Overspecialization in the Computer Field?

The Mainframe asks: "I visited a nameless college campus recently and was shocked at the degree of specialization within the student body. Of the many CS and other IT-related majors that I talked to, not a single one had any real breadth of experience. Web developers knew Perl, but couldn't tell Apache from MySQL. C++ coders knew their language, as long as it was presented in Microsoft Visual C++. I suspect if I'd asked them to use G++ they would have said 'bless you'. Essentially, I'm worried. I plan to do some very interesting things in the next few years, but I'm not going to be able to pull it off if I have to wade through 100 narrow-minded people for every 1 useful human being. Is this something that other employers and co-workers have been having a lot of problems with? Is the whole world having to show its database developers how to use a copying machine?"

Comments

I've seen this lack of creativity..

[Manic Miner]

I used to work on the undergraduate helpdesk for an electronics and computer science department. During my time working there I saw a number of things that I didn't believe were possible, things you would expect in a dilbert cartoon, not at a University!

Although you may not believe it, but this is a true story....

One day I was walking through the computer lab on my way to lunch, when I noticed someone sitting at a computer with the monitor turned on its side. Now all the computer in the lab have iiyama 19 inch monitors, so needless to say I was not impressed at a student screwing around with the hardware, so I wandered over to the person in question to ask what the hell he thought he was playing at!

When I got to the machine I asked him what the hell he was doing. He replied that he was viewing some PDF's of past exam papers, but the PDF's were all in landscape and so he had to turn the monitor on its side to view them properly!

Needless to say I was speachless at first, WTF!, I told him off for screwing around with our equipment, put the monitor back the right way up and told him that he was never to move lab equipment around like that again. At this point he got upset saying how was he supposed to view the exam papers? I told him to use the software to view landscape pages and went to lunch

1 hour later I was coming back from lunch (got to love working for a University) and discovered him, still there, head tilted 90 degrees reading the exam papers!

This is just one example of the lack of creative thought that I saw almost every day while working on the helpdesk. My attitude when working with anything, not just computers, is that what I want to do must be possible I just need to figure out how. I love solving problems and finding creative solutions. I always assumed that people who worked with computers were the same as me, with a passion for experimenting and "playing".

Sadly computing has been seen as a cash cow, anyone that want a high payed job tries to get a computer degree. These people do not make great programmers or computer workers because they have no passion for the work. They don't "get" the technology or the concepts and are only interested in one thing - they pay packet and the end of the month. :(