re: #363 Walter L. Newton

That seems to be what is going on in a lot of places. Companies are hunkering down to ride things out and have cut back in functions like IT to bare minimums.

By the way, I generally occur with your opinion about what a degree is worth in IT work. I think that the importance is that the programmer/analyst understands the methodologies and logic needed to solve the issues - and beyond that it mainly is experience with having seen problems and carried out the solutions previously. Beyond a few design issues all that might change is syntax (e.g. coding a solution in any 3GL will be the same beyond one language possibly having a “trick” or two another doesn’t.*)

My take is that an IT degree means something up until 1-2 years of experience. After that point it’s what you’ve learned to implement and how well you adapt to changing challenges.**

* - In my “youth” I once coded a recursive function in COBOL. That produced a very interesting crash. That’s what you get for being taught Pascal initially in school (where recursion will work.)

** - I also saw an interesting split between IT employees based on where/how they were schooled. Pitt and CMU produced a sort of “technical” IT programmer - very good on the methodology and logic, not that experienced with the business issues - which produced communications issues at times. Duquesne and Robert Morris had a duel business/comp sci program that produced “business” programmers. Since they had the accounting and business classes they understood issues and communicated with the end-users well. On the flip-side they were not as saavy on the technical side, at least initially. Mix them and you did get some good teams though.