On 9/28/2011 11:13 PM, John Coryat wrote: > I agree with the concept that people who get in computer science are > as likely to be good programmers as those who get their education for > something else.
There are relative levels of "good". Huge ranges of good, in fact -- at least a factor of 20, according to the literature, and in my experience there are skill levels that, if you haven't reached them, there are some problems you can't solve no matter how long you take, and the problems you take longer to solve won't have nearly as good of a solution. And some of those things you don't tend to learn without having a degree. Yes it's POSSIBLE to acquire any skills you want without a CS degree (I don't have a computer science degree myself, fyi, but I took most of the upper division CS class sequence), but finding someone who's the level of good I'm looking for (video game development, high performance code, generally can do anything) who doesn't have a degree is extremely rare. And it tends to be obvious in the few cases someone is self-educated to that level, because they will have tons of accomplishments they can point to. I'm not looking for someone who can just code a UI in Java. I don't even use Java on Android -- everything I'm doing is C/C++ and Lua, so it can also run on iOS. When I'm hiring, I look for people who can not only program in straight C if necessary, they could drop into assembly language if they needed to. Which is pretty much how you need to be able to think if you're ever going to write, say, a pixel shader or vertex shader. Unless I'm just looking for a game scripter. In that case, degrees are irrelevant to me. It all depends on what kind of programming you're really talking about, and I think a lot of people will debate with each other endlessly about how to hire "programmers", when each side is talking about people with completely different skill levels. I wonder if we wouldn't benefit from some kind of "certification level" so that when someone says they're a Programmer Level 4, say, you can know whether they're capable of copy-and-paste JavaScript/HTML development, or vertex shader and high performance/real-time code development, or somewhere in the middle. > That's why the idea of hiring kids out of high school is ludicrous. A well known blogger disagrees: "By the way, it's because of this phenomenon—the fact that many of the great people are /never on the job market/—that we are so aggressive about hiring summer interns." [1] Honestly, I was a better programmer fresh out of high school than many of the people I've worked with since then, "real" experience or not (having coded entire games in assembly language by that time, since BASIC wasn't fast enough for me). But I learned a lot of important things in college that made me even better. YMMV. Tim [1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/01/27.html -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Discuss" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-discuss?hl=en.
