[ale] Ga tech

[Jason Day]

On Tue, Feb 21, 2006 at 10:28:43AM -0500, Geoffrey wrote:
> mmillard1 at comcast.net wrote:
> > With so much competition from On-line Universities and One Stop
> > Specialty education shops it is now a case that traditional
> > universities are being forced to produce and compete at a new level.
> > It has long been my opinion that most universities in the US at least
> > were failing to produce people with the real skills they needed to do
> > more than very basic tech jobs. Their failure to keep up made places
> > like ITT possible.
> 
> Which is a shortcut to a REAL education.

Exactly.

> > The market is saturated with academic
> > achievers who do not have the real skills they need to do the jobs

The market is also saturated with people who think they can program but
do not have the proper background.  These people may excel at writing
GUI front-ends or simple programming tasks, but when faced with a
completely new concept like, say, synchronizing access to a shared
resource from multiple threads, they just don't understand the
fundamentals enough to write a working, bug-free (or at least mostly
bug-free) program.

When I was at Ga Tech, the curriculum was heavy on theory.  It was
boring at times and always difficult, but it instilled a true
understanding of the fundamentals.  It didn't just produce academics; it
produced programmers who could tackle new and unfamilliar problems by
applying basic principles.

It makes me sad that this is changing.
-- 
Jason Day                                       jasonday at
http://jasonday.home.att.net                    worldnet dot att dot net
 
"Of course I'm paranoid, everyone is trying to kill me."
    -- Weyoun-6, Star Trek: Deep Space 9