Re: Re: Re: Re: too many ?


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Posted by Kenneth Sloan on May 05, 2003 at 20:41:24:

In Reply to: Re: Re: Re: too many ? posted by Rick Denney on May 05, 2003 at 12:24:03:

Rick says: "Very little of what I include in a training program was in my undergraduate curriculum. Nearly all of it I learned standing out on a street corner next to an older guy, who would point his wrinkled finger at something and tell me what I was looking at. Very few of my college professors coulds have done that. ... Even so, what I learned in college was even more valuable..."

I suggest that a few of Rick's professors made a conscious choice about what he needed during his undergraduate days. He might be surprised at what they *could* have done, had they made a different choice.

Still more of those professors may have made a different choice - a conscious decision to *not* stay current in the practical field - because each head has only so many neurons and no one can be "great" at *everything*

I can still recite instruction timings for a 40 year old computer, and could probably reproduce the infamous "green card" (anyone old enough to know what that is?) from memory. but I also remember the first computer that I made a conscious decision to *not* learn the innards. Both of those computers are now completely obsolete. Knowing the details of either is worthless (except perhaps for an academic course surveying trends in computer architecture); knowing how and when to move on to "the next best thing" is priceless.

When I was first hired as a professional computer jock, there were two types of jobs being offered. For people who had been well trained, there were jobs writing COBOL programs. For people who had been well educated, the company offered an 8-week training program - and then jobs building cutting edge technology. The COBOL programmers are still at it...35 years later. I suppose there's something to be said for job security - if your idea of security is the same 1 year of experience 30 times.

I want my undergraduate students to drill down and learn the intimate nitty-gritty details of *something* (mainly just to learn how to do it, secondarily to do it for me ona project so that I don't have to - I'm too lazy). But, the choice of *what* to drill down on is almost *never* the nitty gritty details that local industry *thinks* they want the students to learn. Some companies complain about this...and then go out of business; the better companies take our students, train them in the techniques du jour, and succeed.


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