[CottonBall]

I feel that, actually, the technical majors have been dumbed down for some time as well. I know I’m going to come off as an old fogie, but I got a degree in Math in 1974, went to grad school, then got a job as a computer programmer. Back then, most of the programmers were math/physics/engineering majors who had learned and/or developed their logical thought processes in their majors, then went on to learn a language in which to implement them.

You make perfect sense (nothing old fogie-ish!). You have to know what you are programming and what is needed before even implementing the coding part of the project.

When I was hiring programmers a few years ago, I was hard pressed to find anyone who knew more than the computer language itself. There was a depth of education that is lacking now, IMHO.

That explains why the naval base I worked on as a civilian overwhelmingly hired engineers for its avionics programming. I've heard a supervisor or two say it was easier to hire someone who knew the mechanics and teach them to program than to hire someone who can program and teach them the engineering. Of course, these days most engineers will graduate already knowing several programming languages. I graduated in '83 and we were doing some fortran programming in my senior classes (my freshman year was spent using punch cards on an IBM mainframe! Thing advanced pretty quickly in those 4 years). Anyway, I think I worked with one computer programmer in my 16 years there and probably hundreds of engineers and tens of mathematicians and physicists. One philosophy major turned programmer - interesting fella! He was the token liberal and we put him on the left side of the trailer....

[MtnClimber]

My company has resorted to hiring computer security (Information Assurance) engineers who have history and psychology degrees. Ever try to get something done while working with totally incapable people?

[tstarr]

Funny - I did my masters thesis and had to punch a full box (2000 cards) of data. Fairly straightforward program, but lots of data. When I found out I could read that into a data file and read that instead of feeding the box of cards every time, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven! :-)

Actually, some of the best programmers I’ve worked with have had “odd” majors like music and philosophy. Go figure... Music I can kind of understand, but philosophy surprised me a bit. I guess it was the logic part of philosophy.