Christopher R. Merlo wrote:
Hello friends. My apologies for the cross-posting, but I'm sending
the same request to all groups.
We are developing two new web programming courses at NCC, and we need
some statements from people in management and leadership positions in
IT to support the need for these courses, which will teach HTML,
JavaScript, CSS, PHP, JSP, and RDBMS interaction with MySQL. If you
feel you can help, please e-mail me, and I'll send you the proposed
course outlines.
Something that I notice is often missing in whole or in part is an
appreciation of architecture-level concerns. In other words, people are
often taught how to code, but not *what* to code or *where*. The
critical issues of where to place code between the tiers, and how to
make such judgements, are often lacking.
Another factor that often seems to be missing, strange as it seems, is
the simple idea that all programs serve human goals. In other words,
some person somewhere is committing time and money to a system, and
almost always it is for the purpose of gain. While a good programmer
will take pride in the quality of his craftsmanship, it often seems to
be missing to take pride in serving the needs of the non-programmer who
is depending on you. While this may seem a "soft" issue compared to the
nuts-and-bolts of PHP or SQL, it separates a useful employee from a
useless one.
With those two ideas in mind, a personal beef of mine is the lack of
understanding of what a database is and what it can do, so I'm always in
favor of more emphasis in that area.
Finally, and this may seem strangest of all, the three most productive
employees I've ever had knew nothing of our particular technology when I
hired them. In each case I hired and attitude and an aptitude and then
showed them the language we were using and put them to work. None of
them was uneducated, I'm not suggesting no education was needed, but all
of them were well grounded in general principles. It seems the course
outline suggested above would be a wonderful cornerstone for teaching a
lot of very basic CS concepts, which might then produce some
general-thinking employment candidates.
Thanks in advance,
-c
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