Re: [ossig] (Fwd) STI News: Firm discovers good IT help hard to find

[Loke Kar Seng <lks@webpres.com.my>]

"TM Tan (aka Meng)" wrote:
> 
> I have one comment and a rant :)
> 
> 1. In the context of the kind of people who hang out on *this* mailing list, probably the article
> could sound insulting. Anyway this JONATHAN Searcy 42-year-old senior vice-president of
> Information Technology for Malaysia's Genting group is going about this in a totally wrong
> way. The fresh grad is a clean sheet, they should damned well train them to the level they
> require. When I was hiring people 2 years ago, I didn't look for advanced skillsets or any
> fancy college or university degree (see my rant below)...I looked for good attitude, willingness
> to learn, and one criteria I look for is what kind of games they played - you can tell a lot about
> people based on the games they play :) It is a damed good sign that they have a passion for
> IT...its not just a job.
> Then we trained them, two years on these guys have great potential. FreeBSD "make world"s
> are routine to them nowdays.
> 
> 2. However, we are talking about the quality of IT grads nowdays. Sad to say, the article is
> pretty close to home. A bazillion years ago when I was an undergrad the first lab session was
> eye opening...UNIX on a PDP 11/44 compiling pascal and Ada programs on the command
> line, not to mention a 6809 assembly language course. Fortunately the blinking prompt after
> the "%" wasn't too different from the blinking prompt after the "]" :)
> We learnt about algorithm design and how to test for correctness etc etc. People in
> Computer Science wrote compilers for their final year projects...we had some 128k fat macs
> with MacPascal but by and large UNIX on Vaxes and PDPs were the main systems we
> worked on.
> 
> Basically the demand for IT skills is so high, almost every college has jumped on the
> bandwagon, cobbling together a "syllabus" without knowledge of "instructional design" or in-
> depth knowledge of what basic IT skills are really needed...some vendors who donate or
> heavily discount hardware and software are contributing to pushing their product....wanna
> guess who ?
> Does anyone check or control the quality of the courses provided ?
> To add to that, who is training the trainers ? Back then my lecturers were professor so-an-so
> or Dr so-and-so.....how many colleges can afford top lecturers ? Are there enough qualified
> lecturers to go around ?
> It used to be a degree or diploma said that the holder has a certain level of expertise and that
> was enough. Why the sudden requirements for professional certifications like MCSE etc etc
> ? Employers want to make sure the person they are hiring knows what DNS, IP numbers and
> netmasks are :)
> 
> Wonder how many IT grads nowdays know who Knuth is and read "The Mythical Man-Month"
> ? How many can hand optimise code instead of turning on some compiler option 

Minor correction, author is Federick Brooks. Knuth is still completing
his books into vol 3 i believe ..

> 
> We live in a place where "programmers" are the lowest level of IT staff...hmm, what does that
> tell you ? Seems like no one is proud to be called a programmer.
> 
> I want to end with this story. I have a friend who works for a large local corporation, he is a
> lawyer for that corporation. He gets a new laptop and tells their IT support guy that he wants
> the hard drive partitioned into 4 sections. The IT guy says "What is a partition?"
> Windows is turning our IT grads into idiots ! It is NOT FUNNY.

I suppose IT/CompSci is too broad nowadays. A person hired for windows
support will not be able to do gcc programming.. we are just lumping
everybody into IT.

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