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Same here in South Africa. Though we have Universities for the "degrees" and Technical Colleges (abr. Technicon) for vocational qualifications (i.e. Diploma instead of Degree). Or at least that's how it used to be (when I was at uni) until someone thought it sounded not too Politically Correct and now you can get your B.Comm / B.Sc / B.Funny at a tech as well ... 
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The degrees you get at SA Technicons are technical degrees, so it would be a Technical B Com or B Com Tech or some such, I'm not sure about the terminology. Also, they take an additional year or two. So after three years you get your Diploma, and then with an additional year of study you get a B Tech degree. Another two years and you might get your M Tech.
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I stand corrected! Thanks.
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Pleasure 
I only know this because I worked at Tshwane University of Technology (TUT) for a few years doing embedded C coding (I have no tertiary qualification whatsoever).
TUT Engineering Dept had an initiative where they provided office space and students to help small businesses develop products. Ostensibly this provided the small businesses with almost-free labour, and gave the students practical experience. Problem was students were only available for 6-month stretches and didn't have skin in the game.
So the engineer "employeed" me with bursary money to fix their code (a paltry sum but wonderful experience).
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"University is where adults go "
ROFL! 
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Well that took a lot longer than expected.
What is the correct term for those who are no longer legally children but not yet able to act like adults. Twats perhaps?
Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them.
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chriselst wrote: What is the correct term for those who are no longer legally children but not yet able to act like adults.
While at uni my father used to tease me, saying: "A student is the lowest form of animal life."
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RyanDev wrote: where you are at?
At my college/university we were taught to not end a sentence with 'at'. Oops, just did it.
(sorry Dude, couldn't resist)
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Gary Huck wrote: (sorry Dude, couldn't resist)
No problem. I get busted by the grammar police all the times. 
There are only 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
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Veni, vidi, vici.
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8 years in college? I don't think he's a PhD, so even assuming he's got a Masters (4 and then 2 years for 6 years total), given how he took an extra 2 years to complete that, no surprises there I would say.
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Not everyone should be a programmer.
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Ennis Ray Lynch, Jr. wrote: Not everyone should be a programmer.
So true and yet so difficult to convince those who shouldn't be that they shouldn't be.
I've worked with at least one terrible programmer -- who did not even understand the basic concept of function calls, so he had thousands of lines of same, slightly altered, for loop peppered through a program which had the same bug throughout. He could not be convinced of his powers of terribleness and could not be deterred from writing more bad code.
Blithely they roll on.
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I was a warehouse person at a company. My job was to receive inventory, stock inventory, ship inventory, etc. I managed to hit myself in the head with a steel rod and get a knot large enough to almost consider a hospital visit. Many questions were asked,
"Are you Ok"
"Do you need to go to the doctor"
"Why was there a steel rod in your hand"
"How come we heard light-saber noises before your injury"
etc.
Bottom-line, warehouse work is not for me. I don't have the capacity for it. I know that, it is my limit. Others should learn theirs as well.
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Amen. Can't wait for this "everyone should code" phase to die.
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I liked the first reply to this article.
"I stopped reading half way though this because the article has nothing to do with entrepreneurship or college. This is a long rant about somebody who lived a sheltered life and got hit hard when they came to the "real world"."
/ravi
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Oh MAN I wish I could follow that boy's life when he leaves school
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Of course, I went to London University, which meant going to a college and, after three years, being able to use BSc(Eng)(Lond) after my name.
I studied Aeronautics at the world's first Aeronautics faculty at QMC.
We 'ad it 'ard.
We had about three lectures on computing and were expected to pick up how to use the card batch system on our ICL 1904 mainframe for Fortran 4 programmes which solved equations - Runge-Kutta, Newtonian or plain algebra - and that was it.
In my final year I chose a full year project, simulating Harriers in full 6 DOF, still in Fortran 4.
By the time I did my first Masters (Cranfield, 1 year), the die was cast and I was hooked on engineering programming.
Nice work if you can get it, but while my degrees gave me general engineering sense and domain knowledge, programming was self-taught.
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Simon O'Riordan from UK wrote: my degrees gave me general engineering sense and domain knowledge
Yeah, to bad most people forget this general knowledge after the exams (and I must confess I too work like that).
I'm not saying University is completely worthless, but you have to do the work yourself, as you said.
It's an OO world.
public class SanderRossel : Lazy<Person>
{
public void DoWork()
{
throw new NotSupportedException();
}
}
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This is very troubling. A friend's son recently took an intro Python class at a private college. He was stuck so I worked with him for about 15 minutes. He said, "I get it. The professor never explained it that way. All he does is open up the IDE, type lines of code and says, 'you just do this'". Ugh. The boy ended up hating Python and programming because of the difficulties he had in this intro course. Too bad.
Way to kill the inspiration there, Professor.
No wonder IT is in the state it is in.
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I think the problem with IT is that it's changing very fast and schools can't keep up. Writing new material every year is expensive.
The teachers probably don't feel like keeping up either, they already have a full time job teaching the old.
I think a lot of professors now were taught in the 80's and that's what they know.
Next to that they're teaching a generation that grew up with computers, while they first used a computer when they were already in their twenties.
And the good IT people can get high salary jobs at big companies, they are not the ones teaching...
It's an OO world.
public class SanderRossel : Lazy<Person>
{
public void DoWork()
{
throw new NotSupportedException();
}
}
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Sander Rossel wrote: I lost the little bit of faith I had in our schooling system
I can relate.
In high school we taught ourselves how to program. None of the teachers knew how, but we had access to a timesharing system. In our senior year they added a programming class taught by a business teacher who had been teaching programming without access to a computer. We ended up debugging his programs for him.
I went a slightly different route, I got a job as a computer operator at a university and then started taking classes in computer science.
To say I was appalled, is an understatement. They were teaching blatantly bad programming methods. Projects were marked done/not done, with the majority of your grade coming from rote memorization of code fragments.
One class, taught by reputedly the hottest professors on campus (I was told I was lucky to get them and the proper methods to bow and scrape to them by others), but one test was composed by one professor and desk checked by the other, before they inserted 5 bugs for us to discover. Neither one of these a-holes bothered to type the original program in to see if it worked. On the test I found 8 bugs, the class as a whole found 11.
Another class, in Assembler, was taught by the TA, I think we only saw the professor once. The TA had us doing Macros two weeks into the class. I already knew Assembler from the timesharing system in high school, so I took to it like a duck to water. The rest of the class didn't have a clue as to the difference between compile time and run time and wondered why their macros weren't running at run time.
I have lots more, but it really bothered me that some of my classmates were going to get degrees and have no clue as to how to program in the real world.
I came away feeling I was merely paying someone to give me a piece of paper to verify what I already knew.
Psychosis at 10
Film at 11
Those who do not remember the past, are doomed to repeat it.
Those who do not remember the past, cannot build upon it.
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BrainiacV wrote: with the majority of your grade coming from rote memorization of code fragments.
That's how it is. You have to memorize for the exam and can forget after that...
BrainiacV wrote: I have lots more, but it really bothered me that some of my classmates were going to get degrees and have no clue as to how to program in the real world.
And some of them get away with it in real life too... 
BrainiacV wrote: I came away feeling I was merely paying someone to give me a piece of paper to verify what I already knew.
Yep, and that piece of paper is worth a lot too. I'm not sure for how long though, because I've been hearing a lot of negative stuff on education lately...
I currently study IT at the Open University. They're not too bad. At least you get to do a lot yourself.
It's an OO world.
public class SanderRossel : Lazy<Person>
{
public void DoWork()
{
throw new NotSupportedException();
}
}
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I hope the article is exaggerating a bit, but I agree with the general statement. After 4 years of writing arrays and data structures and OS fundamentals I got out of school and landed a VB.Net job as a contractor on a team of 1 to build a web app. I had never written in .Net or any decent OO language (VB6 doesn't count). Most of our C++ in college was all functional recursive stuff. I had a ton of concepts to learn, an IDE to understand, deployment to think about, SOLID principles, etc. A friend of mine did a vocational school instead and hit the ground running when he finished. 10 years later we've both ended up as strong technologists but I would have had a much easier go had I learned things applicable upside of academia. I think the only thing I learned from my 4 year BS degree (no pun intended) that I haven't relearned is what O(n) means.
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