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Re: [LUG] bug triage

 

> On 29/08/2007, Neil Williams <linux@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> Now, I'm going to be a little controversial here:
>> <devilsadvocate>
>> For the above reasons, a *humble* self-taught programmer may make a
>> better team worker than a *over confident* graduate.
>> </devilsadvocate>
>
> I'd say the reverse - any reasonable computing degree should expose
> the student to enough to make it quite clear that they can't possibly
> know it all, and connect the student with real world experts who will
> put them in their place sharpish - certainly the case with me.
>
> My 2nd interview out of uni resulted in deconstruction of some C tree
> parsing and building I wrote and was fairly proud of (less that it was
> good, merely that it compiled and ran), and I felt like a complete
> amateur - using malloc rather than a safer alternative,  not using a
> real XML parser, etc.
>
> Having said that - most of the important stuff I've learnt has been
> from the open source (particularly perl) community from my placement
> year onwards - I learnt surprisingly little important stuff (other
> than what it's like to work in IT for a year) on my placement year.

I work in an office for my sins, we have people of various levels of skill
in various departments... A lot of the time we get university graduates
who after the first few months have that "deer in headlights" look about
them..

I guess they don't teach skills such as "you do not know it all" at uni
these days..

Incidently, when I went to college we were being taught to program in
COBOL.. (yeah, like i'm going to use that...) and being lectured by people
who had less IT knowledge than any one of their students.. No I didn't
complete the course. the vast majority of my knowledge has been throgh
hands on (read "oops it's broken, time to fix it") experiance. I think I
get by ok considering this fact.


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