Slashdot Mirror
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?"
I think that trend was set during the tech boom when companies would hire as many as it would take and get em to work as fast as they can.
Specialization is still important but more in overall offerable services than in products. Network admins now come in customer support experience, knowledge of various Microsoft products, pager support among other things rather than just a sneaker-wielding loosely-dressed UNIX hacker.
However this trend is emphasized upon still by colleges, where beside the theory theres no breadth of knowledge offered. Students know all about relational databases, theoretically speaking, but never knew the practical differences between PostGRE or MySQL or why Oracle is so expensive. Similarly they will not be able to set up an environment for themselves to start Perl programming for Apache in Linux. They'll need a Sys admin to do that for them, while companies are looking for exactly that, all the experience rolled into one to save costs.
Savvy Colleges and Institutes will expose their students to the top 5 or more products in that region to allow them to offer more to employers nowadays. They'll be able to offer some support on Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris, possibly AIX and others beside Windows 2000.
However theres never a substitute for having the experience of GWBasic and Commodore-64 and DOS 3.0, and having known all the major products and trends and quirks through the times uptil now. Thats exactly what companies are looking for by must have at least 10 years experience in the field.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Good. We need the mundane plebian computer / electronic engineers. That way the rest of us alpha geeks can go on and learn new things while they are re-treading on the same old boring stuff. Then in a few years, we will go on and make more money and get cooler jobs. Their lack of creativity and knowledge will show a few years after they get into the job market. This is an extremely fast paced field where continuing self-improvement of skills will get you a long way.
JOhn
Campaign for Liberty
Over time, I've noticed that every person posting to Slashdot seems to claim that "their" approach is the best.
People who went to an expensive college smirk about their degree and talk about how employers are looking for knowledge of abstract concepts.
People who didn't attend college at all constantly seem to be justifying their lack of doing so by claiming that they have more "real world" experience and that the college approach is "wrong".
I'd say it's a fair bet that they're both wrong -- a degree is valued much less by most employers than the Ivy League types think, and the "skip college" approach is looked down upon somewhat more by employers than the skippers think.
Plus, I suppose, it depends on the field. If you want to be a cryptographer, you're probably going to be a pretty sorry one without a (nice) degree, but if you're going to run wire and set up Apache and IIS...
May we never see th
college may provide background knowledge (mathematics, system architecture...) that may be lacking in the labor world but is useful for designin' complex systems
a friend of mine who went to college is always the first one i go to when i'm starting a complicated project, mainly because his CS degree involved learning the differences in different algorithms for proccessing input, and he can give me clues as to which ones i'll need to use. OTOH, for his 4+ years of college compared to my -1 year, we both earn almost the same, the difference created by the fact that he entered this field a little before i did.
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This has been noted in other fields as well. Medical Doctors are more and more often becoming specialized rather than being General Practitioners. And I'm sure it's happening in other (less-obvious) fields as well.
The problem is that there's just SO much information out there now. Ten years ago, computing was more simple. Fewer languages. Less options. Less knowledge. How CAN universities teach everything when the number of development tools and languages has grown like kudzu the last few years? Likewise medicine. Or any of the science fields, really.
Knowledge grows exponentially, yet time moves (to our perception) at a mostly constant rate and we (Humans) only have so much capacity to learn, remember and apply.
... "I read part of it all the way through." -- Movie Mogul Sam Goldwyn (and some slashdot readers)
I consider that I have a very broad background. But, I am having a lot of trouble in the current job market.
/w 3-5 yrs of exprience in X. So let's assume I have 3+ yrs combined, so it's not a qualifications issues. I keep hearing things like 'well, they're looking for 3 years continuous experience...'. And to top it off, seems the people don't understand consuling and say 'You have so many short positions, why can't you keep a job for more than 3 months... oh, there's a couple of 9 months jobs in there'. So I explain how I, as a consultant, take a job... and finish it quickly and efficiently... saving companies money. Then I usually have to point out a number of repeat customers and explain the process.
I've worked on large servers (think, all visa transactions) to fairly large financial projects ($6b/month) and biotech (front ends/db integration for BLAST). My projects have ranged from being based on supercomputers (Cray Y/MP) to hobby code on CP/M to embedded development (PSoS, bleh) to a wide variety of 'web' platforms.
I am a decent DBA (installed Oracle twice, can code in SQL in anything from Oracle to PostreSQL, including Informix). I can program in a _wide_ variety of languages Perl, (Objective-)C(++), various ASMs, Cold Fusion, VB, COBOL, MUMPS (and several dozen others). I'm a strong sysadmin. I even have contributions to a number of OSS packages and a few book contributions to my name.
Oh, and just for the record... I'm 28 (I started with college programming courses at 13 and was a paid intern by 14) so it's not age bias.
Now, why am I having trouble? Basically, the 'new' market (at least for the duration) wants specialists. Companies can afford to hire 3 people for what they would have paid for my services 6 months ago. I'm not asking for 6 figures right now, but I'm not willing to take a $30k position (yet) after making (a good chunk over) $100k last year.
I can't get by most HR people. For example I'll see a job for a programmer
So, why do colleges teach specialization... Because that is what most businesses understand. They don't 'get' how a wider view of the world could help them. All they see is someone that 'jumps around' in their field and in the view of your average HR/Hiring manager it makes them look unfocused. Most people in this world pick one thing and dig into it until they are in such a big hole that they can't see out. How many 'COBOL' programmers do you see that, once the market changed, could not pick up a different language and adapt.
Well, that was a lot more than I planned to say. Excuse the rambling, but hopefully it will give a little insight into what I've seen.