Training Software Engineers – Part 2 – The Importance of a Balanced Viewpoint

In this second post on how we go about training software engineers, I’ll be considering the point raised by a non-geek friend of mine once. “You computer guys seem to get so protective of the tools you use!” he exclaimed before going on to claim that the French car he drove was so much better than my solid VW! Taking a solid stance on technology use seems to be the norm now for technologists. We choose our platform, tools and so on, and will fight almost to the death to protect our use of them and will evangelise endlessly to any who’ll listen – and many who won’t – about why they’re so much better than those others may use.

Is this really an attitude we should be passing on to future generations of computer scientists?

At the risk of sounding like a grumpy old man (before my time I hasten to add!), my belief is that we’re better off training software engineers than creating Java programmers (or .Net programmers for that matter). It’s a belief which I appreciate is grounded in my own educational and commercial experiences, but a set of generic engineering techniques is a far more valuable resource for developing a worthwhile career in IT. They enable the recipient to more quickly grasp a wider range of concepts, without having to carry out additional mappings from a particular language they’ve been taught.

I know that students will always want to know when they can build an application, and that is an important aspect of any degree course, particularly if it can be carried out in the context of some group engineering exercise. But if we bow to the pressure to teach just programming, or worse still just the development of glitzy websites, we run the risk of losing a generation or two’s worth of computer science. Perhaps students need to be persuaded a little more of the value of understanding the historical context of the topics they’re studying, and spend a little less time hacking something together.

I fear that technology imbalance is a problem which is also exacerbated by the activities of recruitment agencies. I guess it’s partly down to the way in which the IT job market is now driven, but many of the agencies I’ve worked with seem to place far too much emphasis on keyword searches for ‘Java‘, ‘C#‘, ‘C++‘ and so on. I suppose when the market is so busy, as it seems to be now, and when face-to-face meetings are reserved for the select few, there’s no time for them to assess the wider merits of an applicant. I find it’s often the experiences described in a CV’s prosaic paragraphs which better communicate the real skills of an individual rather than some claim to have 5 years experience of SQL Server. Perhaps this points to a need to do more direct recruitment…