Astonishing ! I've recently attended a couple of interviews where I was asked about design patterns, so yesterday, I thought maybe I hould read up on them a little. I came to just about the same conclusions. Surely, it's more or less just common sense to someone who's done a bit of programming.

I too come from a back-ground that started out with machine code, assembler, C, etc. i.e. I'm an old git. Efficient code was the over-whelming goal, providing it worked. The emphasis has changed dramatically. Today, memory and disk space are both dirt cheap, cpu's are much quicker. The goal has changed to production - kinda like "never mind the quality, feel the width". There's also an obsession that code is "readable". I once worked with a brilliant guy who would remove all/any comments he found in code files because he felt anyone worth their salt should be able to figure what was going on from looking at the code. Generally speaking we had to have a fairly good understanding about what's going on under the hood. That's no longer the case. It's now more a matter of knowing which pieces to plug together. .Net is good example of this. The tools it provides and amount of work and effort it does for developers is astonishing compared to programming with C on a PDP-11. The cost is bloated exe's. Rather like the results of cobol compilers. No one cares about efficient code, or how things work; it's all just get it out there.

You could try asking about garbage collection and unmanaged objects. If you want to go a bit deeper into general programming, ask how to implement a dynamic linked list.

Up until 1999, I lived and worked in Canada. Although I'd been building years and years of experience, I found it very difficult to move on - mainly because I've never had a degree. What I found is human resources departments receive loads of applications for every job, so the first thing they'll do is filter out those that don't have a degree. For them it's a quick and easy way to reduce the number of resumes to look at. I am now back in England, where a degree is much less important (although moving in that direction), but would still be very useful for mobility within the job market, as human resource departments here are starting to use the same filtering mechanism, like we saw during the dramatic down-turn a couple of years ago.

You need two pieces ... First, in configSections, tell it there's a new custom section ... <configSections> <section name="productCode" type="System.Configuration.NameValueFileSectionHandler, System, Version=1.0.5000.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089" /> </configSections> Then add the section ... <productCode> <add key="CV" value="AIG Commercial Vehicle" /> <add key="CY" value="Axa Private Car" /> <add key="MC" value="AIG Motorcycle (MCD)" /> </productCode>

You need two pieces ... First, in configSections, tell it there's a new custom section ...

Then add the section ...

A very good point about the real world skills. The soft skills are so important as most of us work with other people. I don't think university can help here; that comes from experience and I'm still learning. Completely agree with understanding the basics - that's what I was trying to get at. Ken.

I have a bit of a mixture. An electronic apprentiship, some formal university computer science training (but not to degree level), and lots of self taught knowledge. As a developer where a lot of self teaching is involved, I think there are 2 very significant parts of my training, both of them from university ... 1. The formal training involving hardware elements and macro level machine code (CS300), leading to developing a simple compiler. (on DEC - PDP systems) 2. Internal data structures using C (CS340) (lots of indirection involved - really hammering pointers). Having a good grounding in these 2 helps a great deal when learning new languages like C#, which is what I do now. I work with a group, and have worked with others in the past, who have not benefitted from these basics, and I find the difference in understanding what's going on when the programs execute and how systems hang together almost screams out. I am one of the 'old boys' whose learning started before moving into the OO world. For me it was an easy switch, but I can easily see it being difficult for mainframe cobol developers. My route was C, C++, C# (with basket weaving, better known as VB in there as well). I also wonder if starting to learn programming at the end - i.e. starting with something like Java, does developers a limiting disservice instead of starting at the beginning with good old C, or something even more basic like machine code. Ken Ede - lead developer - Europa Group.

One of my favourites was an ad for VB on Unix. I suppose it can be done with emulators, but who in their right mind would ? Something I find very disturbing is recruiters describing jobs as Sexy. Unfortunately, recruiters (scum of the earth) are really just salesmen & women, and if they process enough numbers, they will eventually find a pay-cheque.