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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?
Random updates (downgrades) to the UI don't get you more readers (or clicks).
You mean like grinding my life away on SolidWorks?
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.
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.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
>A diploma is worthless if you can't think for yourself, but this isn't something that can be taught, apparently.
See: Philosophy
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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, ...
Visual Studio is free for students, OSS contributors, and small teams. It's only larger enterprises that have to pay for it.
Visual Studio Code is free and cross-platform, runs great on Linux (and mac), and is a pretty handy tool for working in node.js and other languages.
(disclaimer: I work in the Visual Studio team)
If the students actually care about what they're learning
They don't.
unless they are blithering idiots
They are.
they'll use their critical thinking
They have none
go learn what extra they may need all by themselves.
They won't.
Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.
To get away from the Slashdot front page.
BlameBillCosby.com
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!