back to article Google's Hollywood 'interventions' made on-screen coders cooler

Google operates a “Computer Science in Media Team” that stages “interventions” in Hollywood to steer film-makers towards realistic and accurate depictions of what it's like to work in IT. The company announced the team in 2015 and gave it the job of “making CS more appealing to a wider audience, by dispelling stereotypes and …

  1. ratfox

    Megacorporation influencing media producers in an attempt to change public opinion

    You would need very few changes to make it really creepy.

    I'm not sure if learning that The Amazing World of Gumball is a thing makes it better or worse.

    1. Sandtitz Silver badge
      Thumb Up

      @ratfox

      "I'm not sure if learning that The Amazing World of Gumball is a thing makes it better or worse."

      It's a funny and original show, unlike most other series, animated or not.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Meh

    Hmmmm

    "Shows Google influenced include Miles from Tomorrowland, The Fosters, Silicon Valley, Halt and Catch fire, The Amazing Gumball, The Powerpuff Girls and Ready, Jet, Go."

    I've sort of heard of the power puff girls, but none of the others.

    And you can have "nerdy" by being funny, engaging and not stereotypical, CBBC's So Awkward is a great example of this; one that many girls can relate to and if you want girl nerd cool, then Project MC2 is the one.

    1. Aladdin Sane

      Re: Hmmmm

      Silicon Valley is obscenely funny.

      1. rmason

        Re: Hmmmm

        I came here to add this.

        Silicon Valley is very amusing.

        In silicon Valley and in "Mr Robot" you can actually see the effect of things like the subject of the article.

        Gone are the early NCIS/CSI type thing where the correct types of words are used but with no sort of correct context "we've pinged his VPN and hacked his IP" "let me just unix his router", and you notice that in more and more cases the correct words are using in the correct context.

        1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

          Re: Hmmmm

          The writers of Siliocn Valley are ex-silicon valley engineers, in the same way that the writers of Futurama are real scientists.

    2. HashimSheffield

      Re: Hmmmm

      How old are you!?

  3. Dan 55 Silver badge
    Meh

    Halt and Catch Fire

    Well... they didn't manage very well with making that technically accurate. I bet the elevator pitch was Mad Men with computers.

    Obligatory link: Source Code in TV and Films

    1. Dave 126 Silver badge

      Re: Halt and Catch Fire

      If I want technically accurate, I'll read a manual ;D

      Silicon Valley is very good, especially from the second season. What it isn't is a historical account.

      Similarly, Silicon Valley. If you can just go with their McGuffin of an impossibly good compression algorithm, the door is opened to satirising the odder aspects of start-up and VC culture.

      1. Dan 55 Silver badge

        Re: Halt and Catch Fire

        I just couldn't unsee the C64s' power lights all being off. Half-way through series 3 I think, I guess they read too many Internet comments and they started being on.

  4. m0rt

    Personally I would rather an incorrect stereotype than Google professing to represent me.

    Anyhow - I don't think the stereotype portrayal puts off people who get a kick from code. I do think that sort of thing pulls people in, regardless of the cool factor portrayed.

    I think there are better things to make cool. Like being generally nicer to people in everyday life.

    1. Dave 126 Silver badge

      > I think there are better things to make cool. Like being generally nicer to people in everyday life.

      How are you supposed to solve crimes if you have a happy home life and no drinking problem??!

      Actually, Columbo is the exception that proves the rule: he's nice, he's cool, he has a wife and dog.

      1. AMBxx Silver badge
        Unhappy

        Let's all just admit it - the stereotypes are true.

      2. MJB7

        Re: Exception that proves the rule

        Also both Inspector Barnabys.

        (And while Inspector Montalbano may have commitment issues, it doesn't seem to bother *him*.)

        1. This post has been deleted by its author

      3. Dan 55 Silver badge
        Alert

        He says he has a wife, but we never see her.

        For all we know, Mrs Columbo is his schizophrenic alter ego who goes out and commits the murders then Columbo finds someone else as a fall guy/girl. Any scenes of the fall guy/girl killing someone could be handwaved away because the series is shot with Columbo as an unreliable narrator.

        Or perhaps I've been watching too much Mr Robot.

        1. Dave 126 Silver badge

          > For all we know, Mrs Columbo is his schizophrenic alter ego who goes out and commits the murders then Columbo finds someone else as a fall guy/girl.

          Have you pitched that to a TV Network yet Dan? :D

        2. Ivan Vorpatril

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mrs._Columbo_(TV_series)

        3. Anonymous Coward
          Happy

          Columbo's Wife

          His wife is a real person!

          http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078635/

    2. Dinsdale247

      Bring it on

      This will be a boon for Universities and Colleges and make no difference to those of us that can do the real work. Rarely is someone interested in being 'cool' anything more than a second year drop out.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    “Five years after the premiere of the original CSI television series, forensic science majors in the U.S. increased by 50%, with an over index of women.”

    The result (at least from what I've read about in the UK where there's been a similar huge growth in forensic science degree student) is that there is a massive (we're talking 10x+) oversupply of people graduating with forensics related degrees + in any case I've also heard that UK police forces prefer to train their own forensic officers.Let's hope thet can start to highlight the areas where there actually is a need for gradautes.

    (The other area of up-coming oversupply is, I've heard, law since, according to someone whose in a senior position in a "Russell Group" University with the current UK funding system where Univerisies are now allowed to take as many students as they want then they are keen to maximize the incoming tuition fee income and starting a law degree is very attraactive as students will come as they think law is a good career choice and it only costs a few hours of lecture time a week to put on ... again the problem is that in a few years time there will not be enough junioor legal jobs left for people graduating with law degrees to be able to get the next stage of legal qualification that they need to make use of it).

    1. Aladdin Sane

      Not forgetting that Suits has made law seem sexy.

    2. Korev Silver badge

      the problem is that in a few years time there will not be enough junioor legal jobs left for people graduating with law degrees to be able to get the next stage of legal qualification that they need to make use of it

      This happened to a friend of mine after he decided to do a law "conversion degree"; he's currently doing a job that requires little more than Excel skills and ringing up suppliers and shouting at them.

      1. Prst. V.Jeltz Silver badge

        the .gov could manage the supply problem by subsidising skills in shortage

        (and also penalising useless bullshit subjects)

        On a different note , Forensics , whilst certainly hugely useful and necessary , is the perfect example of something that should be taught in house , as noted above.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      You raise a point that is being missed on a lot of people (and has been a long time). Just the other week I heard someone moaning that they have XYZ of debt and they are struggling to get a job (and house, and, and and). Somehow they thought a History degree would allow them to walk straight into a job and buy a £300,00 brand new house, flash car, and go socialising every night of the week.

      That Media course, that Law course, that Architecture course...what are your chances of getting a job at the end? Each course should have a "Number of people working this field after passing" type stat.

      Some would be very, very low.

      1. Prst. V.Jeltz Silver badge
        Flame

        There is , unfortunately , a school of thought that thinks that merely getting a degree , in whatever bullshit subject is enough to get you a job because "It proves I / they can work hard , prioritize time , see end goals , manage workloads, do research , blah , blah , buzzword"

        This is particularly annoying to people like myself who thought it might be beneficial to society to learn something incredibly difficult and technical that life as we know it is absolutely dependent on , but because I only got a "Higher National Diploma" rather than the magic "degree" , I am somehow outqualified by some dick who got a useless degree in "vineculture" because he liked the subject.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        >That Media course, that Law course, that Architecture course...what are your chances of getting a job at the end? Each course should have a "Number of people working this field after passing" type stat.

        Agree with you completely on Media and probably Law. You could add social sciences, politics, philosophy and a load of other subjects. Fairly sure we still need architects though (and its one of the longest courses to graduate). Unless, the plan for Brexit Britain is to do away with the H&S aspect of designing buildings and just letting anyone build whatever they want, wherever they want it.

        1. isogen74

          So what you want is civil engineers and planning officers then. Your average architect will spend their entire life doing loft conversions and garden grabbing extensions ... they don't need a degree, and the builder will ignore the drawings anyway.

      3. Richocet

        Probably because they were misled into believing this based on marketing from the education provider and maybe influenced by movies and TV.

        And at the time they made this career choice based on that data, they were probably still a minor.

      4. strum

        >That Media course

        I'm not sure whether it's still true, but the last time I looked, the infamous 'Media Studies' courses were one of the best job credentials of them all (i.e., more MS graduates got jobs than other disciplines).

        Engineers & the like love to look down on generalists - but generalists rule the world, and always will do. Specialists go out of style, very quickly.

    4. Richocet

      In a few years?

      It already happened about 7 years ago.

      There are some interesting articles about it in Australian newspapers if you google.

  6. heyrick Silver badge

    “Five years after the premiere of the original CSI television series, forensic science majors in the U.S. increased by 50%, with an over index of women.”

    And then they get hired, realise that the guys in the office aren't hunks and the IT person is neither a perky goth nor able to read a licence plate by zooming up a single pixel a billion times...

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    'I bypassed the storage controller, tapped directly in to the VNX array head, decrypted the nearline SAS disks, injected the flash drivers into the network's FabricPath before disabling the IDF, routed incoming traffic through a bunch of offshore proxies, accessed the ESXi server cluster in the prime data center, and disabled the inter-VSAN routing on the layer-3.'

    Take me! Take me now!!!

    So the end effect of Google's efforts is that rather than leaden dialogue that appears to have been written by a computer, we now have leaden dialogue that appears to have been written by a computer - which is technically plausible.

    1. Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

      Forget all this hacking. There are fully logged-in laptops with decryption dongles all over the place held by hipster coders who can't see because of their dot-com hoodie, can't hear because of their $2000 bluetooth headphones, and are terrified of people appearing IRL. The hoodie logo even says which network you're gaining access to.

  8. a_yank_lurker

    Reality?

    How about a few grey headed types and some balding types with children and grandchildren might make the depictions a bit more realistic. All they have done is remove the hoodie, given the guys a shave and haircut, dress them in more normal clothes, etc. Still 20 something clueless children.

    1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

      Re: Reality?

      You haven't worked in Palo Alto have you ?

  9. Alister

    Can Google save us from this?

    Nobody appears to have mentioned the trope codifier... From CSI

    “I'll create a GUI interface using Visual BASIC, see if I can track an IP address"

    AAaargh, Nooooooooooooooo!

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    So the bullshit uses actual terms?

    The example about the VNX, IDF and so forth used some of the right terms, but still failed to put them together in a coherent way. Is that better? I don't really think so.

    It reads like if you tried to make up a fake language using a bunch of random German and Russian words, so it would almost sound like something real to a German or Russia speaker, but not quite. You'd rather they make up something that's complete bullshit, like Klingon.

  11. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

    Always happens

    Obviously Office Space was funded/written by SAP or IBM - it couldn't have been Oracle or it would have been X-rated for violence and language

  12. Rustbucket

    Forensic over supply.

    Yeah, I thought that would happen, but some of the skills learned are useful in other fields such as food safety and environmental technology.

  13. Nimby
    Devil

    Every time I look around the office, I want to cry.

    Why is real life never like it is on TV? WHY!?!

    Clearly Google hasn't helped enough.

    But at least TV/movie computers don't use 100 pt fonts anymore.

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