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

[Seah Hong Yee <hongyee@polyscientific.com.my>]

I was not educated locally, so my opinion may be a little bias. However,
based on my experience in the last couple of years, I have to say most
of what you guys said are quite true. 

Just to add a few things, 

Attitude : A lot of interns and people I interviewed would complain
about their schools on lack of facilities and packed schedules but few
bother to learn proper way to get the job done. Most fresh graduate I
work with sometimes tend to like to take the easy way out by not trying
to learn something vastly different from what they know. Be it another
operating system or to learn some low level concepts. I once find myself
trying to explain to a fresh developer what memory leaks and buffer
overflow is. Someone once came to tell me that he was an experience sys
admin, apparently all he knew was how to add user via a GUI. 

School : Although not entirely at fault. I would like to say a few
things, a number of local private or public tertiary institution does
not really provide, in my opinion a proper environment for students to
learn. Many of you mentioned the joy of first time seeing a csh, compile
your first chunk of code in command line interface, trying to use the
phone utility on Vms to talk to someone else on the other end of DEC net
or sending your first e-mails. I often find in the current environment,
institution sometimes don't always provide students with enough access
to proper resources to learn. One local university I know have some
Sparc around but ask students to check mail via a web interface and
usually are only allowed to use windows machines only. The sparcs were
apparently for "research only". This is quite different from the
multiple unixs, vms and VM accounts I had when I was in school. 
Sometimes, schools don't often provide good role models for proper
system administration. I once went to one local colleges for a refresher
course. To my horror, I was able to boot the linux machine into single
user mode and change the root password, and on one workstation that I
tried (the only one I tried) the root password was "123456". Password to
certain account was actually pasted on the door to the lab. When asked
about this, the sys admin told me it was "convinient".  BTW, they have a
leased line to the net. 

In some cases, I feel important topics in certain classes are sometimes
not covered. (not just IT though, even in some engineering classes you
find the same problems). A lot of fresh grad claim they took OS design
class, but do not know what's the difference between a micro kernel and
a monolithic kernel.  Know nothing about routing table. Having problems
telling you what ACID stand for in database. 

The sad thing about this is I wasn't even a CS graduate.

 


On Tue, 2002-12-03 at 18:32, mel wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> > 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.
> 
> No, not insulting at all. In fact, what he did was point out and proved that
> local IT grads does not what it takes to be a good (just good) programmers.
> Back in my university, the CS or Engineering society would hold programming
> contests - similar to what was organized by Jonathan (I remembered one event
> in which a student coded his solutions in Perl, but won a Visual Studio for
> C++). Even back then, the interview process was even more thorough and
> tough (a practice that I imitated to this day). Microsoft candidates were
> asked to rate their C/C++ skills, and as usual, one of the questions was
> to implement their own string copy function. I was subjected to a pointer
> arithmethic question during an interview I had (which now become part of
> my interview arsenal[1]).
> 
> Everyone that has read "The Mythical Man-Month" know damn well that
> putting an inexperienced programmer that requires training will damn
> well does not make the project any shorter.
> 
> 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
> 
> I also looked for good attitude, but it was so easy to detect when the
> candidate was "rehearsing" the attitude (this applies to both fresh and
> experienced). I had a candidate who was so enthusiastic about the projects
> that he worked on, but when I shifted the topic to the technical part, his
> voice cracked.
> 
> > are) ...what do our students learn nowdays ? Windows, for sure. Visual
> Basic ? yep, that
> > too.....many get taught how to *use* the visual basic development
> environment (ie what menu
> 
> So you are saying that Windows contributes to the factor that IT grads
> lack programming skill?
> 
> > 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.
> 
> You are wrong. I regards all of my programmers highly, and I respect all of
> them, regardless of their skill level. And programming is more than a rocket
> science. Have you ever spent an entire night chasing lost memory? When you
> code, what sort of data do you hold in your head?
> 
> Sadly, even experienced programmers are also lacking the basic. Most of them
> work for the sake of getting a project done. I've interviewed 10 C++
> programmers, but none of them can get even a fundamental question[2] right.
> 
> Secondly, some even think that they are good - none of the Java programmers
> that I've interviewed can get even a simple question [3], fresh or
> otherwise.
> 
> So, they weren't good to begin with, and only a handful few gets better
> after two of three years experience.
> 
> --mel
> [1] http://mel.ini2.net/edtv/q4.c
> [2] http://mel.ini2.net/edtv/cppq.txt
> [3] http://mel.ini2.net/edtv/java_q1.txt
> 
> 
> 
> 
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