I don't entirely agree. It also matters whether or not some someone has done some meaningful internships. Next to that, there sometimes high potentials, who make it faster to a senior position.
Character and talent are two important keywords, IMHO.
As stated in Peopleware, after a (long) period of overwork, employees tend to underwork for quite a while. For each overworked hour there can be one or more underworked hours. Underwork means being present at your job, but not being much productive due to exhaustion or demotivation after quite some long days.
Most programmers that are really enthousisastic about programming have some protfolio they can show. In the game (entertainment) industry it's quite common you bring along your portfolio and show some demos of the things you've already accomplished.
I think a lot of 'good programmers' do progam for fun in their free time. So I think, most of them should be able to show a portfolio.
What will the next step be? Maybe: 'The medical world and Hollywood have agreed on developing a neural chip to get rid of all human memories with copyrighted information,...'
I started last October working after I got my master's degree in CS.
The only thing really learned during this study, is to learn quickly new programming languages, development methods, etc... No real substantial development experience. (all the team development we had, was pair programming!)
While the company I started working for has also some difficult times (yes, they also had sent home several people), they still hired me based on the ability to be useful for a project in a short period without having any experience in the project (field/programming languages/SE lifecycle).
I think it depends on the type of company you're applying, but there are several companies which find it very important to have flexible employees that can aquire new skills fastly and do not specially have to be specialists in the field.
Check Get With The Program at Gamespy.
Their short description:
Buggy Software is famed (or at least reasonably well-known) for their innovative, if somewhat weird and not overly succesful, entertainment titles like Multimedia Spreadsheet and SimAmoeba.
The team is forever struggling to make deadlines and keep within the budget. The employees are a weird bunch of incompetent, difficult, lazy and evil people. Not annoyed enough to leave but not motivated enough to care either.
Quite cool.
Daniel
As stated in the article, the submission of the winner will be used to improve natural language processing. I think this is **quite** a real world challenge.
IMHO it really doesn't matter that much what the first programming language is in a CS study, I think that one of the main goals of a good CS education is to learn how to use several languages based on different paradigms. Next to OO languages, functional (lisp, etc), logical (prolog and others) and parallel (modula 3) programming languages are as important.
Let's face it, a programming language is just a means to tackle a given problem.
Daniel. "To be is to be the value of a variable" -- W.V.O. Quine
Slashdot Mirror
I don't entirely agree. It also matters whether or not some someone has done some meaningful internships. Next to that, there sometimes high potentials, who make it faster to a senior position.
Character and talent are two important keywords, IMHO.
As stated in Peopleware, after a (long) period of overwork, employees tend to underwork for quite a while. For each overworked hour there can be one or more underworked hours.
Underwork means being present at your job, but not being much productive due to exhaustion or demotivation after quite some long days.
Most programmers that are really enthousisastic about programming have some protfolio they can show. In the game (entertainment) industry it's quite common you bring along your portfolio and show some demos of the things you've already accomplished.
I think a lot of 'good programmers' do progam for fun in their free time. So I think, most of them should be able to show a portfolio.
What will the next step be? Maybe: 'The medical world and Hollywood have agreed on developing a neural chip to get rid of all human memories with copyrighted information, ...'
Daniel.
I started last October working after I got my master's degree in CS.
The only thing really learned during this study, is to learn quickly new programming languages, development methods, etc... No real substantial development experience. (all the team development we had, was pair programming!)
While the company I started working for has also some difficult times (yes, they also had sent home several people), they still hired me based on the ability to be useful for a project in a short period without having any experience in the project (field/programming languages/SE lifecycle).
I think it depends on the type of company you're applying, but there are several companies which find it very important to have flexible employees that can aquire new skills fastly and do not specially have to be specialists in the field.
Daniel.
**Sigh**
Quoting Scott Adams: 'When Did Ignorance Become A Point Of View?'
Check Get With The Program at Gamespy.
Their short description:
Buggy Software is famed (or at least reasonably well-known) for their innovative, if somewhat weird and not overly succesful, entertainment titles like Multimedia Spreadsheet and SimAmoeba. The team is forever struggling to make deadlines and keep within the budget. The employees are a weird bunch of incompetent, difficult, lazy and evil people. Not annoyed enough to leave but not motivated enough to care either.
Quite cool. Daniel
As stated in the article, the submission of the winner will be used to improve natural language processing. I think this is **quite** a real world challenge.
Daniel.
That's nice! You will be able to find out on the net how much delay your flight is having 8-)
Daniel
"To be is to be the value of a variable" -- W.V.O. Quine
IMHO it really doesn't matter that much what the first programming language is in a CS study, I think that one of the main goals of a good CS education is to learn how to use several languages based on different paradigms. Next to OO languages, functional (lisp, etc), logical (prolog and others) and parallel (modula 3) programming languages are as important. Let's face it, a programming language is just a means to tackle a given problem. Daniel.
"To be is to be the value of a variable" -- W.V.O. Quine