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From: perry@apollo.HP.COM (Jim Perry)
Newsgroups: comp.edu
Subject: Re: Education
Message-ID: <47904806.20b6d@apollo.HP.COM>
Date: 21 Dec 89 19:48:00 GMT
References: <1989Dec19.053905.11104@psuvax1.cs.psu.edu> <7492@hubcap.clemson.edu>
Sender: root@apollo.HP.COM
Reply-To: perry@apollo.HP.COM (Jim Perry)
Organization: Hewlett-Packard Apollo Division - Chelmsford, MA
Lines: 48

In article <7492@hubcap.clemson.edu> billwolf%hazel.cs.clemson.edu@hubcap.clemson.edu writes:
>   Education must respond meaningfully to the context in which it is to
>   be consumed.  I submit that if a person feels the need to take the fast
>   track to professional employment, the educational system should not stand
>   in that person's way.  If that person later becomes filthy rich and starts
>   to wonder about humanities courses and the meaning of life, then the system
>   should be ready to serve then as well.  But trying to shove things down the
>   throats of unwilling users will result only in alienating the users and 
>   wasting a lot of valuable educational resources in the process.  

Let's bring this back to specifics.  Employers have certain
requirements that they want their employees to meet.  In the computer
software industry the prerequisite to "professional employment" is
generally a bachelor's degree, often explicitly a BSCS "or
equivalent".  Those four letters, BSCS, carry a lot of baggage, and
don't just mean a piece of paper.  There's the implication of four
years of regimented study across a spectrum of disciplines, generally
concentrating specifically but not exclusively on CS (or SE, if you
will, though that's rarer).  The expectation is that you will have the
breadth of experience represented by typical college distributive
requirements.  

I'm not a hiring manager, but as an engineer I am involved in
interviewing and approving new hires.  I think my criteria are not out
of line with those of others in the business.  I wouldn't hire a
graduate of a program such as you are advocating.  Put that on your
fast track and smoke it.  

There are various academic reasons for distributive requirements, or
that OS courses are part of engineering curricula, and we've gone over
those.  Like it or not, that's what a Bachelor's degree entails, and
what employers expect it to entail.  There's your bottom line, as it
affects your pocketbook.  You want the big professional bucks ASAP,
you'll have to take humanities courses and you may as well try to get
something out of them.

I welcome dissenting opinions from others in the business (not
students, not academics, we're talking professional fast track here). 
In a pinch, I'll accept consenting opinions :-)

[Naturally, every individual is different, and I know many gifted
programmers/engineers who never made it through college at all but
that I'd love to have working for/with me.  I don't know that I'd
interview them based solely on a resume, though...]
-
Jim Perry   perry@apollo.hp.com    HP/Apollo, Chelmsford MA
This particularly rapid unintelligible patter 
isn't generally heard and if it is it doesn't matter.