Re: whoever you hire, make sure it isn't a college graduate

"Chris McDonald" <chris@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
"Phlip" <phlipcpp@xxxxxxxxx> writes:

Programmers:

Can anyone think of another industry where "entry-level" meant "more
experience than just a college graduate"?

What's this saying about our colleges??

Perhaps it says that industry's expectation that graduates hit the ground
running in a field that has changed every month of the 4 years during
which they're simultaneously studying 1 or 2 other fields, is unrealistic?

It is hard to know what should go into a computing studies course.
The first career job is vital for students, but very few of them will get another chance to spend three years working entirely on their own development. So it wouldn't be right to focus entirely on training for the first job, though that is what employers will always say that they want.

The problem is that there is simply no way of preventing an expensively-trained recruit from upping sticks and taking his skills to a competitor. Particularly when the need to shed staff in a downturn leads to lack of any real loyalty. So employers always want to pass on their training costs to universities. However that isn't necessarily in the students' long term interests.

The field is too immature to specify a set of core fundamentals that everyone should know. A language is obviously essential, but should the first one be Lisp, Java, C, or assembler? GUIs are ubiquitous, but very time-consuming to build, and change all the time. They don't really involve anything much that a set of subroutines doesn't. So do they actually have a place in the course? What about parallel programming? Five years ago it would be safe to say that almost no-one would use it for real, will that still be the case in five years' time?

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