[Info-vax] OS implementation languages

[Scott Dorsey]

bill  <bill.gunshannon at gmail.com> wrote:
>Truer than even you can imagine.  Having started in the computer
>biz as a GI and then moving on to government contracting (as a
>systems engineer) with no degree but lots of experience I am amazed
>at the current arguments over whether or not degrees are worth the
>cost. I spent over 25 years in academia after my beltway bandit days
>and I can assure you that the current graduate doesn't have half the
>knowledge I had when I was just a lowly GI Programmer/Analyst.

I see fresh-outs who come with CS degrees from colleges that follow the
ACM curriculum who have a pretty good grip on the basics.

I also see fresh-outs who come with CS degrees from Hooterville Bible
College who have never used a command line, have never used any OS
other than Windows, and have never seen Big-O notation.  They have a
CS degree on paper, but what they really got was a trade school education
in how to write code and they know nothing of actual CS.

But then... I see engineering fresh-outs who have never used a computer
for anything other than Word and Matlab and have no concept of embedded
stuff.  I don't expect engineering students to learn a whole lot of real
computer science but I do expect them to have basic computer literacy skills.

There is a huge range.

I also see self-taught people and they can be interesting because they are
always very motivated (which is how they got to be self-taught in the first
place) but often have odd holes in their knowledge that they don't realize
exist.  If you let them know about the holes they will fix them but they
often don't get to know about them until it's too late.  The older they get
the better they get, and that's not always the case for folks with degrees.
--scott
-- 
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."