Re: Delphi in more schools (was Re: Microsoft here I come)

"Jim Cooper" <jcooper@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:44a1ae29@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

The thing is, after 25 or 30 years of developing, expanding,
maintaining,
refactoring... and reading up on programming "stuff" I've sorta figured
out a few things (for me anyway).

The trouble with most of the self-proclaimed "real world" programmers I
come across is that they stopped reading (if they ever started) a long
time ago. And they never read up on the important things, but confined
themselves to language-specific topics.

Make that "problem specific topics", and you've got your man<g>. I
sometimes stray for the pleasure of straying, but I'm generally working on
something. The IEEE computer rags tweak my mind when I pick them up, I have
to admit<g>.

And the number of years experience is an orthogonal quantity. Many years
ago when I was being trained to interview people for jobs*, the senior guy
training me pointed out that many people do not have 20 years of
experience, they have 1 year of experience 20 times.

Yup, a common problem.

Some of the worst code I've seen has been written by highly "experienced"
people. And if you do find a bad one, they are almost impossible to
educate. At least a new graduate should be used to being taught things :-)

Coulda been some of mine<g>. OTOH, it probably got rewritten at some point.
FWIW, that's only a "bad thing" if you're being expected to deliver code.
I've seen others work on code as if the code is the expected output. That's
not the case. The product out the end is a solution, at the proper time, or
it's worthless.

IMO, it is not really about education levels, or experience, but about
attitude and possessing certain talents that I'm not sure can be taught.
If you cannot reason well, I'm not sure doing logic (or any other) courses
at uni will help, for example.

I completely agree.

Having done well in a good CS degree is an indication that a person may
possess such skills, and be motivated to improve them. But really the only
way to find out is actually hire them :-)

I believe good logic and spatial reasoning skills, along with the right
attitude as you mentioned above, are key. The rest can be learned darned
near anywhere... though it may take 25 or 30 years <vbg>. I've known some
very *smart* people with "flat minds".

FWIW, there were engineering classes specifically designed to discover that.
The "smart" ones could get through them, but sometimes it took two or three
times. Others truly couldn't understand what the fuss was about. I presume
the CS college had similar methods.

Nope, but hiring them with prior experience in a field ain't a bad
move<vbg>.

Which is reasonably unlikely for new CS graduates, since most don't have
any.

I hired only one new CS graduate. He worked out OK, but it was because he
was someone we knew something about and was also willing to jump into the
field and learn. Our needs changed, and he found a better paying position
about the same time, so the whole experience worked out fine for both of us.

Dan


.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Delegates, Generic Methods and algorithms - Functional versus Procedural
    ... I was reading another post and saw an argument that brought ... functional programming is advisable for C#, ... There are books for children, books for teens, books for sci-fi fans, books for computer junkies, etc. ... The problem, then, is when programmers have very different vocabularies. ...
    (microsoft.public.dotnet.languages.csharp)
  • [HPADM] [SUMMARY] ERROR bad magic number/system id for dld.sl
    ... It looks like it was a time-out while reading the file, ... last week because of the named reason. ... Krankenhaus Mara gGmbH. ...
    (HP-UX-Admin)
  • Re: Query Help
    ... Ever read THE PSYCHOLOGY OF COMPUTER PROGRAMMING by Weinberg? ... native language of people in PL/I classes (this was written when PL/I ... NULL for other reasons, like a zero reading is possible, but a NULL ... status of incinerator we run, i.e. if incinerator is on or off during ...
    (microsoft.public.sqlserver.programming)
  • Re: The end.
    ... The best and simple documentation will become complex when complex tasks ... as much as reading the introductory pages to lshort.pdf (the not so short ... Well perhaps you should open your mind. ... chili symbols to indicate a 'red hot tip'); as I say, there's a reason why ...
    (comp.text.tex)
  • Re: pid_t data type
    ... "The implementation shall support one or more programming environments ... then it *is* save to store pid_t's in a long. ... is a big reason to use pid_t's. ... Because these usually return ints, ...
    (comp.unix.programmer)