[SWLUG] Employment agencies

[Steve Hill]

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On Wed, 2 Mar 2005, Julian Hall wrote:

> Hehe.. when I left school I had one A Level... Computing... I could make a 
> BBC Micro jump through hoops... which was precisely HOW MUCH good in the PC 
> based IT workplace?  Precisely zero.  The problem today though is that

Going a bit off topic here, but I used to complain and moan about having 
to deal with the BBC's and RiscOS machines at school and what good is that 
in teaching you how to use Windows and MacOS, as are used in the real 
world...  However by attitude towards this has completey changed because I 
now see the results of people coming out of schools having never used 
anything other than Windows.

Teach a kid how to use Windows from an early age and exaclty how to use it 
will be ingrained in that kid when they leave school.  Present them with 
something that's not windows and they will crap themselves and complain 
that they can't use it even if it looks almost identical.

I think the schools should have a mixture of Windows, Linux and MacOS X 
boxes and have schedules that force the students to use all of them - then 
you get them trained in a more lateral problem solving ability rather than 
expecting everything to be "just so".

Too many times I see people complain that they can't use a machine running 
Fedora (with Gnome) - there's no button marked "start" and working out 
that the red fedora button does the same thing is too difficult for them. 
Then once you show them that they get confused because the menu says 
"OpenOffice Writer" instead of "Microsoft Word" - I mean this stuff isn't 
rocket science, but they've had it drilled into them from day 1 that all 
computers are absolutely identical so they don't try to solve problems 
when presented with something slightly different, they give up instead.

  - Steve       Jabber: steve at nexusuk.org     Web: http://www.nexusuk.org/

      Servatis a periculum, servatis a maleficum - Whisper, Evanescence

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