Quote:
Originally Posted by Katsunami
You're not going to have a teacher in history teach German, and they're both teachers.
.
|
Uh, actually, in US public schools that happens all the time.
Gym teachers teach math and science, english teachers get assigned history.
(Or vice-versa.)
The actual expertise is deprecated. All that matters is a degree in Education ("teaching is teaching") and union membership.
Seriously.
(Private schools and home schooling are trending ever higher for some reason.
)
Now as to non CS programers being able to cook up good code, in the engineering R&D universe it has long been a practice that everybody learn to code. FORTRAN. There are billions of lines of code encompassing a half century and more of corporate knowledge. Going on 70 years in many businesses. Most of it nicely documented and time-tested stable. Some of it pure spaghetti. (Shrug) CS purity isn't a metric that matters, only results and accuracy; the intent is to produce line of business tools, not works of art. The algorithms and science behind them is what matters.
Now, these are standalone tools that do NOT run on public networks. They are not control systems or financial systems. Very different universes.
Our tools originated on IBM and UNIVAC mainframes, migrated to Cray supercomputers and VAX clusters, to UNIX workstations and clustered workstations, to PCs and PC networks and clusters. Usually all that was needed was a quick recompile and a validation suite run.
(One summer we had a batch of interns from a campus where the CS department had taken over the engineering programming courses. They walked in singing the praises of Pascal and how Fortran was passee. We found uses for them but not one was allowed to code a batch script. Next year we partnered with a different engineering school.)
Migrating to commodity PCs saved us a bundle: our first local network cost $4M but saved us zillions in chargebacks an increased out capabilities ten fold. Boss like me. By our third generation we were running multiprocessor PC workstations and the total cost was barely over $120K. Boss really liked me.
More recently, higher management bought into managed code development (a good thing, really) and into porting code into "mainstream languages and environments". The GUI front ends were pretty. The graphing modules are nice. Somewhat useful.
That effort took ten years (while we ran three network generations) cost tens of millions in outside contracts and the best we can say is it runs almost as well as the old Fortran codes. No big loss in productivity. (Come crunch time some staffers run the FORTRAN codes on the laotops to get faster results.)
Different universes, different needs, different rules.
In real world Engineering, degrees matter...but only as evidence that you learned the underpinings of the profession and were (at least on paper) trainable for the job. (Not 100% true.)
The way we put it was: "university taught you the profession, now you get to learn the trade."
The degree is necessary but not sufficient.
Different universes...