College vs. Industry

Over at InfoQ they have a stimulating article "Crossing the Software Education Chasm" reviewing another ACM article of the same name.  A good article about how to better prepare college students for the "real world".  I've had some thoughts of my own from my own experience at San Jose State University (SJSU) in the Computer Science department.

Image by Clay Bennett

I'm not sure about education in general, but at SJSU we were consistently put into teams and consistently not even TOLD about code versioning software.  I was unfamiliar with even the CONCEPT yet alone the practice of even CVS until my Senior year.  Furthermore, testing was not emphasized at all (a point made in the ACM article) but at least writing was.  (Yes, you can blame or thank SJSU for this blog, indirectly).  The most important lession was not a formal class at all.

I used to think that college was the hugest, worst bureaucracy I would ever encounter.

Then I got a real job.