Re: Fifty years' experience in C programming; 20 in VB...

I wasn't being the least bit silly.

Unless I am mistaken I don't think complexity theory and algorithmic analysis are part of the music or animal husbandry degree programs. I am not saying that you have to be in college to learn fundamental computer science, but it is more difficult to learn the basic theory outside of a classroom setting.

Being an "expert" in the syntax of a language and having good problem solving skills may make someone an effective programmer, but being only a programmer without the underlying framework of a computer science degree can be a limiting factor. There are always exceptions, but I am talking about trends and not exceptions.

Would you hire a self-taught statistician? or a self taught mechanical engineer? A programmer is to a computer scientist what a cad cam operator is to a mechanical engineer. There is overlap between a programmer and a computer scientist just as there is between the cad cam operator and the engineer, but there is a fundamental gap between the former and the latter in both categories. Learning through experience to craft a well written program is not the same as having the cross training in engineering and math that most computer science students have had.

I have worked with many good programmers who could solve the every day problem that crossed their desk quickly and elegantly, and they could often solve some of the more difficult problems after a few years of experience. However, I once saw an excellent programmer waste weeks on a problem that was clearly NP-complete, meaning there was no polynomial algorithm. He was an English major. Our CS intern at the time looked at the problem for half a day and properly identified it as exponential. We hired the intern after graduation, and she made more progress in her first year on the job than the English major had in five years. The senior programmer wrote more lines of code per week that the former intern had, but he lacked the training necessary to solve some of the problems the recent grad was able to deal with.

I am sure we could go tit for tat with anecdotes. However, having worked with several hundred programmers on everything from small teams to casts of hundreds, I think that *IN GENERAL* there is no substitute for a computer science degree.

--
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Chris Weiss
mailto:chris_at_hpdbe.com
www.hpdbe.com
High Performance Database Engineering
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"Larry Linson" <larry.linson_at_ntpcug.org> wrote in message
news:8WEA8.4277$Dx3.2845_at_nwrddc02.gnilink.net...


> Don't be silly. One of the best programmers I ever knew had a degree in

> Music, another had a degree in Animal Husbandry, and I have known many,

many


> other competent and capable people who had no degree at all. One

degree-less


> colleague held his own in the Research Division of a major computing

> company.

>

> In fact, quite a few years ago, we cringed whenever a new-hire had a

> Computer Science degree, because the probability was high that he/she

would


> expect to be assigned to write The Compiler That Saved Computing, and even

> though I worked for the largest computer manufacturer of the day, there

were


> precious few compiler-writing jobs available -- especially for entry-level

> CS grads.

>

>

>