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Ennis Ray Lynch, Jr. wrote: Not everyone should be a programmer.
So true and yet so difficult to convince those who shouldn't be that they shouldn't be.
I've worked with at least one terrible programmer -- who did not even understand the basic concept of function calls, so he had thousands of lines of same, slightly altered, for loop peppered through a program which had the same bug throughout. He could not be convinced of his powers of terribleness and could not be deterred from writing more bad code.
Blithely they roll on. 
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I was a warehouse person at a company. My job was to receive inventory, stock inventory, ship inventory, etc. I managed to hit myself in the head with a steel rod and get a knot large enough to almost consider a hospital visit. Many questions were asked,
"Are you Ok"
"Do you need to go to the doctor"
"Why was there a steel rod in your hand"
"How come we heard light-saber noises before your injury"
etc.
Bottom-line, warehouse work is not for me. I don't have the capacity for it. I know that, it is my limit. Others should learn theirs as well.
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Amen. Can't wait for this "everyone should code" phase to die.
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I liked the first reply to this article.
"I stopped reading half way though this because the article has nothing to do with entrepreneurship or college. This is a long rant about somebody who lived a sheltered life and got hit hard when they came to the "real world"."
/ravi
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Oh MAN I wish I could follow that boy's life when he leaves school 
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Of course, I went to London University, which meant going to a college and, after three years, being able to use BSc(Eng)(Lond) after my name.
I studied Aeronautics at the world's first Aeronautics faculty at QMC.
We 'ad it 'ard.
We had about three lectures on computing and were expected to pick up how to use the card batch system on our ICL 1904 mainframe for Fortran 4 programmes which solved equations - Runge-Kutta, Newtonian or plain algebra - and that was it.
In my final year I chose a full year project, simulating Harriers in full 6 DOF, still in Fortran 4.
By the time I did my first Masters (Cranfield, 1 year), the die was cast and I was hooked on engineering programming.
Nice work if you can get it, but while my degrees gave me general engineering sense and domain knowledge, programming was self-taught.
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Simon O'Riordan from UK wrote: my degrees gave me general engineering sense and domain knowledge
Yeah, to bad most people forget this general knowledge after the exams (and I must confess I too work like that).
I'm not saying University is completely worthless, but you have to do the work yourself, as you said.
It's an OO world.
public class SanderRossel : Lazy<Person>
{
public void DoWork()
{
throw new NotSupportedException();
}
}
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This is very troubling. A friend's son recently took an intro Python class at a private college. He was stuck so I worked with him for about 15 minutes. He said, "I get it. The professor never explained it that way. All he does is open up the IDE, type lines of code and says, 'you just do this'". Ugh. The boy ended up hating Python and programming because of the difficulties he had in this intro course. Too bad.
Way to kill the inspiration there, Professor.
No wonder IT is in the state it is in.
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I think the problem with IT is that it's changing very fast and schools can't keep up. Writing new material every year is expensive.
The teachers probably don't feel like keeping up either, they already have a full time job teaching the old.
I think a lot of professors now were taught in the 80's and that's what they know.
Next to that they're teaching a generation that grew up with computers, while they first used a computer when they were already in their twenties.
And the good IT people can get high salary jobs at big companies, they are not the ones teaching...
It's an OO world.
public class SanderRossel : Lazy<Person>
{
public void DoWork()
{
throw new NotSupportedException();
}
}
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Sander Rossel wrote: I lost the little bit of faith I had in our schooling system
I can relate.
In high school we taught ourselves how to program. None of the teachers knew how, but we had access to a timesharing system. In our senior year they added a programming class taught by a business teacher who had been teaching programming without access to a computer. We ended up debugging his programs for him.
I went a slightly different route, I got a job as a computer operator at a university and then started taking classes in computer science.
To say I was appalled, is an understatement. They were teaching blatantly bad programming methods. Projects were marked done/not done, with the majority of your grade coming from rote memorization of code fragments.
One class, taught by reputedly the hottest professors on campus (I was told I was lucky to get them and the proper methods to bow and scrape to them by others), but one test was composed by one professor and desk checked by the other, before they inserted 5 bugs for us to discover. Neither one of these a-holes bothered to type the original program in to see if it worked. On the test I found 8 bugs, the class as a whole found 11.
Another class, in Assembler, was taught by the TA, I think we only saw the professor once. The TA had us doing Macros two weeks into the class. I already knew Assembler from the timesharing system in high school, so I took to it like a duck to water. The rest of the class didn't have a clue as to the difference between compile time and run time and wondered why their macros weren't running at run time.
I have lots more, but it really bothered me that some of my classmates were going to get degrees and have no clue as to how to program in the real world.
I came away feeling I was merely paying someone to give me a piece of paper to verify what I already knew.
Psychosis at 10
Film at 11
Those who do not remember the past, are doomed to repeat it.
Those who do not remember the past, cannot build upon it.
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BrainiacV wrote: with the majority of your grade coming from rote memorization of code fragments.
That's how it is. You have to memorize for the exam and can forget after that...
BrainiacV wrote: I have lots more, but it really bothered me that some of my classmates were going to get degrees and have no clue as to how to program in the real world.
And some of them get away with it in real life too... 
BrainiacV wrote: I came away feeling I was merely paying someone to give me a piece of paper to verify what I already knew.
Yep, and that piece of paper is worth a lot too. I'm not sure for how long though, because I've been hearing a lot of negative stuff on education lately...
I currently study IT at the Open University. They're not too bad. At least you get to do a lot yourself.
It's an OO world.
public class SanderRossel : Lazy<Person>
{
public void DoWork()
{
throw new NotSupportedException();
}
}
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I hope the article is exaggerating a bit, but I agree with the general statement. After 4 years of writing arrays and data structures and OS fundamentals I got out of school and landed a VB.Net job as a contractor on a team of 1 to build a web app. I had never written in .Net or any decent OO language (VB6 doesn't count). Most of our C++ in college was all functional recursive stuff. I had a ton of concepts to learn, an IDE to understand, deployment to think about, SOLID principles, etc. A friend of mine did a vocational school instead and hit the ground running when he finished. 10 years later we've both ended up as strong technologists but I would have had a much easier go had I learned things applicable upside of academia. I think the only thing I learned from my 4 year BS degree (no pun intended) that I haven't relearned is what O(n) means.
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I like that you mentioned the contrast between your college/university experience and your friend's vocational school experience. Colleges end up doing so much theory and forget to write an app which would have to survive in the real world.
It is one of the major failures of college/university instruction.
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If it is any consolation neither can any of your professors. 
The report of my death was an exaggeration - Mark Twain
Simply Elegant Designs JimmyRopes Designs
I'm on-line therefore I am.
JimmyRopes
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The article is a bit contrived IMHO. Could not even turn on a computer? Even my elderly mother-in-law can do this.
That said, as someone who teaches CS at a major university, it is clear there is a bubble. Students who have little aptitude for programming and math are majoring in CS because of the economic incentives. This dilutes the academic experience for the capable students, while sending the incapable students off on an unsustainable career path. The bubble will burst, and will leave many people high and dry. We would do everyone a favor by encouraging the incapable students to pursue something they *are* good at.
Related to this, it is clear there is a disconnect between what CS programs require students to learn and what skills are relevant in the working world. Many students who go into CS actually want to learn software development, but CS programs offer very little in the way of SD. Institutions of higher ed, however, typically make changes at a glacial pace, and we should not count on them to fix the problems anytime soon. Accordingly, I'm in the process of fixing the disconnect in a small way by providing SD training to recent CS graduates. Even so, SD training won't magically make incapable students capable.
And related to this, don't expect universities to discourage incapable students from majoring in CS. Universities are, first and foremost, interested in selling their customers what they think they want, and the students are the customers.
Meanwhile, I've yet to find an incapable student who is unable to turn on a computer, so Mr. Altucher would bolster his credibility by going a little more lightly on the hyperbole.
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You make very good points and you are correct about the extreme hyperbole of the article.
Great points about Universities not doing much with real Soft Dev. and their extremely slow pace.
Very encouraging to know you are out there making a difference.
Thanks.
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I worked for a company in 1990 and the boss employed a freshly graduated guy to be my assistant and help out with several new bespoke projects. he not only couldn't program, or understand simple instructions, but had no concept of what a customer might want, it was a disaster - he's probably a bigwig at Microsoft by now but I passed him on like a hot potato at the first opportunity
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_WinBase_ wrote: I passed him on like a hot potato at the first opportunity
That is similar to what they did with the guy I mentioned who didn't even understand functions.
Everyone felt sorry for him even though he refused to open his eyes to any constructive criticism.
One day a manager was going through ways to get rid of him,
"he can't code, he doesn't deal well with customers, he cannot write reports, he can't design systems...There's a management position in the Drabble Project. I'll tell the VP of Drabble that this is his man."
Yes, I'm serious.
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HR departments always ask me why I don't want recent graduates, with their fresh minds and fresh ideas.
It's because "fresh" ain't the word.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Mark_Wallace wrote: It's because "fresh" ain't the word.
Haha. This genuinely made me LOL.
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I doubt anyone that did nothing but attend class would be able to program professionally. Regardless of grades.
New graduates however often have work experience in programming and/or have done it outside of class. Sometimes that allows them to do a fairly decent job on non-critical software but attempting to hire new grads without defining a mentoring system is unlikely, on average, to produce good results.
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I know of people who have a 1st or a 2:1 in Computer Science and can't program. It really makes you wonder at the range of topics covered in Computer Science degrees. I would have thought that programming was one of the fundamental topics but apparently it isn't.
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This is interesting too, because in the 80s when I was in high school they always said, "data processing" (computer science) requires vast knowledge of math, so I knew I was out. Then, around 1988 I got my first computer, started learning QuickBasic, then QuickC and started writing programs. I didn't notice that I had not learned math so I kept on programming and learning. I was very good in logic for some reason, but at the time -- because my teachers had told me I was terrible in math -- I wasn't good at math.
Finally, after some years I decided to take some college math courses since they were apparently wrong about needing math for computer science, I figured maybe they were wrong about me being good in math too. I excelled in math. I love math. But, you see, the way they teach things is so non-vocational that all the teachers get stuck teaching so much theory that many people become disinterested.
Then, finally the truth becomes obvious. They teach math as theory because the teachers themselves don't understand math. So they stand around and spout things like, "advanced math is required for 'data processing'".
Meanwhile, real and interesting math is happening inside your cells. But, most high school math teachers are really English majors who've never tried any math or logic problems outside the books, so they just keep the myth going.
Sheesh.
Then, at the college level, it does seem that colleges are teaching some very important foundational concepts . However, concepts don't get it in the real world. Students need more vocational training -- hands-on porgramming -- at the beginning, and then later as they know enough to understand how the foundation concepts are important, they should learn those. Or, at least more balance between the two.
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There's video[^] and everything of this totally non-event.
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