[Gllug] VACANCY: Junior Systems Support

[John Winters]

- Tethys wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 1, 2009 at 10:18 AM, Hari Sekhon<hpsekhon at googlemail.com> wrote:
> 
>> I'm surprised we're talking about degrees any more these days,
>> especially in a practical job like IT, I thought everyone already
>> figured out that degrees were a waste of time and money?
> 
> At a guess, you don't have a degree. They're far from a waste of time
> and money. Certainly at the time I did mine, a degree in computer
> science equipped you to deal with the world of IT far better than
> learning on the job,

It's a few years ago, but when I started in serious IT (very early
eighties) I joined a graduate recruitment programme at GEC Computers and
whilst I had a degree it wasn't in IT - it was Maths.  I felt at a bit
of a disadvantage because most of those around me had degrees in IT and
could spout lots of terminology which I didn't understand.

I quickly found however that although their theoretical knowledge was
much better than mine, for most of them their practical skills were
non-existent.  I still remember the fillip it gave me when two of us
were set to writing a suite of small scripts for a marketing
demonstration.  I did mine quite quickly and found my colleague still
struggling with his first one.  I took a look and found something like:

  IF price > 10 AND price < 2

Given the required logic at that point I suggested it should be OR
instead of AND.  He made the change and suddenly his script worked.
Next thing I knew he did a global edit of all his scripts to change all
the ANDs to ORs, because clearly OR was better than AND.  At this point
I realised that I was actually a lot better at programming than most of
those around me, despite my lack of an IT degree.

Yes, purely an anecdote and a sample size of one (although he was not
atypical).  It was however an era when computer programming seemed to be
used as a default occupation by careers advisors - "You don't seem to
have any particular aptitude for anything.  You'd better become a
computer programmer."

Over the years I've encountered very, very few competent programmers -
probably fewer than 10.  I've noticed no correlation between competence
and having an IT degree.

John

-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at gllug.org.uk
http://lists.gllug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/gllug