Lets get one thing straight right off the bat. If someone has been named president of International Business Machines Corporation, it means they are the heir apparent and future chief executive officer of what used to be the worlds largest IT supplier and, with prior presidents, actually was the worlds largest IT supplier. Which is why the announcement of the departure of Jim Whitehurst from IBM on the Friday before the Independence Day holiday in America started was such a surprise.

Someone at the company forgot what being named president of the IBM Company means. Or no longer cared.

That someone is very likely current CEO Arvind Krishna, who was given that role back in January 2021, when the companys board of directors also named Whitehurst president. Whitehurst came to IBM after being CEO at Red Hat, the open source software giant the only open source software giant if you want to be precise that IBM paid $34 billion to acquire in October 2018. Perhaps Krishna, who is 59 and already coming up against the traditional retirement age of 60 for IBMs chairman and CEO, has decided that he is best to run Big Blue and that the person who ran Red Hat for more than a dozen years, who was chief operating officer for Delta Air Lines for six years (covering ops as a well as the CIO role), who was a partner at the Boston Consulting Group for a dozen years, and who got a double major in computer science and economics from Rice University and an MBA from Harvard University, is not.

To be fair, that someone who forgot the meaning of the president title at IBM could have been the companys board, it could have been the executive management at Big Blue, or it could have been Whitehurst himself. Or maybe all four at once.

The upshot is we will never know what that future IBM, one that brought the sensibilities Whitehurst has developed in his long career from outside of Big Blue, could have been. We expected transformation, and because there is precedent for bringing outsiders inside Big Blue to help transform it, as former chief executive officer and chairman Louis Gerstner masterfully did when he was brought in from outside of Big Blue to literally save its corporate life on April Fools Day 1993. There is an equally important one which we will explain below, and Whitehurst could have been the third.

Those of us who have been around for a long time and who watched IBM very carefully know exactly how dire IBMs situation was in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as the entire computer business was shapeshifting and the world as Big Blue knew is suddenly collapsed. Back then, mainframe and minicomputer demand dried up and the Unix open systems revolution took the corporate datacenters of the world by storm. It was hard to watch IBMs death spiral, and that is what it truly was.

In the late 1980s, at its peak, IBM had well over 400,000 employees and half of them were in the United States. In 1991, IBM shed around 30,000 employees and booked a $3.4 billion charge, pushing it to report a $2.8 billion loss. In 1992, IBMs revenues shrank a bit, but it lost nearly $5 billion and the employee count dropped nearly 43,000, just above 300,000 people worldwide. The following year, 1993, was just awful for IBM, with revenues trending down by a few points and IBM shedding another 45,000 employees and posted a stunning $8.9 billion in restructuring charges and an $8.1 billion loss against $62.7 billion in sales. Chairman and CEO John Akers retired in April that year and Gerstner was brought in to replace him. The next year, IBM was able to boost revenue by two points to $64 billion and actually posted a $3 billion profit, but the layoffs continued and the employee count shrank by 36,000 to 220,000.

This was the first time an outsider ran Big Blue aside from Thomas Watson himself, when he joined the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company in May 1914 to be its general manager and nearly a year later was named its first president. CTR was eventually rejiggered, with meat slicers and scales sold off and it focused on the punch card tabulating gear that turned it into the first iteration of what we know as IBM. Gerstner rejiggered IBM in a different way, putting its services and software front and center and opening both up to competitive IT platforms while making its four platforms mainframes, proprietary minicomputers, Unix minicomputers, and X86 servers open to running operating systems, middleware, and applications created by others. The commercial Internet and the dot-com boom and the e-business explosion in the wake of this helped keep IBM alive for another decade. Gerstner retired a hero and joined private equity firm The Carlyle Group.

To one way of looking at it, IBMs situation is not as bad now in 2021 as it was starting in 1991. But to another way, IBM is a lot less relevant today than it was in the early 1990s, and Red Hat was exactly the big transfusion of fresh blood that IBM needed to revitalize and change itself. Whitehurst was without question one of the big assets that Big Blue got in the deal, and it was no doubt a goal of former IBM president, chief executive officer, and chairman Ginni Rometty, who preceded Krishna and Whitehurst in their roles, to see Whitehurst eventually and we think sooner rather than later take the helm. We fully expected for Krishna to be chairman for several years, by the way, before Whitehurst assumed that role.

The precedent for presidents is clear here at IBM, and it is important to point this out. Whatever happened with Whitehurst violates that precedent, which means it had to be pretty significant. While it is true, as has been reported, that Whitehurst, who is 54, wants to be CEO at a company before he retires, the CEO job he undoubtedly thought he would have and that any IBMer and IBM watcher already thought he had was the future CEO at IBM.

Thomas Watson, who is called IBMs founder but thats a bit fuzzy if you look into the long history of the companies that make up IBM, all the way back to Hermann Holleriths punch card tabulators that were used in the US Census in 1890, was succeeded by his son, Thomas Watson, Jr, who was named president in 1952 and CEO when his father died in 1956. This was when IBM was transforming itself into the mainframe computer maker that made it a household name and fabulously rich by any corporate standards you care to bring to the table. Vin Learson was named IBM president in 1966 and was chairman and CEO from 1971 through 1973. Frank Cary was named president in 1971, with Learson approaching the mandatory 60 retirement age in 1973, when Cary was then named chairman and CEO. Cary was CEO until 1981 and chairman until 1983. John Opel was named president in 1974 under Cary and took over as CEO and chairman when Cary relinquished those roles. John Akers was named president in 1983 and two years later was named CEO and chairman when Opel stepped down. IBM did not initially have a president when Gerstner came in, but Akers had an assistant named Sam Palmisano who Gerstner took a shining to, and in 2000 he was named president, in 2002 he was named CEO, and in 2003 he was named chairman. As Palmisano approached the 60 retirement age, Ginni Rometty was named president and CEO in early 2012 and chairman in late 2012. When Rometty relinquished her president and CEO roles in January 2020, Krishna was named CEO and Whitehurst president, and she stepped down as chairman in December 2020 and Krishna took on that role.

The split CEO/president roles that Rometty did across two people is unusual in IBMs history, but not without precedent, either. It was reasonable to expect that Whitehurst would be CEO and wield the power while Krishna would be chairman and provide the IBM historical context. Krishna has been calling all the plays since Rometty stepped down, including selling off a big chunk of the services business and focusing down on the hybrid cloud message. Neither is particularly exciting to Wall Street or customers, even if the latter is indeed how computing will be done for most of the large enterprises that Big Blue cares most about.

IBM did not have a platform that captures the imagination and it did not have a story to tell, and Red Hat definitely gave it both of those. We wonder why Whitehurst is not the one who is going to be calling the plays and relaying that message to the world. Given his experience as consultant, CIO, and CEO of a major software company that has shaken up the enterprise, it is a wonder indeed. And we wonder what kind of IBM might have emerged under Whitehursts guidance a few years hence. IBM will persevere, and Red Hat is still a wonderful asset, but Big Blue cannot be the same after this. It will be a little less red and a little more blue, at the very least.

In other IBM reorganization news, Tom Rosamilia, who we always thought might be president and CEO at Big Blue, has been put in charge of the Cloud and Cognitive Software group at the company the role that Krishna held when Rometty did the Red Hat deal. Ric Lewis, who used to run Hewlett Packard Enterprises Mission Critical Systems division has been brought in to run Systems group, replacing Rosamilia. Bridget van Kralingen is retiring and has stepped down as head of Global Markets, a group and division spanning marketing and sales role, and Rob Thomas, who has run various hardware and software units, has taken over that role.

Continued here:

The Future IBM We Will Probably Never See - The Next Platform

SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Amazon (Nasdaq:AMZN) is thrilled to announce the 2021 class of Amazon Future Engineer Teacher of the Year Award recipients. Each year, Amazon recognizes ten dynamic teachers for their work to inspire students from underserved and historically underrepresented communities to pursue careers in computer science and robotics. The following educators are this year's recipients:

"It has been an especially difficult year for teachers, so we are excited to recognize their hard work and commitment to their students' successes," said Victor Reinoso, Global Director, Amazon Future Engineer, Amazon in the Community. "The Amazon Future Engineer Teacher of the Year Award recipients work diligently to help students in underserved and underrepresented communities build life-changing skills to propel their futures in computer science. We celebrate their tireless efforts to increase access to technology and computer literacy in their classrooms and beyond."

Recipients were chosen based on a variety of criteria, including a commitment to promoting diversity and inclusion within computer science education, a recommendation from a school administrator, and compelling, personal anecdotes about their schools and students. Scholarship America reviewed the applications and selected the ten award recipients.

Teachers learned of the honor when their principals and fellow colleagues surprised them with an Amazon box filled with Amazon Future Engineer swag. Each of the award-winning teachers received a prize package valued at more than $30,000, which includes $25,000 to expand computer science and/or robotics education at their respective schools, as well as a $5,000 cash award for each educator to celebrate their exemplary work with students.

Receiving this award meant the hard work and dedication that I have devoted to students paid off for them. I introduced my students to coding because I understand we live in a digital age and our children are our future, said Dr. Melissa Collins, computer science teacher at John P. Freeman Optional School. We have to work with our future generation so they can help change the narrative and become STEM professionals who help motivate and encourage other students.

Amazon Future Engineer is a childhood-to-career computer science education program intended to inspire and educate millions of students globally, including hundreds of thousands of students in the U.S. each year. Students explore computer science through school curriculum and project-based learning, using code to make music, program robots, and solve problems. Amazon Future Engineer also awards 100 students each year with four-year, $40,000 scholarships and paid internships at Amazon. Now in its second year, the Amazon Future Engineer Teacher of the Year Award program is part of Amazon's commitment to STEM and computer science education. For 2021, Amazon has a goal to reach 1.6 million students from historically underrepresented communities globally through Amazon Future Engineer with real-world-inspired virtual and hands-on computer science project learning. The program is currently available in the U.S., U.K., France, and Canada.

Computer science is the fastest-growing profession within the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) field, but only 8% of STEM graduates earn a computer science degree, with a small percentage from underrepresented communities. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects the market for computer science professionals will grow 11% between 2019 and 2029, much faster than the average for all other occupations.

Learn more about a few of our 2021 Amazon Future Engineer Teacher of the Year Award recipients at About Amazon.

If you or someone you know would like to be considered for this honor, sign up for an email reminder to apply this fall for the Amazon Future Engineer Teacher of the Year Award.

About Amazon

Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Amazon strives to be Earths Most Customer-Centric Company, Earths Best Employer, and Earths Safest Place to Work. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Career Choice, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, Alexa, Just Walk Out technology, Amazon Studios, and The Climate Pledge are some of the things pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.

Read the original here:

Amazon Recognizes Computer Science Educators with 2021 Teacher of the Year Award - Business Wire

Now were putting that all out for the world to help us, Sweeney says. I see the lab as a transition point between a lot of the work thats built up over the last decades and the transition to a brighter future.

Shorenstein Center Director Nancy Gibbs, the Visiting Edward R. Murrow Professor of Practice of Press, Politics, and Public Policy, said Sweeneys qualifications blending computer science, teaching, and government service make her the ideal person to launch the new venture.

The new lab will be an important addition to Kennedy School initiatives that have deepened teaching, scholarship and action-oriented public policy research on digital and related technology, Gibbs says.

Sweeney has already been working with students and faculty on a range of public interest technology projects focused on using technology to enhance democratic participation and vaccine access and to address other societal challenges. That work has already influenced government regulations and prompted technology companies including Facebook and Airbnb to change some of their practices.

Examples of initiatives that have resulted from collaborations with Harvard students and colleagues include VoteFlare, a service in Georgia that monitors voters registration status in real time and alerts them via email, text, or phone if something has changed (if they have been purged from a voter list, for example), giving them time to make corrections before election day.

As we go, as were shaping the future, we want to make sure that were also expanding the opportunities and advancing equity making sure were bringing others along with us.

Latanya Sweeney

Another project, called MyDataCan, is designed to take control of personal data from technology companies and give it back to users. When people use apps and web-based services that are affiliated with MyDataCan, they can view, delete, share, or privatize their data using encryption, depending on their privacy preferences.

Students carried out some of this work through the Data Privacy Lab, which Sweeney established while based in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard. The Journal of Technology Science, which Sweeney founded and serves as editor in chief, has been a channel for sharing information about these projects.

But even as the public interest tech successes were achieved, Sweeney says, the need to expand from a purely Harvard-based, undergraduate program was becoming clearer. It was realizing that, in any given year, we were leaving more problems unsolved than we could address, she says. We needed a way for students to get to do this work, not only at the undergraduate level, but at the graduate level as well.

Sweeney said the new lab will give students, scholars, and faculty across the Kennedy School, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and other parts of Harvard University experience working directly with technology, including algorithms, programs, tools, devices, and more. Ultimately, the lab will have three overarching goals: creating, developing, and providing technologies in the public interest; enabling research; and providing ways to share knowledge about public interest technology across institutions and disciplines.

All of that effort, Sweeney says, will be guided by a desire not just to foster technology that serves some people, but that serves everyone. As we go, as were shaping the future, we want to make sure that were also expanding the opportunities and advancing equity making sure were bringing others along with us, she says.

View original post here:

At new Harvard lab, technology to serve the public - Harvard Gazette

Many big tech companies still expect developers to have an understanding of programming fundamentals, despite the fact coding jobs are becoming increasingly platform-based. So how important is theory, really?

Big tech companies can base hiring decisions around a candidate's understanding of programming fundamentals, much to the chagrin of developers.

Image: skynesher/Getty Images

The question of how important programming theory is to real-world software development is a divisive issue within the developer community, and you don't have to go far to find people arguing on both sides.

A lot of big tech companies still base hiring decisions around a candidate's understanding of programming fundamentals, much to the chagrin of developers who have learnt to code but do not hold a computer science degree, where much of this is taught.

Online coding courses and so-called bootcamps have exploded in popularity in recent years among those looking for a fasttrack into software development. These intensive courses usually focus on a specific programming language or platform, which students will be taught to use over the course of several weeks.

While they might be a convenient choice for someone looking for a mid-life career shift, or for someone who doesn't have the time or money to sit a two-to-four-year computer science degree, online courses rarely leave students with an understanding of programming fundamentals. This can come as a nasty surprise when it shows up in the interview process.

"If a person has spent their career learning programming in practice which we could say it's how most people learn to program nowadays, including me these theoretical questions can be extremely difficult to answer, giving a feeling that these processes are ineffective and even unfair to a point," says Bruno Rocha, an iOS developer and writer for programming blog SwiftRocks.

Rocha recently wrote about the topic of programming fundamentals and how important they are to a successful career in software development.

SEE:The best programming languages to learn--and the worst(TechRepublic Premium)

He points out that, while the traditional tech companies have continued with their view of programming as a generic concept, newer companies have more practical and focused platform needs, which is exactly the type of job that bootcamp-style courses are designed to fill.

"In short, the interview process of these companies is considerably different from the average one, with the former being more focused on theory and the latter being focused more on practical concepts."

A lot of the anger towards tech companies who demand an understanding of computer science stems from the fact that it is largely seen as unnecessary for the types of tasks a coder will actually be expected to perform as part of their job.

The short explanation is because theoretical knowledge is unnecessary for most jobs nowadays, says Rocha. "Although they provide a great boost to your programming ability, it's safe to say that from a career necessity standpoint, one does not need to master programming in a generic way if their job is to code for a specific platform, like web or iOS."

Of course, the importance of this knowledge also depends on where or for whom an aspiring developer wants to work.

A common misconception is that the work performed by software giants is the same as for the average tech company, but this is not true, says Rocha. "Even though the job might technically be the same, these companies have considerably different needs and objectives, and I think it's very important to consider and understand these differences when setting your career goals," he adds.

Tom Crick, professor of digital education and policy at Swansea University, says people are becoming increasingly sceptical of tech giants' "brutal" technical interview processes , which aren't necessarily an accurate means of determining a candidate's core competencies.

"It's quite attritional," Crick says. "Some people like it as a badge of honor. But actually, I think if we are talking about that transition from a software engineering graduate into their first position, what are the expectations for their skills and their knowledge and understanding, and what they could actually demonstrate?"

Crick believes university programmes have a part to play in better preparing graduate developers for employment, noting that most big companies will expect a candidate to hold "a good degree from a good university".

In which case, current software engineering programmes may need something of an overhaul, with Crick noting that many UK universities have simply tweaked their computer science degree to accommodate more software-focused syllabi.

"The software engineering program has developed as 'let's tweak the computer science degree and add a bit more software-type stuff'," he says.

SEE: C++ programming language: How it became the foundation for everything, and what's next (free PDF) (TechRepublic)

"Actually, you're starting to see, particularly because of the demand for people to program across a range of different sectorsthe kind of breadth of knowledge and expertise goes all the way from, you need programming skills, you need some sort of formal kind of theoretical knowledge, but also you need the ability to understand what it means for designing software for user-centred design, and understand how that can be used in a variety of different contexts."

When it comes to practical versus theoretical knowledge, Crick says it isn't a case of either or neither is comparable to the other in terms of the experience they offer, and each have their individual merits.

"I think they can be complimentary. Doing a bootcamp can be a really rapid immersion into say, if you wanted to learn Angular and the hot JavaScript framework that everyone seems to use in FinTech. Then, I can see that going on an Angular bootcamp would be really good, because it'd be much more industry-focused," he says.

However, Crick also believes that, much like any technical discipline, mastering software engineering requires theoretical knowledge knowledge that developers won't gain in a intensive online course. "I get quite frustrated when people say you just need to be able to program and you don't need to do all that theory stuff, because the theory stuff is also quite important to understand mistakes that have been made in software for years and years," he says.

"There's a pragmatism around [the fact that] you cannot be an expert after doing an eight-week or a three-month program. It's just the reality; it's just impossible."

There's also the issue of hands-on experience. An intensive driving course will teach new drivers the practical skills needed to manoeuvre a car in a few short days, but it won't give them the sustained experience that turns people into confident and capable drivers. The same is true for coding.

SEE:How to build a successful developer career (free PDF)(TechRepublic)

"You need to develop those competencies, those behaviors and practices, and clearly you develop some of those at university, but you also have to develop those in industry," says Crick.

"I don't think you could develop that over two weeks, eight weeks or three months. And I also don't think you entirely develop that over the lifetime of an undergraduate degree. It's the apprenticeship and the development and then you have to do that in the real world, in industry, too."

The rapid rise of smartphone technology some 15 years ago led to a shortage of developers, which coding bootcamps sprang up to fill by enabling those without a college degree to get into the industry.

But with more new developers coming through these non-traditional pipelines, there is a risk of a mismatch between their own expectations and those of hiring companies, with Crick noting that coding bootcamps may make students over-confident about their capabilities.

"That's not to say that the computer science degree is a prerequisite for going to be a software engineer, because actually there are lot of people who are software engineers haven't done a computer science degree," he adds.

"But if you look across people with, say, a STEM science or a sort of STEM degree background, you'll see a lot of engineers, mathematicians and scientists who are also very good at programming, because they have that strong technical foundation about how to think about solving problems."

A weekly update of all the essential technology news from the UK and Europe. Wednesdays

Read more:

Programming theory: A waste of time, or key to your dream coding job? - TechRepublic

Computing touches every aspect of teaching and learning at MIT, and the humanities are no exception, with scholars across disciplines using computational tools to answer critical questions in humanistic research. MIT is uniquely positioned to innovate in the digital humanities, with widespread skills in coding and deep engagement in the humanities. Bridging the gap creating a bilingual community, as MIT President L. Rafael Reif calls it to make connections across diverse research interests will be one key to success.

Now, a new collaboration between the MIT Programs in Digital Humanities (DH Lab) and the MIT Libraries is helping foster relationships among scholars with intersecting interests in computational culture. Since September 2020, the DH Lab has partnered with the libraries to present Digital Teaching and Research Collaborative Sessions, a weekly series of virtual events that provide a regular, informal space for faculty and researchers to connect with DH Lab staff, MIT librarians, and with one another. Recordings of these sessions are now available on the MIT Libraries YouTube channel.

We wanted to hold open space for instructors and researchers across SHASS [School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences] to meet and share their insights and experiences in online learning during this unprecedented year, says Stephanie Frampton, associate professor of literature and faculty director of the DH Lab, founded in 2018 to build community through undergraduate research opportunities (UROPs), faculty research, visiting scholars programs, and events. It began with a week of workshops on tools for online teaching just before the fall semester and grew into a year-long series of more than 30 events involving faculty, researchers, students, and librarians from all corners of the Institute and beyond. Its been wonderful to see Thursday afternoons become a real touchstone for the community.

Frampton and DH Lab Research Associate Erica Zimmer, who was instrumental in organizing and running the events, were eager to partner with the MIT Libraries Ece Turnator, humanities and digital scholarship librarian, and Mark Szarko, librarian for comparative media studies, literature, philosophy, and theater arts. With the pandemic prompting a switch to remote learning, both librarians had been working extensively with faculty looking to enhance teaching and UROPs with digital tools.

Ece and Mark had already been working to bring the digital humanities forward at MIT, making people aware of tools, techniques, and case studies through IAP [Independent Activities Period] sessions, workshops, and a resource guide, says Zimmer. People at MIT know the libraries can help them figure out where they need to go next with a project, so their partnership has been crucial in that regard.

It makes sense for the libraries to be a partner in creating community around the digital humanities, says Szarko. MIT faculty have a wide range of research interests, and the MIT Libraries provide a sort of neutral ground for making connections across disciplines. Its a place that welcomes everyone.

The series started informally, with water cooler sessions on topics such as student engagement and strategies for teaching online. Other sessions demonstrated particular resources such as annotation, mapping, and text analysis tools, the collaborative publishing platform PubPub, or Relata, an experimental search tool for humanistic scholarship. Presentations also showcased underutilized collections at MIT, such as Archnet, a digital library developed by the Aga Khan Documentation Center. Perhaps most crucially, the series introduced participants to other scholars with similar research interests.

I enjoyed brainstorming with fascinating new and old colleagues that I would not have had a chance to speak with otherwise, says Michel DeGraff, professor of linguistics and director of the MIT-Haiti Initiative, who attended multiple events.

With an average of 25 to 30 participants at each session, the virtual events drew not only MIT scholars from various humanities fields, but also attendees from chemistry, electrical engineering and computer science, mathematics, and MIT Sloan School of Management, as well as journalists, filmmakers, and others beyond the Institute. People have tuned into the sessions, which are open to those with no prior experience using digital techniques in research or pedagogy, from at least nine different countries.

With a return to on-campus teaching and research activity projected for the fall term, session organizers are discussing ways to carry forward the strengths of the series as well as the insights and sense of community cultivated during this unusual academic year. Whatever format these discussions take in the future, their goal remains the same.

Were trying to create an ecosystem of knowledge and connections, says Turnator. The sessions are an opportunity to not only learn more about specific tools and resources but to see who else at MIT and beyond is interested in similar types of problems.

The MIT Programs in Digital Humanities are generously funded, in part, by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

See the rest here:

Online hub for research and teaching brings digital humanities to the fore - MIT News