However, midwives are a special case of nurse and I’m not sure how well my argument translates to generic doctor vs. generic nurse, which is what you originally said.

I guess what I’m thinking is that nurses and doctors don’t substitute for each other and neither do CS geeks and smooth IT product managers. Since Joel was talking about CS geeks, I’m not sure where I’m going with this. But it’s been interesting talking about it. I’m sure it’s a topic I’ll return to often, because I want to know how computer science and related fields should be taught in a way to attract and retain those people who have an important contribution to make to the field.

Surely on a practical level much of software development is just trial & error. But you must possess a general sense of how to go about solving problems when you get to the trial and error part. That doesn’t always come from a quick course in Java or whatever.

Of course, there’s software development and then there’s software development. Your original post was about “jobs having to do with computing”, and that’s casting a pretty big net. I guess for 75% of the “development situations” out there don’t really call for anything very in-depth, while probably *more* than 75% call for a good ability to sit through a meeting or communicate with your boss about your progress.

I still think the doctor comparison I made before works, though. Having a baby doesn’t really qualify as a *medical* event in my mind. People have been doing that quite successfully without “trained” (or even any) help for a while now. However, something that requires a legitimate scholastic background (say developing a course of radiation treatment, or doing a hip replacement, or removing a gall bladder) is different, methinks. I’d rather not have my midwife perform any of those things, no matter how good her bedside manner is.

Yeah, I don’t see how anyone could be a real computer scientist or programmer and not get recursion. I mean, how are you going to deal with any sort of tree structure if you don’t get recursion? And how can you not get it, anyway? It’s just not that hard.

I never thought pointers were hard either, and if someone can’t get them, well, maybe they shouldn’t be on the tech end of computing. On the other hand, maybe pointers don’t need to be introduced in the earliest CS classes. If they scare people away, not because those people can’t do them, but because those people don’t have confidence or haven’t gotten truly excited about CS yet… well, we could lose some good people who, if they started with a more forgiving language like Java, might get excited enough to later get the memory management bit.

I guess what it comes down to is me. I got weeded out of computer science without taking a single class because everyone complained how hard the intro CS class was. I thought, “wow, I can’t do that… look at all these smart people who find it so hard.” Then, when I finally did take the classes as a grad student I found them exhilarating and easy. If CS had been more appealing to me, I could have avoided a lot of pain later on, in the form of worrying about not having a CS degree and having to go back to school to firm up my tech background, and so forth. I still don’t know assembly language. I think my time is better spent now on higher level issues, though.

As for nurses vs. doctors or IT vs. CS, I think they could be orthogonal at least in certain cases. The nurse-midwives who delivered my baby knew so much about normal pregnancy and delivery. They approached it from a completely different perspective than obstetricians, who are trained surgeons. Similarly, the hospice nurses I observed when I was a volunteer knew all sorts of things about comforting a patient, things doctors didn’t know. I wouldn’t want to do without nurses or doctors during a health crisis. The different perspectives don’t substitute for one another. It’s similar for IT, with its focuses on encoding business rules in software, compared with CS, with its focus on everything computational. They don’t replace each other. People who might be really good at IT because of their ability to cut through the crap of business processes and bureaucracies might be miserable at developing an efficient sorting algorithm. But how many people need to write sorting algorithms vs. contending with the weird things that go on in the corporate world these days?

I barely know Java, with my background being chiefly in C and C++, so I am probably just being crochety (at the very least I’m being uninformed…). I remember when I was getting my BS in Comp Sci (93-97) the contrast was always between the CS department, and the “Information Technology” department over at the business school. There, the students got a decent familiarity with common apps and development tools, and were polished, easy to talk to, always knew sports scores, and made very pretty resumes; meanwhile we comp sci students burned nights away juggling background threads to drive robots or writing our own compilers and generally living a much smellier, weirder, dorkier existence.

I can’t argue which is more useful– it was the late nineties so we all got magnificent jobs– but I did notice that the IT kids just did not have the same generalized problem solving skills. Sometimes it doesn’t matter what the particulars of your training are, just as long as they provide for a difficult, challenging experience. I never used, say, Prolog in any real job, and only barely used any knowledge of assembly-level programming. However, I think going through the crucible of study and practice brought about some emergent properties of flexibility and endurance that the IT guys didn’t get Certainly I knew what recursion was, for crying out loud. I don’t really think you can call yourself a programmer without at least understanding it. Maybe you can “work in the computer world,” but you’re not a programmer (that’s a generic “you”, btw Anne– I know you know what recursion is! I’m just venting at large).

Times have changed of course, and the tools out there now are so much more powerful and easier to use. But someone has to write the tools.