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

"Chris Weiss" <chris_at_hpdbe.com> wrote in news:aavhor$2j5g$1_at_msunews.cl.msu.edu:

> I wasn't being the least bit silly.
>
> 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.
>
> --
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> Chris Weiss
> mailto:chris_at_hpdbe.com
> www.hpdbe.com
> High Performance Database Engineering
> Available for long and short term contracts

In 1967 I was able to take advantage of the G.I. Bill and found myself at the University of Florida which had one of the first IBM 360's. I majored in Operations Research and machine intelligence with a minor in Statistics.

My first job in late 1967 was with a fledgling group called MasterCard who hired me to work on a voice recogition system. At the end of nine months we had created a viable system. To us, it was the perfect blending of science and art. The only problem was that the average response time between human voice request and computer reply was approximately 47 seconds. We thought it was wonderful, management thought it was terrible. They quickly fired the project leader and lead engineer and brought in a gentleman whose main claim to fame was doctoral dissertation on Chauser and a love of machine intelligence. He proposed a solution which simply could not work, but he said do it. It was simple, brute force and doomed to failure. Anyone with more than a year of basic math could understand why it could not work. It cut the response time to an average of ten seconds. We all knew it could not work. It did.

The point is there are a lot of us around without a computer degree because that degree is relatively new. I no longer work on large projects. I am a one man shop and I have not needed too much from theoretical math to make things work. When I do, I start doing research and that is fun, too.

But in all truth, if I was looking at a resume I would look for something that showed a creative spark, something that makes a person stand out, and a computer science degree is not a prerequisite nor is it a foundation of creative intellect.

Robert Berman Received on Sat May 04 2002 - 09:43:09 CDT