8 years of college and can't program?
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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.
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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 doubt anyone that did nothing but attend class would be able to program professionally. Regardless of grades. New graduates however often have work experience in programming and/or have done it outside of class. Sometimes that allows them to do a fairly decent job on non-critical software but attempting to hire new grads without defining a mentoring system is unlikely, on average, to produce good results.
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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 know of people who have a 1st or a 2:1 in Computer Science and can't program. It really makes you wonder at the range of topics covered in Computer Science degrees. I would have thought that programming was one of the fundamental topics but apparently it isn't.
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I know of people who have a 1st or a 2:1 in Computer Science and can't program. It really makes you wonder at the range of topics covered in Computer Science degrees. I would have thought that programming was one of the fundamental topics but apparently it isn't.
This is interesting too, because in the 80s when I was in high school they always said, "data processing" (computer science) requires vast knowledge of math, so I knew I was out. Then, around 1988 I got my first computer, started learning QuickBasic, then QuickC and started writing programs. I didn't notice that I had not learned math so I kept on programming and learning. I was very good in logic for some reason, but at the time -- because my teachers had told me I was terrible in math -- I wasn't good at math. Finally, after some years I decided to take some college math courses since they were apparently wrong about needing math for computer science, I figured maybe they were wrong about me being good in math too. I excelled in math. I love math. But, you see, the way they teach things is so non-vocational that all the teachers get stuck teaching so much theory that many people become disinterested. Then, finally the truth becomes obvious. They teach math as theory because the teachers themselves don't understand math. So they stand around and spout things like, "advanced math is required for 'data processing'". Meanwhile, real and interesting math is happening inside your cells. But, most high school math teachers are really English majors who've never tried any math or logic problems outside the books, so they just keep the myth going. Sheesh. Then, at the college level, it does seem that colleges are teaching some very important foundational concepts . However, concepts don't get it in the real world. Students need more vocational training -- hands-on porgramming -- at the beginning, and then later as they know enough to understand how the foundation concepts are important, they should learn those. Or, at least more balance between the two.
