Re: No future for DB2 - slightly off-topic, discusses what people are being taught at uni

Neil Truby wrote:
>
> Speaking from my experience in the UK I find an even wider trend: in the
> four years by consultancy has been going we've recruited several graduate
> trainees. In 2001 and 2002 you could be pretty sure that most applicants
> from university would have a pretty decent grounding in UNIX and/or Linux,
> these being the platforms favoured by academia. We'd also find that most
> would have done at least one hands-on course or practical assignment with
> SQL Server or Oracle.
>
> We didn't recruit in 2003 or 2004 and this year has been a real eye-opener.
> Perhaps less than one in five applicants has had *any* practical experience
> of a non-Windows OS - if they know about UNIX/Linux at all it's because
> they're done a theoeritical course lasting a most a couple of hours. Also,
> the level of database theory has dropped too: asked to name a commercial
> database system they name Access, which is the "database" that the majority
> of them have hands-on experience of. A few had also used SQL (as they call
> SQL Server, using the phrases interchangably). One or two were able to name
> a non-MS database product, which was Oracle. None had heard of DB2, Ingres,
> Informix etc.
>

When I was in school, which was a very long time (took me 7 years to complete a 4 year education of Advanced Informatics (which has little to do with witts, but more with the appealing student life ;)), I saw a very disturbing flow. When I started we were educated in Oracle, Unix (Solaris/Linux), Overall databases (isolation levels, ACID properties, Locking mechanisms,etc), Oracle/PL, Systems architecture, ASM/C++/Haskell, etc. But when I finished it (a year ago): Assesments, Projects, Learning to learn, communications, Windows, bla, communicating with each other, bla, java, a bit of MySQL ('create table' and 'select', enough to create a nice webpage able to show a shopping cart :'( ) etc. The school is setting loose coorporate hippies, with a lot of knowledge about working in project groups, but very little about technology. It has become a school for Projectmanagement instead of IT specialists. And this is not a single incident, it's happening all around here. (BTW, this is what's happening in the Netherlands). It's really disturbing.

-R- Received on Thu Aug 04 2005 - 04:15:19 CDT