[Info-vax] IBM Layoffs (quite a bit off topic)

[JF Mezei]

Re: need for education

There are many reports of deacreasing software quality at Apple.
In recent year, they have grown R&D by something like 40 or 45% if I
recall correctly.

If the education system cranked out experienced programmers with proper
skills and knowledge of quality assurance etc, perhaps Apple could have
grown it programmer pool so significantly without having to bear the
brunt of customers complaining about bugs.

(an example: recently released 10.10.2 may provide many fixes, but
apparanetly also causes language to always revert to US-Englsh and not
telerate other variants of english available).

Consider when VMS was moved to a new group of people which resulted is
some inexperienced guy changing the DIRECTORY command (for what reason
?) before he knew that having a .DIR extension did not make a file a
directory, there was a bit in the header for it.

The VMS case is perhaps understandable because HP was winding it down
and had no interest in it. But for Apple, it brings up an interesting
issue:

should (and can) schools crank up people ready for work ?

must employers assume a large part of training costs when they hire
employees (which means unable to grow R&D very fast)

or should employers be in greater contact with education system to guide
teachers into teaching the right skills  that are needed ASAP ?


Here is a problem for universities;

year 1: Teacher develops new course
year 2: teacher pitches it to university
year 3: first student enrols in class.
year 5: first student to graduate who took that class.

Those skills are not of great use by the time the guy/gal is on the job
market, unless the education is either updated at faster rate, of the
skill set is more generic (such as how to test programs etc) and still
of value because it is less time sensitive.

(consider the ephemeray scripting languages such as perl, php, python,
ruby on rails etc which are "soupe du jour" and change rapidly. It is
worth teaching those to first year uni students ?