in a previous thread it has been claimed that sales of new and improved tools for professional software developers is a hard job because their companies either run things so well that conceivable improvements would be minimal or else they don’t give a damn about the process at all.
Ok, fine. So let’s consider a group of potential buyers of programming related tools that are known to have (some) money to spend, totally suck at the software development process and sincerely care about getting it done well enough to get at least a B while still getting some sleep and preserving sanity to boot. Let’s consider high school and college students in affluent countries taking intro programming.
So does anybody know how many people per year take intro programming in the countries known for paying money for software tools?
Sorry but all I have is an oblique anecdote. I used to do on-campus recruiting of engineers for my company, giving short interviews to perhaps 10 or 15 near-grads and selecting some for further interviews. The last time I asked what programming abilities they had, only one said they could program in any language, and this was because he had taken a course in programming. When I asked whether he had ever done any programming outside of that course, he said no. This was probably about 6 years ago.
That’s why, in the software development team I work for, we don’t hire CS majors, but rather math and physics majors that needed to program for their studies. (I was a physics major who for my Ph.D. did computational studies of certain kinds of atomic structures, for example.) The company wants to know that we can write programs that solve real problems.
I suppose you’d have to define “Intro programming” a little better. There’s “intro programming” for non-technology majors, and then there are the serious courses for technology majors.
I’d say that most college students probably end up taking one of the intro courses, but a fairly small number end up taking the technology major courses (basically all of the technology majors).
I’m not sure I understand this response. Are you saying it’s your experience that CS grads have all gone through a program that’s overly theoretical and can’t write code?
No, I wouldn’t personally say that, though on the other hand my manager has sometimes hinted that she feels that way. What I do know is that our most successful programmers, the ones that have consistently provided software solutions the company needs, were not CS grads, but were math or physics grads who also had strong programming backgrounds.
ETA: Of course, it depends what kind of software we’re talking about. Our group deals with complicated navigation system software.
bump, could you please clarify what would that course taken by non-technology majors entail, that you think that “most” students would take, entail? I myself never thought that majority of liberal arts, social sciences etc fuzzy majors took any programming whatsoever.
If I were working as a sociologist trying to answer this question through systematic polling or through analysis of course catalogs and enrollment info, presumably I would have tried classifying courses using a checklist containing questions like “is iterating through array covered?”, “is function decomposition covered?”, “does the final project typically contain more than 3000 lines of code?” etc. In practice, presumably nobody here did such research, but whatever data points we can get from people would be most appreciated.
Well, at Texas A&M back in the early-mid 1990s, the course was CPSC207, and it was titled something like “Introduction to Programming and Computer Concepts.” I had friends who were psychology majors who took it because they had to.
As best as I could tell, they taught Pascal, and got up to about pointers/linked lists. My buddy’s final semester project was to make a really simple linked list, and add nodes, delete nodes and rearrange nodes.