What you are asking for is what I ask project managers or anyone in administration to know. And we can be pretty sure it will be standard next decade. No doubt.

Let me tell you something about me. My father was an engineer, so when the first PC came out we were one of the first to have one. I started programming at the age of 8, giving me a total of 27 years of coding. There is no topic, algorithm and no language that I haven’t used in my life.

Took a break 2 years ago after I had to work 16 hours each day for 3 months straight. I went freelancing for fun. I had much more success than expected. My clients made too many bad experiences with companies led by non-programmers who use non-programmers for hiring their staff. I tell them they all suck and get a lot of money for that.

And your text sounds like you never really wrote a program yourself. I can read subtexts in your posting which scream “productivity paradox”, “trend of persistence”, “sustained yield”, so that I’m pretty sure none of your programs will be in use after 3 years.

Learn chess. Play it a lot. Maybe one day then you will understand why the most obvious first step is not always the best one. If CS students will graduate as you want them to do, I will make much more money.

Out of curiousity, what degree program is this? Sounds fantastic!

Or even better, the dev is the hacker type who does this on her own 😛

Now *that* is the only requirement we have at our shop 🙂 Degree or not, you’ve gotta love this stuff or we’re not all too interested in the potential hire.

I wouldn’t be so quick to say he’s hiring the wrong people. It is likely that the mass of potential prospects for hiring just have zero knowledge of a real production environment, both dev environments as well as server stacks.

I’m not advocating that college is worthless. We’ve hired three college graduates, have an intern that is finishing his degree, and have hired a copywriter with two masters.

But we’ve definitely felt the burn training the newly graduated developers about basic things like git, web stacks, APIs, etc.

I think it is not the place for colleges to teach these things, since they focus on the foundational knowledge, but I agree with the original post… it would be great to hire someone with a degree AND some sort of training time in a trade school that teaches the modern day ropes, so we can get them running on day one.

there must be an education reform that permits this kind of approach. education reform, i mean, more like a revolution.

education is based on the industrial model, with “phases of manufacturing” (classes), lot numbers (school year), different high/low grade finishing (uni/college).

it is so outdated that even yourself forgot to mention teamwork. which i believe is the one thing that is missing to really kick the world sky high in the information golden age.

and an instance of an outdated system cannot evolve parallel to an industry that is changing, more or less, radically each 6months (in perspective of technology and knowledge base). even for a genius like myself is hard to keep up. 😀

Hank, if you reorder that a bit, you’ll have a better acronym: RAWR

I disagree. Things don’t change so fast that a school shouldn’t be able to change with it. I just don’t see how building a compiler is going to help somebody building a LAMP, or a mobile application. There could be some core classes (like ‘how to use libraries’) but even those would change based on the popular languages of the decade.

I would also like to see courses like this for software testers (NOT like the ASTQB syllabus), product managers, and project managers.

We launched the appendTo Developer Learning Center to begin to facilitate this exact thing. Our first course is small and focused, but it’s a start.

I recently completed a 1 year motorcycle maintenance course, which was very theory-oriented.

I now have a holistic understanding of how a motorbike’s components work together. So while I might have trouble performing the actual repair flawlessly, I am able to point towards the probable cause of a problem.

I have since worked a lot on my own bike and closed the gap between theory and practice. I was able to do that because of my theoretical knowledge and resulting confidence.

Relating back to programming, the question is whether we want to produce builders or architects.

I believe we need both.