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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?
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.
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.
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)
Have to disagree with you here, as both a blacksmith and "one of today's kids".
Anvils are typically purchased, because "blacksmith" doesn't equate to "foundry".
Many kids today are just as, if not *more*, motivated to ask questions than the "older generation". This includes asking "how can I do something my IDE doesn't support".
Extra info on the blacksmith bit: most blacksmith shops are designed around the idea of forging metals, not smelting them. This is part of why a blacksmith's anvil was and is one of their most prized possessions...it used to be nearly irreplaceable. Current technology has made cheap anvils fairly available, but you can't just buy a 300 pound anvil at your local Home Depot.
The process of creating an anvil is one of the few things that you can't do with traditional blacksmith tools. If you have an anvil and a single hammer, all of your other tools can be made from bits of metal or bar/rod stock. Punches, tongs, other hammers...even the forge itself can be made by hand. But the anvil has to be a solid piece of metal, and the only way to do that is with a shop designed specifically for anvil making, or with modern metal casting equipment.
Moving on from the anvil bit to the "kids these days, gerrof mah lawn" bit...I would hazard that the typical distribution of interests has migrated outward in the bell curve. Technology today makes it easy for an unmotivated child to spend the majority of their day immersed in facebook/instagram/pinterest/twitter/etc. But it also makes it much easier for a motivated child to find knowledge.
An example from my personal experiences: I ran Minecraft servers for about 3 years, and had one of the more successful modded servers online in early to mid 2014. A lot of the players were in the 8-18 years old range. And quite a lot of them were interested in figuring out and using interesting game mechanics to their advantage. We're talking about kids in their early teens learning digital logic so that they can build a piston based elevator with floor selection buttons. I know more teenagers who have a solid grasp of programming decision logic because of ComputerCraft than I do professional programmers who learned via a 4 year computer science school.
Obviously, it's just my own personal experience. But I was one of the kids who started out with an IDE scratching out HTML, and now I'm a linux system administrator with four or so languages under my belt.
Bits of code, random ramblings: jakimfett.com