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

But you are forgetting one thing. No college degree actually teaches how to "craft" a good program. They teach the syntax and a little rudimentary logic and that's it. It takes logical thinking to "craft" a good program and a BS in CS doesn't give anyone that. Musicians have to think and recognize patterns and a person with a science degree has been taught to think with a scientific approach. I can't tell you how many times I've seen CompSci students and grads that went into the field because the salaries were high.

Give me a janitor with a love of computers and a logical mind and I will be happy to teach him/her the syntax needed to program.

"Chris Weiss" <chris_at_hpdbe.com> wrote in message news:aavhor$2j5g$1_at_msunews.cl.msu.edu...
> 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.
>
> --
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> Chris Weiss
> mailto:chris_at_hpdbe.com
> www.hpdbe.com
> High Performance Database Engineering
> Available for long and short term contracts
>
>
> "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.
> >
> >
> >
>
>
>
Received on Tue May 07 2002 - 15:41:03 CDT