On 13/10/2011 00:51, David Lee wrote:
Perhaps the us and uk differ substantially in academic philosophy


Yes, perhaps. Certainly the UK and Germany differ greatly. In Germany, from what I've seen, you need to have academic qualifications to be a manager in a technology company; when I worked in Software AG most of the senior technical people and managers had doctorates. In the UK, it's quite common for the management to feel threatened by, and avoid employing, people who are smarter than they are. I think software companies in the US put much more effort into hiring high-flyers than those in the UK, but in both countries academic qualifications count for little.

One traditional difference between the UK and the US, which has been diluted but still exists, is that academia in the UK traditionally thinks of commerce as rather grubby and undignified, which means that the cultural distrust between academia and industry actually applies on both sides. There's not nearly enough cross-fertilization. There are also far too many people teaching computing in our universities who have no industrial experience at all.

Michael Kay
Saxonica
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