[Gllug] VACANCY: Junior Systems Support

[Hari Sekhon]

Martin N Stevens wrote:
> From my perspective if having worked in IT mainly as sysadmin but with 
> some programming thrown in,
> and nearly at the end of completing an OU CompSci BSc.
>
> The degree course that I have taken has been expensive, boring and 
> taught me very little other than how
> to write an assignment to get all the marks.
That's extremely interesting, I actually looked at the OU as well as 
some other universities over the years and always thought the courses 
weren't really very good by professional standards. There is also a lot 
of theory that doesn't seem to be directly applicable in a lot of 
academic courses. Someone else I know is actually doing one of those 
courses as well. It's a horrible box ticking exercise I thought, and if 
not for the waste of time and money would be ticking that box myself 
right now... but I'm not sure what the advantage of it would be at this 
stage in my career. I attended a class a few years ago only to leave 
muttering after the first session because they were going to spend a 
whole year on basic control structures that I had previously learned 
independently in a week of hard study. The people who were on that 
course probably still don't have jobs in IT several years later and are 
busy working in retail paying off their student debts.

Academia tends to hide away from the business world rather than trying 
to foster skills that businesses would actually want to pay for which is 
why so many people end up never working in their degree fields. What's 
the point in studying something you never apply only to end up working 
in a different sector of the jobs market? You may as well not have done 
a degree because you didn't advance in the field in which you are 
practicing.

Another great flaw I find is the fact that you can have much better 
qualifications attained over a number of years and still not be able to 
get one single credit for widely recognized industry standard 
qualifications shows a distinct lack of care for what the actual 
industry in the real world is doing (or just plain arrogance), which 
sets a bad precedent for students. When I was a young student I was also 
brainwashed by the bubble culture in academia which goes along the lines 
of "I do education, the world owes me a high salary"... and then the 
bubble pops...

-h

-- 
Hari Sekhon
http://www.linkedin.com/in/harisekhon

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