Re: Industry versus academia

[Daniel Weinreb <address@hidden>]

Sundar Narasimhan wrote:

>In summary, why do you all believe that the average programmer is
>dumb, and does not want to learn new things? 
>
I, for one, am not saying that they are "dumb", but there are different 
tiers of people out
there who have different levels of skills and skill sets.  There isn't 
just one kind of "average
programmer".  There are different kinds of people who have different 
capabilities.  I
would just love to say that every single programmer out there knows as 
much as the
top-rank MIT graduates who I used to hang out with, but all industry 
experience tells
me that it's just not true.  Real live customers, such as major 
financial companies,
have a real problem that really hurts them: too much of the software 
work that they
want done requires too high a level of skill sets.  They cannot get 
applications written
fast enough because they cannot find or cannot afford the kind of 
wizards needed to
write such applications.  They need to get things set up so that they 
don't need so
many wizards.  Please note that someone who is less than a wizard does not
deserve to be called "dumb"; there's plenty of room for being quite 
intelligent
without being a system programming wizard.