I wouldn't sell today's college grads too far short; there are a lot of
bright folks among them who will have no trouble picking up the Real World. I
didn't learn any JCL skills in school -- not surprising, given that we were
running a CDC Cyber 760 at Georgia Tech at the time (early 1980's) -- and I had
only written one COBOL program by the time I graduated. Still, I think my
school did a decent enough job, given the newness of the major at the time and
the breadth of the material they were attempting to cover. They were more
interested in teaching how computers worked and in exposing us to many
different languages (LISP, APL, MIX Assembler, BASIC, FORTRAN, etc.) and
approaches to computing than in giving an in-depth course of study in a
particular vendor's system. (Oddly enough, they taught nothing in C, and the
only Unix-like system I can remember was the Software Toolkit on a PR1ME mini.
It was fun to play with.)
Given some of the comments in this thread so far, some of you may find
amusing this quotation from "Read Programmers Don't Write Pascal:"
"When I got out of school, I thought I was the best programmer in the world. I
could write an unbeatable tic-tac-toe program, use five different computer
languages, and create 1000-line programs that WORKED (really)!!! Then I got
out into the Real World. My first task in the Real World was to read and
understand a 200,000-line Fortran program, then speed it up by a factor of two.
Any Real Programmer will tell you that all the Structured Coding in the world
won't help you solve a problem like that -- it takes actual talent."
Jon
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