Too true. Let's face it, there's just some things in life where you have to get your nose tweaked to learn.
Hrm... reminds me where's my copy of K&R and Knuth books.
Hehe and here I was thinking nobody remembered Lisp.
While I think VB is suitable for teaching some concepts I don't think it serves as an all around tool for educational purposes. Like quite a few other posts here, I think you need to see a breadth of programming languages to understand how the concepts gel together and where there's commonality and change.
When I started out it was:
Pascal -> C -> C++/Java, MAL (MIPS Assemb), Lisp, VC++/VC#
They've all got pros and cons, and while I may never program in C for the rest of my days, it was a great learning experience, i'd say the same for learning MIPS assembler.
There seems to be this experience gap which few people are able to bridge these days. Everyone wants a person that's a subject matter expert in Windows, Linux, SQL, network security, name your focus area. But most of the time you have people that are at the bottom of the experience ladder eager to learn and apply their skills or folks who are tenured and expect higher pay for their years of experience.
I agree with several other posts earlier. IT is sadly one of those industries where a resume is often useless in helping to weed out the can-do people over the fluff. Quite ofen it boils down to throwing a scenario at somebody and seeing if all they know is book-smarts or they have a strong troubleshooting process to begin with.
While on the surface this looks like something plausible there's a catch 22.
Yes you have to allocate $10/hr for the outsourced programmer, but does your end client also want to pay you the programmer for the potential increase in manhours YOU have to do just to coordinate w/the other side.
Factor in, meetings, conference calls, QA etc and the savings benefits can sometimes be outweighed by productivity loss. The most frequent example of outsourcing, besides coding is Helpdesk. Where if you look at customer feedback just keeps getting worse. It takes longer for the lower-cost employee to field a call due to things like cultural/linguistic/timezones which results in irrate customers and potential loss of business.
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Too true. Let's face it, there's just some things in life where you have to get your nose tweaked to learn. Hrm... reminds me where's my copy of K&R and Knuth books.
While I think VB is suitable for teaching some concepts I don't think it serves as an all around tool for educational purposes. Like quite a few other posts here, I think you need to see a breadth of programming languages to understand how the concepts gel together and where there's commonality and change.
When I started out it was:
Pascal -> C -> C++/Java, MAL (MIPS Assemb), Lisp, VC++/VC#
They've all got pros and cons, and while I may never program in C for the rest of my days, it was a great learning experience, i'd say the same for learning MIPS assembler.
There seems to be this experience gap which few people are able to bridge these days. Everyone wants a person that's a subject matter expert in Windows, Linux, SQL, network security, name your focus area. But most of the time you have people that are at the bottom of the experience ladder eager to learn and apply their skills or folks who are tenured and expect higher pay for their years of experience.
I agree with several other posts earlier. IT is sadly one of those industries where a resume is often useless in helping to weed out the can-do people over the fluff. Quite ofen it boils down to throwing a scenario at somebody and seeing if all they know is book-smarts or they have a strong troubleshooting process to begin with.
Yes you have to allocate $10/hr for the outsourced programmer, but does your end client also want to pay you the programmer for the potential increase in manhours YOU have to do just to coordinate w/the other side.
Factor in, meetings, conference calls, QA etc and the savings benefits can sometimes be outweighed by productivity loss. The most frequent example of outsourcing, besides coding is Helpdesk. Where if you look at customer feedback just keeps getting worse. It takes longer for the lower-cost employee to field a call due to things like cultural/linguistic/timezones which results in irrate customers and potential loss of business.
There's always a catch22 somewhere. Just my $.02