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

Not good for a recession

[mnmn]

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.

Re:It's the people

[Milican]

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

College versus not

[0x0d0a]

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...