On 12-Sep-01 Alexis Lee wrote:
Raphael Mankin wrote:
<flamewar> As an employer of programmers of some 30 years experience I find that CS graduates are generally a dead loss. I would much rather employ English or Philosophy graduates: at least they know that they don't know. They also tend to have some knowledge of the world outside computers, unlike the CS graduates who can best be described as pig ignorant.
BTW one of my sons is a [pseudo-]CS graduate. His degree is in maths+computing.
</flamewar>
Sz wrote:
nope, I was speaking purely as an observer of EE students and CS students at university.
I would suggest that a 10 year engineer would lose versus a CS student with a first or 2:1 and 7 years experience. 2:2 and under is not very impressive, on my course anyway. But then I have considerably more background than most people.
I don't agree with that, a friend got a 3rd, and I consider him way above me in most things (yeah that's you bing ;) In my opinion, just because someone has a degree dosen't mean they have more experience/knowledge than somebody else. Some of the most knowledgeable people I know didn't go to uni. The best programmer I have had the pleasure of working with used to defuse bombs in the gulf war.. and could totally run rings around me when coding.... --
<war> We have the whole academic-ranking thing here. Raphael, I must assume that you're looking for the wrong qualities in your employees.
What I am concerned with is not the quality of the degree, nor even whether the candidate knows Design Patterns by heart. What I look for is the ability to analyse a real world situation, to communicate intelligently (and with correct spelling, grammar and punctuation, when writing), and plain common sense. Actual programming is only a small part of a programmer's job.