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Re: Sun's senior IT architect Victoria Livschitz aboutXML

• To: bob@w...
• Subject: Re: Sun's senior IT architect Victoria Livschitz aboutXML
• From: Bob Foster <bob@o...>
• Date: Sat, 14 Feb 2004 17:03:04 -0600
• Cc: rjm@z..., 'Dimitre Novatchev' <dnovatchev@y...>,xml-dev@l...
• In-reply-to: <001c01c3f347$c65e6b10$650aa8c0@BOBDEV>
• References: <001c01c3f347$c65e6b10$650aa8c0@BOBDEV>
• User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031007

Bob Wyman wrote:
 > Rick Marshall wrote:
 >>this interview seems to me to be simply a display of ignorance.
 >
 > 	I think you're being a bit harsh there. On the other hand, I
 > was a disappointed by the arrogance that she shows when she compares
 > programmers to mathematicians and says: "Programmers are "average"
 > folks; they have to be, since programming is a profession of millions
 > of people, many without college degrees. "

This opinion seems well-informed enough. The average programmer is a 
fairly average person in most respects, including intelligence and 
training. She is right, this must be so because the current technology 
requires too many programmers for it to all be done by exceptional people.

When people discuss movement of programming jobs from the West to the 
East, for example, they tend to emphasise the abilities of Eastern 
programmers, rather than accept the idea that many programming tasks 
aren't so difficult to begin with.

 > 	Well, I don't have a college degree and I've contributed one
 > heck of a lot more to the software business than tens of thousands of
 > Computer Science PhD's have. The same can be said of "average" college
 > drop-outs like Bill Gates, etc. Frankly, I have never found that the
 > possession of an advanced degree is a very useful measure of a
 > developer's skills or utility. If nothing else, the schools all seem
 > to focus their advanced students to the point where they often aren't
 > useful dealing with the broadly defined problem sets typical of the
 > real world.

I hear you that universities don't do a good job of training 
programmers, but it's no good railing against the arrogance of people 
with advanced degrees. After all, that is sort of the point.

Bob

 > 	Spending your life in school doesn't make you special. It's
 > what you do once you get out that counts.
 >
 > 		bob wyman

• References:
  • RE: Sun's senior IT architect Victoria Livschitz aboutXML
    • From: "Bob Wyman" <bob@w...>

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