Joel has written a wonderful article titled “Advice for Computer Science College Students“. Its really good and a must read for every CS major student.
A snippet
...If you enjoy programming computers, count your blessings: you are in a very fortunate minority of people who can make a great living doing work they enjoy. Most people aren't so lucky. The very idea that you can "love your job" is a modern concept....
I would even recommend you to take a huge printout, laminate it and hang it in ur room. Most of his view are 100% correct. He talks about need for need for learning C, microeconomics, writing skills, need for a good GPA.....
But even here Sriram has something different to say regarding Joel advising for a good GPA.. In that matter I completely go with Sriram's viewpoint. Certainly, In a country like India, GPA SUCKS.... In most cases, it is inversely proportional to the students real skills. There is no continous assesment here.
A geeky classmate of mine flunked in Digital Systems Course and Software Engineering Course. He got some less than 10 marks out of 100 in both. But this guy has secured 40th rank (99.8 %ile) in the Graduate Aptitude Test in Enginnering (GATE) examination conducted by the premier IITs (for PG studies). !!!! And this guy was rejected by a very very famous Indian IT service company "INFOSYS".
This geeky friend of mine had actually represented India at a Software Design Contest held at Philippines and got 2nd prize at International level...All that at the age of 16... His case speaks very well about the Indian Education System and Recruitment by Indian IT Companies.....
In India you can get high marks if and only if you dont follow the *good* books for the courses. Almost for every course in every university, local author books are published. And you can get 80% above only if you study from those local author books. I swear none of my university toppers would have heard of Don Knuth or Rob Pike or even Brian Kernighan !!!!
The only *skills* needed to get into the Indian IT majors is an Engineering degree and some amount of luck (or fate!!) but the only way to survive in this industry even after the current outsourcing boom ends would be to go by some of Sriram's suggestions - one being coding, coding and coding....
Overall both articles are really worth reading.
Joel's Article: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CollegeAdvice.html
Sriram's : http://www.dotnetjunkies.com/WebLog/sriram/archive/2005/01/03/41183.aspx
[P.S. : This is my 50th post. I have always greatly enjoyed writing every entry here. My experiences in this blogosphere were really exciting. Please send ur comments about my blog]
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