JavaSchools and skill sets
Friday, 30 December 2005
What’s wrong with CS education today?
Joel Spolsky, in the Perils of JavaSchools argues that university grades are no longer a good indicator of great programmers because hard topics like recursion, double pointer indirection et c. are no longer being taught in universities cranking out Java programmers.
Meanwhile, Robert Scoble said that their software teams aren’t finding enough C and C++ programmers to get their work done.
Steve Yegge, when he was at Amazon, blogged about how he looks for hires who have full suite of skills, not just C++ or Java.
The three people above have orthogonal needs. Joel wants great programmers who are able to adapt to new situations; Microsoft wants developers who can maintain and extend their existing code base; Steve is looking for developers who can not only code, but also solve operational problems with scripting and regexes.
CS departments need to understand that their end customers (the businesses) occupy different niches and have very much different needs. There’s room for different colleges to cater for different markets by targetting skillsets which are not just Java-based.
