Universities these days...

[NathanE]

Interviewed a young chap last week and started showing him around the source tree of our main project. Somehow the subject of Microsoft came up and he was instantly into his "oh not Microsoft! badly designed products.. yada yada" prose.

Despite this he was an avid .NET developer...

Go figure.

 

[Una]

So? .NET and CLR is one of the better Microsoft technologies out there.. From a technical point of view they copied java and improved on some areas Java lacked in at the time. Does not mean he needs to like the rest of ms's stuff. Perhaps he is a Mono advocate anyway...

 

[NathanE]

A Mono advocate with WinForms and Visual Studio on his CV?

Nah...

Not saying there was anything wrong with the chap (we hired him). Just don't like the fact Uni's seem to be conditioning these people into irrational hatred towards Microsoft.

I realise everyone has their, albeit slightly "religious", point of view on these matters (and that was my response to him) but it just seems to me that these people are being taught to think like this without any real substance for their reasonings.

 

[dave-lew99]

Just don't like the fact Uni's seem to be conditioning these people into irrational hatred towards Microsoft.

Not my Uni....they love MS, you're not allowed to use anything else - which i also don't agree with.

I think you should use what's best for the job - taking into account, learning curve, previous knowledge, cost, etc (basically TCO), MS it not good for everything - likewise linux is not good for everything either!

The importance is knowing the areas where a product isn't as good as another - CodeGear RAD Studio (C++) for example doesn't particularly like interfacing with DirectX - it can be done, but its just a bit more hassle than it would have been in MSVC++. So the conclusion there is, if you're doing lots of DirectX work, you're probably better off with MSVC++ - even though i find CodeGear C++ far easier and cleaner to work with most of the time.

 

[Una]

Not saying there was anything wrong with the chap (we hired him). Just don't like the fact Uni's seem to be conditioning these people into irrational hatred towards Microsoft.

I realise everyone has their, albeit slightly "religious", point of view on these matters (and that was my response to him) but it just seems to me that these people are being taught to think like this without any real substance for their reasonings.

Hmm yeah perhaps. I would have always thought that was the case though? The profs tend to be old school unix hackers and often very leftist/(anti-capitalist?) (they work in a uni after all ) Obviously conditioning people to have an irrational hatred of MS is bad. However, teaching microsoft technologies would be even worse... Main problem I see is the opposite that people think MS technologies are the be all end all.. When most of the "interesting" (in my opinion) programming is not application development so your languages like C#/VB etc fall flat. My first real programming job entailed coding for lots of weird platforms

The important thing is obviously knowing which areas certain tech is strong in and which areas are lacking.

My uni seriously pushed Java as the main programming language, so much so that they dropped the C programming module for a year only to realise how relevant it still is

 

[Pulseammo]

I didn't get the feeling that any of the lecturers at my uni (ok, apart from the odd few) really bashed MS (and when I say MS here it might as well be any sort of closed source style company), it seemed that most just seemed to advocate the use of OSS (i.e. the closed source style tools just didn't seem to get mentioned much), prolly somehow links in with "education should be free to all" or something. At the end of the day we could do our projects in whatever we wanted, java was pushed heavily here as well though.

In the end I think the most important stuff is stuff like design patterns and theory because that sort of stuff is at least transferable (seemed to be a focus on that as well at my uni). Obviously it's handy to know your way around the tools and APIs of a language to be decently productive as well though. As for an interview, I think that "programming politics" (er actually politics in general ;P) is definitely not a good subject to go into unless you are absolutely opposed to something (so wouldn't take the job anyway).

 

[NathanE]

Agreed I didn't want to get into programming politics so pretty much nullified that conversation from ever beginning.

Another thing was design patterns... he didn't know what they were. Then in disbelief I threw him a few examples of some and then he knew what they were... So clearly there seems to be uni's out there that aren't using the industry standard term "design pattern".

 

[Beansprout]

My uni (admittedly I don't do much programming though) seems to be fairly neutral/sensible - all the PCs dual-boot Windows/Linux, we got taught Java and C but folk on another course got a chance to do .NET, etc. Maybe I just haven't run into the hippy professors

 

[kkbigal]

My uni is faily neutral overall - it teaches use of Unix/Linux, Python and .NET, but the operating system module actually focuses 100% on Unix because they want to show students an alternative to Windows.

There are still lecturers that drop sly digs at MS during sessions though

 

[philjohn]

I remember one lecturer saying he wanted to sue Microsoft for including an easter egg in Excel. He tried to justify it by saying it was untested software that could do anything to his computer - and if he'd been a higher-up in Microsoft at the time he would have sacked anyone with knowledge of it.

 

[kkbigal]

I remember one lecturer saying he wanted to sue Microsoft for including an easter egg in Excel. He tried to justify it by saying it was untested software that could do anything to his computer - and if he'd been a higher-up in Microsoft at the time he would have sacked anyone with knowledge of it.

This isn't the funny 3D thing in Excel 97 is it?

 

[Shoseki]

Just don't like the fact Uni's seem to be conditioning these people into irrational hatred towards Microsoft..

a) Students don't have any money, therefore prefer OSS (unless they just pirate).
b) Universities don't have any money, therefore prefer OSS (unless they waste money on individual licences for individual rooms e.g. media editing room).
c) *Some* open source software (and some of its' techniques) are light years ahead of its' closed cousin, yet because of things like poor interface / support, ends up in the trash despite its true value. A large number of open source projects are developed to be buildable on any operating system with a build system, so Firefox can be run on linux/Mac OS X/Windows without significant re-writes. These are the sorts of development techniques that Microsoft has no clue about and need to be drummed into students. True open source advocates don't really care about the companies involved, just the projects themselves, and give kudos to those who contribute. The biggest problem with business-developed software from an academic point of view is that the business model > *, which means that often, anti-features trump technical excellence, and this is not something that actually benefits either the software development community or society in general.

All that you ever get from business is sales information - true technical documentation is very difficicult to disseminate from sales banter.

 

[mattgaunt]

I think the reason anti-MS stuff in uni's isn't because the uni itself digs at MS, I think its because students realise the alternatives when they come to uni, I never heard of linux till I got to uni installed without any help or suggestions from the uni and love it and use it over MS for pretty much everything.

I disagree that price is an issue, MS want the next set of students to walk into a job and recommend there software so MS logically would offer some reduced rate for education - second of all as a student studying computer science I have been given a free copy of XP prof. vista and recent windows server 2003.

I think the only time lecturers will dig at MS is when there was some fatal floor in MS that realistically shouldn't of been in existence if good programming practices were implemented - but if there was a floor in linux would anyone here about it?? Its all to do with MS having its name out there soo much that one scrap of news becomes a big story.

The uni itself doesn't care how u do your work, as long as u do it since everyone has their own preferences.

 

[fez]

Are you sure that it was the university that turned him anti microsoft. I think that a good percentage of people out there are anti-microsoft without any sort of persuasion. Are you sure that it was the universities influence. Im not that keen on microsoft but program in .NET; I personally think that apple have it easy when they are making software. This is the hardware its going to run on, optimise it for that and code it for that and dont worry about anything else.

MS have to worry about every technically retarded individual using their software with a billion potential combinations of hardware and people complaining at them when someone buys vista and their soundcard doesnt work with it. Its not the lack of support from the soundcard manufacturer, its MS problem for writing a "rubbish" OS.

I usually take peoples oppinions with a pinch of salt as often they are ill informed or just heard their oppinion through a friend.