Re: Industry versus academia

[Sundar Narasimhan <address@hidden>]

   >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.  

Well.. when you water it down to be non-controversial that statement
becomes almost content-free.. for me at least. Replace programmer w/
"plumber" and read that again -- why is that interesting? It's just a
fact of life that we are all not the same. What else is new?

As to application development problems.. to switch topics..
what do you think of business models a-la www.virtusa.com?  

My suggestion is that once BEA or IBM (websphere) acquires technology
such as Ilog's JRules (you can buy me a beer for suggesting that :)
and bundles it for < 400$ (or price for .Net CD's :) my view is that
such end-user problems will disappear and the entire SI & custom
app. market can and will cannibalize itself.

   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.