Two (or three?) days ago I read an interesting article by Joel Spolsky about The Perils of JavaSchools, and I don’t know but it seems that he read my mind. This is something I have been thinking for some years now and obviously I agree 100%.
Robert Scoble commented on his own weblog about it also, and you can see that it’s true. A lot of people/businesses need and expect good programmers (intelligent, stars, hard-core, pragmatic, …) to at least do a good work on:
- Maintaining existing software.
- Develop Operating Systems/kernels (besides Linux).
- Enhance existing software.
- Solve complex issues. (Someone who knows C/C++ will give me more confidence than someone who knows and was taught only Java.)
The Latin and Greek example was good also, I won’t mention why they’re good because that’s already explained in the National Committee for Latin and Greek webpage, the point with this is it seems that in the U.S. and México things are similar in respect to education by particular colleges versus the ones owned by the government (I’ve talked about this with some U.S. citizens, so that’s why I’m telling this). Here in Guadalajara, the schools/colleges owned by the government do not teach anything about Latin or Greek at all, unless you’re studying something about Languages in the university (maybe Law?), and in the particular High School I studied we had a semester about Greek and Latin Etymologies. For sure education levels are dispair, and is understandable why most mexicans do not know the spanish language, imagine about other/secondary languages.
But this doesn’t means guys that graduate from them aren’t good or intelligent in the computer sciences space either, I have a couple of friends that come from one of those government-owned universities that I really recognize as intelligent and good about computer sciences. Unfortunately they don’t work for the company I’m working on, they were at one time. Enough said about them that I can count the intelligent (pure/brain intelligence) guys from all the people I have met with less than the fingers of my hands.
And I agree with Jack Bell in that programming stars (intelligent people or intelligent pragmatic programmers) are born, not made. This of course to me also means that everyone has the same capabilities in doing whatever the thing, but the issue here is that because of genetics, education, culture, you name it, just a few know how to have an effective and efficient use of neurons and to actually have a nice “play” between them (synapses). This intelligence or ‘pure’ intelligence is different, at least for me, than emotional intelligence (yep, I already read that book a lot of years ago), wisdom, … but this is another topic.
All of this means that if I want good programmers, I for sure won’t trust on guys with whatever average that come from JavaSchools, but will trust on those that passed the regular years on a good university that was committed to teach good computer science and that only holds those who have the characteristics to do at least a decent career. As an example, my graduated generation was comprised of half the guys who entered into it. This means that half of the initial people was not really made for this job, or at least for that level of knowledge and skills; I’ll hate to see a University that lets students graduate even if they are not up to the task.
I still feel I have a lot more to add about this topic, but I’ll stop here, don’t want to bore my 2 readers (myself and maybe someone else 
) with a bad english novel about my thoughts.
It would be good for Joel if he enables his site like a blog where we can add comments; maybe it is and I’m missing something. I’m sure that his site would be one of the best places to go and check for good discussions about software.
