I'm not surprised. Software design is *not* science but more an art form.
Most of the programmers I hired *with* degrees did *not* have them in
computer science. I even had one who came from Microsoft whose field
was Theology. He was a good programmer too.
I heard about this story yesterday on Gil Gross's show on the local talk
station. I don't think Gil has a degree either but has had quite a
career and is a really bright guy. He worked for ABC News and knew
Peter Jennings. Referencing this article yesterday he mentioned that
Jennings did not have a degree either but was very knowledgeable about
geopolitics. In comparison some of the grads they hired couldn't even
name the capitals of some countries in the news.
Gil also knows that our local tech industry has many successful people
who don't have degrees. I've probably told the story here before but
back in the late 1990s I had a call from a recruiter looking for a
multi-media acquisitions manager. I wasn't interested but told her I
knew someone who would be very good at it. She stressed the company,
Coca-Cola (which for some reason wanted to get into this), required a
degree and the guy I knew did not have one but he would have done a bang
up job. Maybe the reason we don't associate Coca-Cola with multi-media
is that they hired someone "with a degree" who didn't know shit. :-D
On 12/24/2014 10:15 AM, TurquoiseBee [email protected]
[FairfieldLife] wrote:
*/Although I am a college grad (B.A. in English), your post made me
think back to a time at ILOG in France in which some HR geek from the
company pointed out to me at a large convention (with some derision)
that I was the only person in the company without a Ph.D.
/*
*/
/*
*/I got a chance to remind him of that later during the convention,
when it became obvious that the only person in the building who had
suggested out loud that it really *wasn't* a good idea to rip off the
entire interface of a Microsoft product and pass it off as your own
was me.
/*
*/
/*
*/Yes, they really did that, and yes, the *only* person in the
building who was on record as having spoken up about it and having
told them not to do it was me. If the Microsoft rep who spotted it on
a screen in our booth hadn't had a sense of humor and told them to
"take it down and never display it in public again," these Ph.D.'s
assumption that they "knew it all" could have cost the company
millions of dollars, or its very existence. /*
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*From:* "Bhairitu [email protected] [FairfieldLife]"
<[email protected]>
*To:* "[email protected]" <[email protected]>
*Sent:* Wednesday, December 24, 2014 6:57 PM
*Subject:* [FairfieldLife] Now we know why NEO is so bad
It was designed by a bunch of college grads:
http://www.salon.com/2014/12/23/gwyneth_paltrow_reportedly_not_educated_enough_for_marissa_mayer/
A college degree or education won't make you a great programmer any more
than a college degree in music will make you a great musician. I know
many a college dropout who has done well in life. I also know people
with advanced degrees who don't know their field very well at all. Hey,
but they have those letters after their name. Yup, a degree doesn't say
much especially if you graduated with a C- average.
In the computer science field, very few colleges were teaching it right
until about 2000. I even sat on a an computer science advisory board
for one college where the profs, scared of losing their tenure, needed
help with setting up a curriculum that would get their graduates jobs.
By the mid 1990s programming in Pascal was not going to cut it. I hired
more people who were self taught out of books and magazines than folks
with a computer science degree. These people were very productive.
I'm not against education by any means but I have for colleges being
about getting an eduction and not just a piece of paper.
