8 years of college and can't program?
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Here's a snippet from this great article and great author, James Altucher... [-- Only one problem: when I arrived at the job, after 8 years of learning how to program in an academic environment—I couldn’t program. I won’t get into the details. But I had no clue. I couldn’t even turn on a computer. It was a mess. I think I even ruined people’s lives while trying to do my job. --] https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140506232520-5858595-10-things-entrepreneurs-don-t-learn-in-college?trk=object-title[^]
The article is a bit contrived IMHO. Could not even turn on a computer? Even my elderly mother-in-law can do this. That said, as someone who teaches CS at a major university, it is clear there is a bubble. Students who have little aptitude for programming and math are majoring in CS because of the economic incentives. This dilutes the academic experience for the capable students, while sending the incapable students off on an unsustainable career path. The bubble will burst, and will leave many people high and dry. We would do everyone a favor by encouraging the incapable students to pursue something they *are* good at. Related to this, it is clear there is a disconnect between what CS programs require students to learn and what skills are relevant in the working world. Many students who go into CS actually want to learn software development, but CS programs offer very little in the way of SD. Institutions of higher ed, however, typically make changes at a glacial pace, and we should not count on them to fix the problems anytime soon. Accordingly, I'm in the process of fixing the disconnect in a small way by providing SD training to recent CS graduates. Even so, SD training won't magically make incapable students capable. And related to this, don't expect universities to discourage incapable students from majoring in CS. Universities are, first and foremost, interested in selling their customers what they think they want, and the students are the customers. Meanwhile, I've yet to find an incapable student who is unable to turn on a computer, so Mr. Altucher would bolster his credibility by going a little more lightly on the hyperbole.
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When I spent a year as a high school senior in Minn. a long time ago (75-76), my classmates were certainly considering going to the University or to a college - often referred to as a "community college". Maybe things have changed in the 38 years since then, or maybe it varies from state to state. Those community colleges did award bachelor degrees, master degrees were far less common. The education was generally viewed as less academic, much more applied science. Here in Norway, we distinguish between universities and "høgskole" (which literally translates to "High School", but you start høgskole education after 13 years of general schooling). Similar to what Kornfeld Eliyahu Peter tells, høgskole education teach you how to do things properly, rather than do develop new theories ;), and the education is shorter: Up until a few years ago, you could choose between a two-year and a three-year program. Today, only the three year program is offered. In engineering diciplines, a University education will take you five years. If you continue to a Ph.D, it will typically take you another two to three years, for a total of eight years. Re. the headline and original post: It is commonly said here in Norway that a høgskole educated engineer can be put to productive work immediately, while a university educated engineer won't be of any real value for your company for the first year after he completes his education. (However, the university guy usually has a much higher long term potential.) I guess this is another phrasing of what newton.saber says. In my study days, I postponed my last year of study, working for 14 months, so I believe I was of use to my first (post-degree) employer from day one. :) (Actually, it was the same company I worked for during those 14 months.) But I would like to mention that going back to university after 14 months of work exprience raised a lot of questions in me about the usability of the stuff we worked with the last year. It didn't seem very essential to the needs that I had learned during my working year.
In my little part of the world, there is a similar difference between college (community college) and university. There is a saying:
If you want an education, go to university. If you want a job, go to college.
Having been to both, I agree. University was interesting, but college landed me a job before I even graduated, and I have been working ever since.
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When I spent a year as a high school senior in Minn. a long time ago (75-76), my classmates were certainly considering going to the University or to a college - often referred to as a "community college". Maybe things have changed in the 38 years since then, or maybe it varies from state to state. Those community colleges did award bachelor degrees, master degrees were far less common. The education was generally viewed as less academic, much more applied science. Here in Norway, we distinguish between universities and "høgskole" (which literally translates to "High School", but you start høgskole education after 13 years of general schooling). Similar to what Kornfeld Eliyahu Peter tells, høgskole education teach you how to do things properly, rather than do develop new theories ;), and the education is shorter: Up until a few years ago, you could choose between a two-year and a three-year program. Today, only the three year program is offered. In engineering diciplines, a University education will take you five years. If you continue to a Ph.D, it will typically take you another two to three years, for a total of eight years. Re. the headline and original post: It is commonly said here in Norway that a høgskole educated engineer can be put to productive work immediately, while a university educated engineer won't be of any real value for your company for the first year after he completes his education. (However, the university guy usually has a much higher long term potential.) I guess this is another phrasing of what newton.saber says. In my study days, I postponed my last year of study, working for 14 months, so I believe I was of use to my first (post-degree) employer from day one. :) (Actually, it was the same company I worked for during those 14 months.) But I would like to mention that going back to university after 14 months of work exprience raised a lot of questions in me about the usability of the stuff we worked with the last year. It didn't seem very essential to the needs that I had learned during my working year.
You state: When I spent a year as a high school senior in Minn. a long time ago (75-76), my classmates were certainly considering going to the University or to a college - often referred to as a "community college". Maybe things have changed in the 38 years since then, or maybe it varies from state to state. Although this may be true, the discussion is typically "should I attend a community college or should I attend a University". After the choice is made, however, I expected them to say "I am in college" regardless of whether they chose a University or a community college. If the intention is to make a distinction (at least in the states by a native speaker in the states), the full term "community college" is usually used rather than just "college" or they may offer a further clarification that it is a full University, but, I have never heard a native speaker in the states say "I am attending university". My recollections of things in the states related to college only go back to 1980, however. Things were very different while living in outside the US.
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We had an intern who was in his fourth year of college (not university, but something more practical), and he couldn't write a single line of code. He studied for Application Developer. The name of his study was Application Development. He had courses like Programming, Databases, Design and what have you. He couldn't write a single line of code... Literally. When I first sat down with him he 'forgot' how to declare a variable in multiple languages (we tried VB and C#). According to his teacher database design was his strong point, but he couldn't design a basic master-detail structure (he put the detail id in the header and couldn't figure out what was wrong even when I pointed it out). Here is the sad part. He graduated the same year! :omg: :wtf: :confused::~ :| X| I lost the little bit of faith I had in our schooling system, and humanity as a whole, the day I heard he graduated...
It's an OO world.
public class SanderRossel : Lazy<Person>
{
public void DoWork()
{
throw new NotSupportedException();
}
}This is very troubling. A friend's son recently took an intro Python class at a private college. He was stuck so I worked with him for about 15 minutes. He said, "I get it. The professor never explained it that way. All he does is open up the IDE, type lines of code and says, 'you just do this'". Ugh. The boy ended up hating Python and programming because of the difficulties he had in this intro course. Too bad. Way to kill the inspiration there, Professor. No wonder IT is in the state it is in.
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I hope the article is exaggerating a bit, but I agree with the general statement. After 4 years of writing arrays and data structures and OS fundamentals I got out of school and landed a VB.Net job as a contractor on a team of 1 to build a web app. I had never written in .Net or any decent OO language (VB6 doesn't count). Most of our C++ in college was all functional recursive stuff. I had a ton of concepts to learn, an IDE to understand, deployment to think about, SOLID principles, etc. A friend of mine did a vocational school instead and hit the ground running when he finished. 10 years later we've both ended up as strong technologists but I would have had a much easier go had I learned things applicable upside of academia. I think the only thing I learned from my 4 year BS degree (no pun intended) that I haven't relearned is what O(n) means.
I like that you mentioned the contrast between your college/university experience and your friend's vocational school experience. Colleges end up doing so much theory and forget to write an app which would have to survive in the real world. It is one of the major failures of college/university instruction.
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The article is a bit contrived IMHO. Could not even turn on a computer? Even my elderly mother-in-law can do this. That said, as someone who teaches CS at a major university, it is clear there is a bubble. Students who have little aptitude for programming and math are majoring in CS because of the economic incentives. This dilutes the academic experience for the capable students, while sending the incapable students off on an unsustainable career path. The bubble will burst, and will leave many people high and dry. We would do everyone a favor by encouraging the incapable students to pursue something they *are* good at. Related to this, it is clear there is a disconnect between what CS programs require students to learn and what skills are relevant in the working world. Many students who go into CS actually want to learn software development, but CS programs offer very little in the way of SD. Institutions of higher ed, however, typically make changes at a glacial pace, and we should not count on them to fix the problems anytime soon. Accordingly, I'm in the process of fixing the disconnect in a small way by providing SD training to recent CS graduates. Even so, SD training won't magically make incapable students capable. And related to this, don't expect universities to discourage incapable students from majoring in CS. Universities are, first and foremost, interested in selling their customers what they think they want, and the students are the customers. Meanwhile, I've yet to find an incapable student who is unable to turn on a computer, so Mr. Altucher would bolster his credibility by going a little more lightly on the hyperbole.
You make very good points and you are correct about the extreme hyperbole of the article. Great points about Universities not doing much with real Soft Dev. and their extremely slow pace. Very encouraging to know you are out there making a difference. Thanks.
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We had an intern who was in his fourth year of college (not university, but something more practical), and he couldn't write a single line of code. He studied for Application Developer. The name of his study was Application Development. He had courses like Programming, Databases, Design and what have you. He couldn't write a single line of code... Literally. When I first sat down with him he 'forgot' how to declare a variable in multiple languages (we tried VB and C#). According to his teacher database design was his strong point, but he couldn't design a basic master-detail structure (he put the detail id in the header and couldn't figure out what was wrong even when I pointed it out). Here is the sad part. He graduated the same year! :omg: :wtf: :confused::~ :| X| I lost the little bit of faith I had in our schooling system, and humanity as a whole, the day I heard he graduated...
It's an OO world.
public class SanderRossel : Lazy<Person>
{
public void DoWork()
{
throw new NotSupportedException();
}
}Sander Rossel wrote:
I lost the little bit of faith I had in our schooling system
I can relate. In high school we taught ourselves how to program. None of the teachers knew how, but we had access to a timesharing system. In our senior year they added a programming class taught by a business teacher who had been teaching programming without access to a computer. We ended up debugging his programs for him. I went a slightly different route, I got a job as a computer operator at a university and then started taking classes in computer science. To say I was appalled, is an understatement. They were teaching blatantly bad programming methods. Projects were marked done/not done, with the majority of your grade coming from rote memorization of code fragments. One class, taught by reputedly the hottest professors on campus (I was told I was lucky to get them and the proper methods to bow and scrape to them by others), but one test was composed by one professor and desk checked by the other, before they inserted 5 bugs for us to discover. Neither one of these a-holes bothered to type the original program in to see if it worked. On the test I found 8 bugs, the class as a whole found 11. Another class, in Assembler, was taught by the TA, I think we only saw the professor once. The TA had us doing Macros two weeks into the class. I already knew Assembler from the timesharing system in high school, so I took to it like a duck to water. The rest of the class didn't have a clue as to the difference between compile time and run time and wondered why their macros weren't running at run time. I have lots more, but it really bothered me that some of my classmates were going to get degrees and have no clue as to how to program in the real world. I came away feeling I was merely paying someone to give me a piece of paper to verify what I already knew.
Psychosis at 10 Film at 11 Those who do not remember the past, are doomed to repeat it. Those who do not remember the past, cannot build upon it.
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Here's a snippet from this great article and great author, James Altucher... [-- Only one problem: when I arrived at the job, after 8 years of learning how to program in an academic environment—I couldn’t program. I won’t get into the details. But I had no clue. I couldn’t even turn on a computer. It was a mess. I think I even ruined people’s lives while trying to do my job. --] https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140506232520-5858595-10-things-entrepreneurs-don-t-learn-in-college?trk=object-title[^]
I worked for a company in 1990 and the boss employed a freshly graduated guy to be my assistant and help out with several new bespoke projects. he not only couldn't program, or understand simple instructions, but had no concept of what a customer might want, it was a disaster - he's probably a bigwig at Microsoft by now but I passed him on like a hot potato at the first opportunity
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Of course, I went to London University, which meant going to a college and, after three years, being able to use BSc(Eng)(Lond) after my name. I studied Aeronautics at the world's first Aeronautics faculty at QMC. We 'ad it 'ard. We had about three lectures on computing and were expected to pick up how to use the card batch system on our ICL 1904 mainframe for Fortran 4 programmes which solved equations - Runge-Kutta, Newtonian or plain algebra - and that was it. In my final year I chose a full year project, simulating Harriers in full 6 DOF, still in Fortran 4. By the time I did my first Masters (Cranfield, 1 year), the die was cast and I was hooked on engineering programming. Nice work if you can get it, but while my degrees gave me general engineering sense and domain knowledge, programming was self-taught.
Simon O'Riordan from UK wrote:
my degrees gave me general engineering sense and domain knowledge
Yeah, to bad most people forget this general knowledge after the exams (and I must confess I too work like that). I'm not saying University is completely worthless, but you have to do the work yourself, as you said.
It's an OO world.
public class SanderRossel : Lazy<Person>
{
public void DoWork()
{
throw new NotSupportedException();
}
} -
This is very troubling. A friend's son recently took an intro Python class at a private college. He was stuck so I worked with him for about 15 minutes. He said, "I get it. The professor never explained it that way. All he does is open up the IDE, type lines of code and says, 'you just do this'". Ugh. The boy ended up hating Python and programming because of the difficulties he had in this intro course. Too bad. Way to kill the inspiration there, Professor. No wonder IT is in the state it is in.
I think the problem with IT is that it's changing very fast and schools can't keep up. Writing new material every year is expensive. The teachers probably don't feel like keeping up either, they already have a full time job teaching the old. I think a lot of professors now were taught in the 80's and that's what they know. Next to that they're teaching a generation that grew up with computers, while they first used a computer when they were already in their twenties. And the good IT people can get high salary jobs at big companies, they are not the ones teaching...
It's an OO world.
public class SanderRossel : Lazy<Person>
{
public void DoWork()
{
throw new NotSupportedException();
}
} -
Sander Rossel wrote:
I lost the little bit of faith I had in our schooling system
I can relate. In high school we taught ourselves how to program. None of the teachers knew how, but we had access to a timesharing system. In our senior year they added a programming class taught by a business teacher who had been teaching programming without access to a computer. We ended up debugging his programs for him. I went a slightly different route, I got a job as a computer operator at a university and then started taking classes in computer science. To say I was appalled, is an understatement. They were teaching blatantly bad programming methods. Projects were marked done/not done, with the majority of your grade coming from rote memorization of code fragments. One class, taught by reputedly the hottest professors on campus (I was told I was lucky to get them and the proper methods to bow and scrape to them by others), but one test was composed by one professor and desk checked by the other, before they inserted 5 bugs for us to discover. Neither one of these a-holes bothered to type the original program in to see if it worked. On the test I found 8 bugs, the class as a whole found 11. Another class, in Assembler, was taught by the TA, I think we only saw the professor once. The TA had us doing Macros two weeks into the class. I already knew Assembler from the timesharing system in high school, so I took to it like a duck to water. The rest of the class didn't have a clue as to the difference between compile time and run time and wondered why their macros weren't running at run time. I have lots more, but it really bothered me that some of my classmates were going to get degrees and have no clue as to how to program in the real world. I came away feeling I was merely paying someone to give me a piece of paper to verify what I already knew.
Psychosis at 10 Film at 11 Those who do not remember the past, are doomed to repeat it. Those who do not remember the past, cannot build upon it.
BrainiacV wrote:
with the majority of your grade coming from rote memorization of code fragments.
That's how it is. You have to memorize for the exam and can forget after that...
BrainiacV wrote:
I have lots more, but it really bothered me that some of my classmates were going to get degrees and have no clue as to how to program in the real world.
And some of them get away with it in real life too... :sigh:
BrainiacV wrote:
I came away feeling I was merely paying someone to give me a piece of paper to verify what I already knew.
Yep, and that piece of paper is worth a lot too. I'm not sure for how long though, because I've been hearing a lot of negative stuff on education lately... I currently study IT at the Open University. They're not too bad. At least you get to do a lot yourself.
It's an OO world.
public class SanderRossel : Lazy<Person>
{
public void DoWork()
{
throw new NotSupportedException();
}
} -
I worked for a company in 1990 and the boss employed a freshly graduated guy to be my assistant and help out with several new bespoke projects. he not only couldn't program, or understand simple instructions, but had no concept of what a customer might want, it was a disaster - he's probably a bigwig at Microsoft by now but I passed him on like a hot potato at the first opportunity
_WinBase_ wrote:
I passed him on like a hot potato at the first opportunity
That is similar to what they did with the guy I mentioned who didn't even understand functions. Everyone felt sorry for him even though he refused to open his eyes to any constructive criticism. One day a manager was going through ways to get rid of him,
"he can't code, he doesn't deal well with customers, he cannot write reports, he can't design systems...There's a management position in the Drabble Project. I'll tell the VP of Drabble that this is his man."
Yes, I'm serious.
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Hm. In the US they are interchangeable. Interesting.
There are only 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
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Not everyone should be a programmer.
Need custom software developed? I do custom programming based primarily on MS tools with an emphasis on C# development and consulting. "And they, since they Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs" -- Robert Frost "All users always want Excel" --Ennis Lynch
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Quote:
8 years of college and can't program?
I would expect that someone who takes 8 years to get through college can barely tie their own shoes.
There are only 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
Unless, of course, you are putting yourself through school and only able to afford to go part-time.
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Here's a snippet from this great article and great author, James Altucher... [-- Only one problem: when I arrived at the job, after 8 years of learning how to program in an academic environment—I couldn’t program. I won’t get into the details. But I had no clue. I couldn’t even turn on a computer. It was a mess. I think I even ruined people’s lives while trying to do my job. --] https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140506232520-5858595-10-things-entrepreneurs-don-t-learn-in-college?trk=object-title[^]
HR departments always ask me why I don't want recent graduates, with their fresh minds and fresh ideas. It's because "fresh" ain't the word.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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The degrees you get at SA Technicons are technical degrees, so it would be a Technical B Com or B Com Tech or some such, I'm not sure about the terminology. Also, they take an additional year or two. So after three years you get your Diploma, and then with an additional year of study you get a B Tech degree. Another two years and you might get your M Tech.
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Well that took a lot longer than expected. What is the correct term for those who are no longer legally children but not yet able to act like adults. Twats perhaps?
Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them.
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Pleasure :) I only know this because I worked at Tshwane University of Technology (TUT) for a few years doing embedded C coding (I have no tertiary qualification whatsoever). TUT Engineering Dept had an initiative where they provided office space and students to help small businesses develop products. Ostensibly this provided the small businesses with almost-free labour, and gave the students practical experience. Problem was students were only available for 6-month stretches and didn't have skin in the game. So the engineer "employeed" me with bursary money to fix their code (a paltry sum but wonderful experience).
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HR departments always ask me why I don't want recent graduates, with their fresh minds and fresh ideas. It's because "fresh" ain't the word.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
Mark_Wallace wrote:
It's because "fresh" ain't the word.
Haha. This genuinely made me LOL.
