The Tools Don't Get You the Job

An anonymous reader writes: It's a trend that seems to permeate education across every discipline, from creative to technical: reliance on a single expensive, proprietary, vendor-driven tool. Whether it's the predominance of Adobe in design programs, of Visual Studio in many computer science programs, or even Microsoft Office components in business schools, too often students come away with education that teaches them how to be rote users of a tool rather than critical thinkers who can apply skills in their discipline across toolsets. Relying on knowledge of a single tool chain can create single point of failure for a student's education when licensing comes back to bite. What can we do to bring more software choice into education to give students more opportunity when they get out into the real world?

Comments

In other news

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

Random updates (downgrades) to the UI don't get you more readers (or clicks).

No, not so much

[Lunix Nutcase]

The Tools Don't Get You the Job

Well except for when the company hiring for the job only uses a certain set of tools and actually wants you to have experience in them, right? Because that is hardly an exceptional case.

Re:No, not so much

[phishybongwaters]

You missed the point. It's not about the tool specifically, of course you need to skill yourself in whatever applications your field is going to use. But if you are merely becoming a pro at using that 1 tool you are likely not thinking past how to use that tool. Want an example? Web hosting. So you are a wiz at dreamweaver or whatever other crapware people use to make template webpages these days, great for you. What happens when the company that hires you expects you to actually UNDERSTAND HTML and PHP and AJAX and JAVASCRIPT? You fail miserably as you don't actually have web hosting skills, you have point and click dreamweaver skills. This is a horrible example, but it's kind of to the point. For the coders: You use node.js? Fantastic, good for you, but do you actually understand what it's doing for you? Could you code those functions yourself? Can you look at them and at least make sense of 50% of it? If the answer is no, you don't know how to code javascript, you know how to use libraries.

The tool DOES get you the job

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Because HR Drones don't understand software, I am finding that quite often the tool DOES get you the job, and consequently, it's incredibly hard to break out of either the LAMP or Microsoft Silos when designing software. Sure, for a particular industrial robot, FORTH may be a better language, or for certain expert systems, LISP machines work well, but when doing such a project in the real world, there are only a few real choices- C#, C++, Java, or Python is all anybody cares about.

So make sure your students are exposed to a wide variety- but make sure they're EXPERTS in learning new frameworks and learning new syntax.

Blacksmiths

[Darinbob]

A blacksmith will typically create an anvil for personal use, rather than buying one. It's a part of the process of becoming a real blacksmith. It's not unique here, many craftsmen make or customize their own tools. I see hardware engineers doing this a lot as well, jurying rigging up some device to help them out.

This used to be true with programming too, there weren't many tools so you had to write your own or modify someone else's (and you shared them with others). If a new type of computer came out you would port the tools are maybe even write some from scratch. Today the kids can't even begin to imagine this: if there's not a button on their IDE's to do what they want then they don't do it, they don't bother learning a scripting or shell languages to do what they need. I mean it's a frigging computer, the whole point of it is to be able to program it to do what you want it to do!