a b wrote:
Yeah all those "Joe six-pack" PhDs running Google are definitely not
"real IT/CS professionals". They are clearly not capable of "system
engineering", with degrees not worth the paper they are printed on. I
mean come on what kind of two bit organizations are these: CMU, MIT,
Stanford, Caltech, etc. They sound like a bunch of of "hackers" making
a mockery of the science of "systems engineering".
That's exactly right, inspite of your sarcasm, it is true: they're PhDs,
scientists, hackers, not engineers.
Academia always made for poor engineers, because they were out of touch with
reality, out of touch of how things are done and run in the real world.
I remember when I was taking my advanced C programming course years ago: my
teacher had completely different ideas about coding than what we were actually
doing in the industry (I had already been working for a software company for a
few years). And although she knew her stuff with respect to materia, it took
several lectures by me to bring her up to speed on how things are done in the
real world.
If we didn't face the academia problem today, we wouldn't even be having this
discussion. There are no competent UNIX people coming out of academic
institutions because the academia is incapable of educating them.
It's a disaster.
This is absolutely true from experience, as well; however, I would
restrain myself from calling it "incompetence" on the part of academics.
Its simply
a matter that "engineering" experience (as you call it) is exclusive to
the curriculum of the average Computer Science program. One doesn't need
to be running Solaris on SPARC hardware to teach data structures, driver
development, or algorithms. Its more of a case that the curriculum of a
Computer
Science program needs to be more well-defined, as its quite bloated,
nowadays. While some schools have created "software engineering",
"information systems", "embedded systems development", etc.
concentrations, the majority of them have not, and thus, are producing
students that have the most "common" of skills, rather than the most
"well-defined". This is acceptable, given that a degree shouldn't
represent your knowledge base, but your ability to learn new
technologies. Its our job to show that one of the new technologies that
should be learned is Solaris. It would certainly help that case if Sun
were pushed into the academic environment more forcefully, as though
Solaris isn't required to teach an algorithms class, it would certainly
give the students exposure to it.
Derek E. Lewis
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://delewis.blogspot.com
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