Christopher Smith wrote:
> From: Steve Robertson [mailto:steven_j_robertson_at_hotmail.com]
> 3.) The explosion of the Internet has brought a lot of people
> into the
> software development arena that should be in other
> professions. In recent
> years, anyone that knew a language's syntax could get a job
> as a developer.
> "Knowing the syntax does not a developer make". Hmmm... That
> could be my new
> sig file :-)
I agree completely, but since you raise such a good point, what would you
say _does_ make one a "developer?"
Hmmm. I'm not sure the "explosion of the Internet" had anything to do
with it. As far as I can tell things started to tank in the mid-80's,
when I noticed that all of the resume packages coming out of Berkeley
were starting to look more or less identical save for the name at the
top (it wasn't uncommon to find several sharing an address and telephone
number).
At the time I realized that what had happened was that engineering --
at least of the EECS or CS sort -- had become "popular", and Berkeley
had started to limit enrollment in the majors based on academic
performance. If you're a school and you're looking for a metric,
academic performance may be an obvious one, but it's not at all
clear that academic performance is a strong predictor of someone
making a good engineer. Empirically it's quite the opposite; _most_
people who perform well in a purely academic sense seem to do so
by restricting themselves to learning and regurgitating only what is
put in front of them, where most people that I consider to be good
engineers tend to head off on tangents as interesting things
cross their paths, not stopping until a new concept is understood
and somehow integrated into their bag of tricks.
FWIW, I developed my own metric in response: I'd hire a new grad with
a solid C average who had worked or done interesting projects in
the field _outside_ of the academic setting before I'd hire someone
with a straight-A average who had never done anything beyond what
the curriculum demanded.
--
Chris Kennedy
chris_at_mainecoon.com
http://www.mainecoon.com
PGP fingerprint: 4E99 10B6 7253 B048 6685 6CBC 55E1 20A3 108D AB97
Received on Mon Dec 17 2001 - 17:28:41 GMT