Jon, I think the bigger complaint has been the disconnect between the profs in the colleges and the real world, not so much the students. I know I made a disparaging remark about the "script kiddies", but that again is more the fault of the institution, which I think have moved from teaching the concepts which could be turned into real world skills to "teaching to the test", like the person who mentioned the MCSE training that often gives the person the piece of paper but can't really support the boxes.
I like your quote. I can somewhat relate. Definitely didn't think I was a great programmer when I got out of school, in fact I was scared silly when I walked into my first programming job. Got knocked into reality when I turned my very first COBOL program into my boss. He took 1 look at it and said something along the lines of "what the ##**## is this?" I used all the structured coding I had learned in school and it made the program much more difficult to understand. He told me to go back and rewrite it so it would make sense. I ripped half the code out, put in a couple well-placed "goto" statements (gasp!) and turned it back in. He said "much better, now get to work on the next one". Thanks for the chuckle. Rex -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Jon Brock Sent: Thursday, June 29, 2006 1:30 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Curiosity 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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
