Quoting Lior Kesos <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> I've heard many people being more happy with these technical school > graduates for missions that don't require the scaling of the engineers > to be a GUI programmer or a database programmer (whoops just covered 50% > of the market if not more) one does not have to be a rocket scientist. Probably those many people never took a look at their code... Have you seen stored procedures with GOTO statements in them? I have. In fact, structures that emulate while loops with GOTO, when there is need only for an IF because you get exactly one row from the preceding query... And the language does include whiles if they needed it... I'm not even talking about all the HTML crap and Javascript filth that I've had to sift through in my years of web programming. Or content loading. Easy enough task, isn't it? Parsing a text file and putting the proper values into the database. Well, apparently not when you give it to a clueless programmer who does it in Java when she doesn't know Java, and comes up with the ugliest state machine with so many dependencies that if we have to add a field to that file, we need to write the whole thing anew. Or our wap programmer who wrote every program three times to match different display requirements by three cellular providers. Not a clue how to write ifs, never mind using templates. But hey, their things worked. At the time. It's just now that they were all cut back, *I* have to do all the maintenance... Yes, there are counter examples. For example, again in the military, I had to maintain a program in which a couple of older Atudaim (i.e. CS graduates) implemented a serious algorithm of their own devising. They were considered geniuses in that military unit. And it was a complex one. It's only that no-one could ever read it. It was full of q=p, pp=qq++ etc., and the only comment in the program said "And now q gets the value of qq". I swear. However, I maintain my position that there is strong correlation between degree and cluefullness. Also, every single clueful programmer whom I met during the years of work, if he wasn't a CS graduate then, he had become one since then. So it was merely a matter of being good material. So, how do you hire people? Well, in the days when programmers were worth their weight in gold, you had to somehow test all the four applicants that sent you CVs. But these days, that you have 4000 applicants for every job, including ones that don't even fit *one* of the requirements, you have to find heuristics that will cut the numbers down to manageable size which you *can* test. A BSc is such a heuristic. So it discriminates against the few clueful non-academics. How would you do it, if you had to contend with thousands of CVs? Herouth ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
