology is useless if not used for the
greater good of serving the customer."  Sometimes, I
think that cutting edge companies have an easier time
cultivating this mindset than more mundane IT companies.
A company selling a new kind of technology or lifestyle
has to develop its customer base, and so thinks a lot
about customers.  It will be interesting to see how
companies like Yahoo!, Amazon, and Google change as they
make the transition into the established, mainstream
companies of 2020.

On the relationship between academia and industry, Vogels
says that faculty and Ph.D. students need to get out into
industry in order to come into contact with "the very
exciting decentralized computing work that has rocked the
operating systems and distributed systems world in the past
few years".  Academics have always sought access to data
sets large enough for them to test their theories.  This
 era of open source and open APIs has created a lot of new
opportunities for research, but open data would do even
more.  Of course, the data is the real asset that the big
internet companies hold, so it won't be open in the same
way for a while.  Internships and sabbaticals are the best
avenue open for academics interested in this kind of research
these days.
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