On Wed, 16 Apr 2008, Christopher R. Merlo wrote: > That's actually not true, and your apparent belief in this untruth is > probably what has led to your seemingly very strongly felt distaste for > university education.
At least US education... > The purpose of a college or university is to provide the student with an > education, so that the student may go on to contribute back to society. An > education involves more than just learning a trade, or a skill. Moreover, > most experts in any field are usually well-versed in some other field as > well; this is what allows educated people to do things like draw analogies, > or relate to non-technical people. This sort of implies that someone that is highly specialised cannot relate to people in other dsciplines. I dont think that is true (Im sure you could find some prime examples but they are probably exceptions). I clearly dont need a class in English to write these emails with correct capitalization and punctuation (or spelling!). > Physicists must read the classics in > English literature so that non-physicists will talk to them at dinner > parties; this helps with things like professional networking. The attitude outside the US is that that is something you do in your own time. (In the UK, you might get a day or half day off per week to pursue your own intrests outside of your academic study). In any case, you would learn some of those skills in your work experience too. > (Everyone who > got your job because you know the right non-IT person, raise your hands. My hand is not raised. Connections might count in certain businesses but Ive never been hired because of people I know. (And Im doing exceptionally well in my career thanks very much). > and the reason they kept tapping me, over my > colleagues, was that I was an effective communicator, and I was able to > translate plans to code, and feature requests to timetables, but also code > to English, and bug hunts to revised timetables; and I didn't scare the > suits away when I talked to them. I think that says more about the lack of technical knowledge of suits more than anything else. I think technical people should be managed by technical people. I think people wanting to manage technical companies should learn about the technology rather than generic management. This, to me, is the real problem. -- Aj. _______________________________________________ New York PHP Community Talk Mailing List http://lists.nyphp.org/mailman/listinfo/talk NYPHPCon 2006 Presentations Online http://www.nyphpcon.com Show Your Participation in New York PHP http://www.nyphp.org/show_participation.php
