The Underscore Archives

On Fri, Jun 20, 2008 at 12:35 PM, Stefan Goodchild
<underscore at stefangoodchild.com> wrote:
> Ahh well.. 15 years hard experience in IT counts for nothing these
> days as I didn't have the opportunity to go to college and uni all
> those years ago I guess...
>
> Me? Bitter?  Nonsense ;-)

Requiring a CS Degree for developers is a policy that my employer
adopted after I joined. Good job, else I wouldn't have got my job (I
did a BSc in Industrial Design).

The reasoning (which is sound unless it applies to you) was that
someone hiring for a position will see a lot of CVs; you need some
tool to cut through the haystack to find the needle you're looking
for. Yes, you might exclude some good candidates along the way, but it
increases the chance of finding a good candidate.

Now, I have no experience of a CS course, but if someone graduated
from one without at least *some* knowledge of the importance of
user-testing, usability, experience et al, along with Best Practice
stuff like source control, code reuse/DRY principles etc I'd be
questioning the quality of the course.

Tim