Don't believe everything you think.
I'm glad that I didn't get a 2-year degree to learn a certain technical skill in order to serve the short-term interests of an employer at the expense of my own long-term interests. Plus, I went to a university to get a liberal education as well as a marketable skill.
Maybe companies that claim that nobody stays at a job very long any more are creating cultures that make that prediction into a self-fulfilling prophesy. Often, their attitudes come across as thinly-veiled contempt for their employees. I mean, you talked about hiring 50 programmers... what's your turnover like? Is your code base as disposable as your coders seem to be?
We should be hiring a programmer right now where I work. All I know is that they better be able to demonstrate some serious problem-solving skills because technologies change and being familiar with our development system is only going to get them 5% of the way. They can be two-year, self-taught, or university trained, but they've got to be able to add to and maintain a huge, complicated code base (and, at some point, help completely rewrite it in a different platform that hasn't been invented yet.) We'd expect that the person could pick up any new language in short order - just like our current programmers have done.
Not sure if you meant to reply to me or to Tailg8r but for the record I stepped off the treadmill nearly two years ago now. I’m not hiring anybody. I deleted my LinkedIn account. That was a freeing event!
In any case in a subsequent post Tailg8r briefly described an organization that in the face of it seems to value its human capital. So perhaps those 50 acquisitions are still there?
He was also expressing lament regarding the NDSU CS product and its sub-optimal fit for current business requirements. Makes me wonder how many of their undergrads are being placed and into what environments.
Don't believe everything you think.
Really? Would you say that any or all of those senior engineers are/were good at managing others expectations? At managing up? At communicating to business leaders and/or external partners? All of these things are what I would classify as political skills. They certainly are not technical skills.
Many thousands are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts, sir."
Scrooge-"Are there no prisons?". "Plenty of prisons..."
Scrooge-"And the Union workhouses." . "Are they still in operation?". "Both very busy, sir..."
"Those who are badly off must go there."
"Many can't go there; and many would rather die."
Scrooge- "If they would rather die," "they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population."
Row the Boat! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjFvcVZOCV0
So...what I've gotten out of this is that NDSU is trying to teach the theory behind this stuff so that these grads can continue to be valuable after changes in the industry wipe out technical stuff like languages?
Also good, fast, cheap.
I used to think I had a big dick putting a CD into the computer and hitting install.
College of Business Alumnus