Hi Tilo. University shouldn’t necessarily harder: it just would need not to let right about anyone advance so easily. See comment #5.

Genius is born–not paid.

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone elses opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

Thanks. I also have to agree with you: this isn’t going to happen. It’s kind of sad, but given the current situation, I can hardly see any improvement chances.

I was seriously downrated on student evaluations for actually trying to teach something that I thought was fairly basic in a course that the students said was “introductory” and therefore was necessarily easy. Even so, I felt required to pass most of the students (a 2.0 average here is really a 1.0 or less in ability and given the trends I’m seeing a 3.0 will soon be a 1.0).

We don’t even have weed out courses (as mentioned above). Such things would be tossed out by the university as evil. This bugs me as I’ve worked in industry and most of our graduates are not worth hiring — but there’s no way they can know that and no way I can communicate that to anyone.

However I can’t really see this happening as we’re suffering from a Loke Wobegon effect where everyone thinks they (or their kids) are above average. Trying to reverse that is going to be really tough. Also there’s a little too much social Darwinism in that for me — for example the weed out classes at my school were almost guessing games in the correct answer as the problems were really complex. But that’s a fault of the university.

And I agree with your post about this driving down wages, and I mainly blame business people or those that get into project management with a few years of experience. They don’t know the full price of a bad programmer and think they are all just cogs. If they are all cogs why not get the cheapest one?

The reason this can go on is that people move around in jobs so there’s no such thing as an institutional learning where someone can say “whoa we tried offshoring this complex project to India / China / Russia and it came in 5x over budget and 3 years late” It is like all projects of this sort start anew with people thinking its going to be all roses and are shocked, shocked to find out that they don’t get amazing results.

I mostly agree, except for the developing brain wiring thing. Admitted, I was already interested in programming when I was 10 or so, but I got my first computer with 19 (parents…) and the very basic BASIC when I was a kid wasn’t ANYTHING like the stuff I’ve been doing the last eight years now (turned 27).

What it takes is lots of hard work (there’s a good article “teach yourself programming in ten years” or sth. like that) and the motivation to learn all the concepts there are in programming (functions, higher-order functions, data types, objects, polymorphism, subtyping, inheritance, modules…).

I started with reading ESR’s how to become a hacker, learned Lisp (first Scheme), C, Java and some assembler, SML and peeked at some other languages. It takes time.

The best we can do is educate people about the complexity, and to tell them that software quality IS manageable, i.e. you need to get a team of good developers, but then you can do it. And we also need more software companies (or consulting shops) run by developers. And fewer architecture astronauts; they steal our bread, lower our wages, and talk crap most of the time.

Thanks for the typo report and for reading