Month: August 2018

I believe that the technology industry is a meritocracy and that it should be a meritocracy.  I believe that it is a meritocracy because of the rise and fall of companies that we have seen and the nature of the industry as a whole.  Given that the technology created by people working in this industry will be used by millions of people worldwide, the products of this industry should be easy to use, fool-proof and of the highest possible quality.  The products should be intuitive and easy for the vast majority of our population to access and utilize because that is exactly who is going to be using it.  Due to all of these reasons, I believe that merit should be the leading reason for hiring a new engineer or programmer in the technology industry.  Companies within the technology industry need to hire the best engineers and programmers to be able to succeed and deploy their product to the masses and, once that happens, continually evolve and adapt to the ever-changing preferences of their end-users while also maintaining the integrity of the product the company puts out.  The best engineers and programmers will be able to do this and every company should strive to hire the very best to be able to set themselves apart from all of the other companies in their space.  Just as the reading said, the main reason that Facebook overtook MySpace and other early social media platforms was due to Mark Zuckerberg’s talent in both coding Facebook and hiring the very best coders to be able to take what he had given them in the prototype for Facebook and spin it into the Facebook we all know today.  I truly believe that it is a good thing for the industry to be a meritocracy because of the nature of the industry today, as I have mentioned.  I truly believe that the people that put in the best work and prove to their superiors that they are capable of performing at the highest possible level should be afforded every opportunity to advance their career and move up in their respective company.  This belief of mine definitely came from my childhood growing up in the ultimate meritocracy: sports.  In sports, the only thing that is looked at when deciding who should start or make a roster is how good of a player you are.  That is all that matters because careers, mainly the coach/manager of the team, matter upon it.  If the manager of a professional sports team wins games, they will be paid handsomely and for them to win games they need to play the best players whenever possible.  I believe that the technology industry, while I do see it as a meritocracy now, should take note of this and apply some of the same ideals.  Just as the manager will play the best baseball players to try and win as many games out of 162 as possible, tech companies should hire the best programmers and engineers to try and win as many users out of the general public as possible.  The general public will always choose the easiest and most convenient option for them and the easiest way for tech companies to become this option is to hire the best programmers and engineers that can bring efficiency and convenience to whatever company they are working for.

My name is Nick Rocco and I am a senior Computer Science major at the University of Notre Dame.  I am from Suffield, Connecticut, which is a small town about 30 minutes north of Hartford, the capital of Connecticut.  I have always been interested in sports having played both football and baseball all the way through the end of high school and currently work on campus for the Notre Dame football team in their analytics department.  I decided to study Computer Science because of the flexibility it gives me in deciding what my future career path.  When I came to Notre Dame, I wasn’t entirely sure what I wanted to do afterwards and in fact started out as a mechanical engineer.  I decided to switch to CS because I realized that, with the way the world is nowadays, every company can benefit from somebody that knows how to program and how to use computing to their benefit.  This would allow me great flexibility in the career path I decided to choose.  What I hope to get out of this class and the most pressing topics facing computer scientists and engineers are very closely related.  I really look forward to studying the topic of free speech and censorship as I believe, especially given the climate of the country, this is very interesting.  As computer scientists, the way we code a given platform directly impacts the way that people who use this platform view things.  We could have a direct impact on shaping the attitude of the user towards a given topic based upon what we allow them to view by using our platform.  This is an extremely heavy burden and one that we should not take lightly.  This is why I am very much looking forward to talking about this and think it is one of the most pressing topics that computer scientists and engineers face.

Typically, when I determine if an action is right or wrong I weigh all of the possible benefits and consequences of that action and look at which is greater.  In this sense, I believe that I typically depend on the utilitarian approach that is described in the reading from Brown University.  In this reading, this approach is described as “a system in which actions could be described as good or bad depending upon the amount and degree of pleasure and/or pain they would produce”.  I believe that this description closely matches up with the system that I use when I try to assess whether an action is right or wrong.  In my system, I look at all of the potential benefits and consequences that could happen for myself and also the other people that this potential action could impact.  In that way, I try to figure out if the action is more good than bad and also look at more than just how this action impacts myself, but try to look at the larger picture instead of just my own little world.  I believe that through this system, I can most broadly look at the impact that an action has on the world and then decide whether or not I should consider the action right or wrong.  This system that I employ also uses some of the other systems described in the reading.  One of such systems is the egoistic approach.  I use this approach when I look at the potential benefits and consequences that an action has on solely myself.  As I mentioned, this is not the only thing that I look at as I also look at the benefits and consequences an action will have on other people, but I do take into consideration the egoistic beliefs and look at how an action will impact myself.  Similarly, I believe that I also use aspects of the common good approach when I look at the potential benefits and consequences that an action could have on the people around me and the people that this action could impact.  While both the common good approach and egoistic approach solely look at the benefits and consequences of the people and the self, respectively, I try to weight both in my decision of deciding whether an action is good or not because I believe that both are important in this decision.  I do not believe that one of these systems is “better” than the other and I believe that both must play a role in truly deciding whether or not an action is good or not.  If one does not look at their own self interest, then they could become unhappy and may not engage in any self pleasing actions.  If one only looks at their own self interest, they could quickly become self centered and may be off putting to others around them.  This is why I will look at both my own self interest and the people around me when looking at how to discern whether an action is right or wrong.