Hi Peter, > > > Yes, there will be fewer entry-level places for university > > > graduates whose initial employment would be the dogsbody work > > > a company needs, whilst the graduate learns programming in the > > > real world. > > Is programming a degree requirement thing, or would it be appropriate > as a technology course at Colleges?
I've no degree in programming, but work has only ever been programming so it's not needed. Quite a few of the better programmers I've known have degrees in unrelated areas: physics, astronomy, linguistics... Music tends to pop up quite often; both create from an abstraction and need puzzle-solving? Years ago, I was employed at a company which made big hardware and the software to run on it. CPI puts today's cost at £50 M for one unit. There were about four young men in the department, all doing software ‘engineering’ HNDs over several years by spending one working day a week at a local polytechnic. They were a few years older than the normal university student. Say the youngest started the HND at 20 instead of 18. They came from a mix of backgrounds: one had started on the shop floor as a wire wrapper; there was a manager's son with 'A' levels; another drifted away from school before 'A' levels... They'd got onto the HND course by their employer recognising their aptitude, and coughing up the money for the benefit of in-house trained programmers. The students valued the opportunity of the HND because it wasn't an automatic shoo-in of a degree course after sixth form. By the end of their HND, they were some of the most solid programmers I'd worked with. Not the most skilled, or the most knowledgable, but keen to learn, and benefiting from the mix of real-world programming with their colleagues for most of the week whilst getting a bit of theory beside it. (I remember one of their projects was writing a seven-layer OSI network stack for a ring network of microcontrollers.) This gave a much more useful programmer than the fresh computer-‘science’-degree graduates I worked with a few years later. I think in part because they knew which bits of educational dogma to ignore. Those later graduates came with impractical orthodoxy. Now it would be outside of the subject matter — the campus-wide, barren groupthink — but back then it was on the subject. A couple I remember: - The classic ‘every block of code needs a comment’. I thought that had died out as experience of structured programming spread in the ’70s. The right-margin of a comment per assembler instruction doesn't need to carry over with good structure and naming. These are hard; the time should be spent there, not on an atrophying comment. - Give every type of dynamically-allocated data structure a unique number, store it at the start of the memory after each allocation, and check it's correct before every access. This was how they were taught to code C of that era because it would otherwise let them access the memory holding a Foo as if it were a Bar. Stabilisers so the university didn't have to teach them to ride a bike. Never mind the source-code clutter, object-code bloat, and run-time overhead. They were vehement in the necessity of these: good software engineering demanded it. I preferred the HND students with practical knowledge. Employing an official apprentice has been too much hassle under the Government's regime for quite a few years. I know a couple of companies which have done it for one cohort then said never again. The ever rising tax on employment also encourages spending on equipment or services rather than increasing headcount. Tax more, consume less; that's their argument for taxing sugar. The run-of-the-mill university is under attack from multiple sides. AI is now capable of handing in a lot of the student's work, lessening the value of the degree on the CV, but not its student-debt cost. To fight back, universities will have an AI verbally examine the graduate to test their knowledge; like the viva voce for a dissertation, but because its more scalable, it will be more often. Some students won't like this so the lower-quality universities won't bother to maintain the charade; their incentive is to attract more students to replace those they're pushing out onto the dole. New universities like https://uaustin.org seek to avoid the declining rigour of the incumbents for the brightest students. And for the majority that don't go, the option of learning many topics using the Internet to degree level is only increasing. The traditional university also offers a mixing bowl for young, energetic minds to spark off one another; how that transfers to online is unclear to me. But it has probably been stymied for a few years now by needing to guard what one says as that, before long, also influences what new conscious thoughts one has. As the amount of AI to hand rises yet its cost falls, every curious mind will have a tireless correspondent answering one ‘Why..?’ after another. This could bring a lot more cross-discipline, so novelly productive, knowledge. And then there's Musk's humanoid robots for the physical, human-shaped world. -- Cheers, Ralph. -- Next meeting: Online, Jitsi, Tuesday, 2026-05-05 20:00 Check to whom you are replying Meetings, mailing list, IRC, ... https://dorset.lug.org.uk New thread, don't hijack: mailto:[email protected]
