Opportunity

[Steve Litt]

On Tue, 2022-08-23 at 03:01 +0000, David Schwartz via PLUG-discuss wrote:
> The question that was posed morphed into something about the value of CS degrees
> today. I don’t think they’re worth the time or cost to get one. 

I agree. More later...
> 
> Pretty much all of the work I’ve been hired to do since then (2005+) was based
> entirely on the fact that I had 10+ years working with Delphi. 

How would you like to give an online presentation, on Lazarus, at the GoLUG meeting
in early October or early November? I think it would be well received.


About CS degrees...

As I've mentioned a few thousand times, I learned to program at Santa Monica
Community College. In late 1986 I had to hire an assistant programmer to help take
care of what ten years later would be called the client in what ten years later
would be called a client/server system. This client was written, by me, in Turbo
Pascal, which is an easy language, so I was looking for an entry level person
willing to work cheap. I put the word out, got 750 resumes, and called a few.

The test part of my interview consisted of the following:

In *pseudocode*, write a program to read lines out of one file, capitalize every
letter, and write them to a new file. You have 30 minutes, but if you hand it in
earlier it will count to your credit. Easy, right?

Several applicants had CS degrees from UCLA. Some claimed they could write a
compiler. Not one of the the UCLA grads could get it done in 30 minutes. Disgusted,
I recruited a couple of students from Santa Monica Community College. They both did
it in 30 minutes or less. One was ideal, but she and I couldn't come close to
agreeing on salary.

Yeah, I'm not that impressed with CS degrees for real world programming, and the CS
grads or undergrads I knew who were good would have been good if they'd spent the
time clerking at a convenience store: They simply had what it takes, schooling
irrelevant.


SteveT