patrickmcginnis59 10839 (9/12/2013)
can't tell who wrote this comment
Because we know that many of the really great people in computing/IT/database had not a single academic qualification in computing or in IT or in database. Surely we shouldn't restrict ourselves to people who have more academic qualifications in the field than Alan Turing or Fred Williams or Grace Hopper or John McCarthy or Tony Hoare or Ted Codd or Cliff Jones or Chris Date - if they hadn't been allowed to work in computing we wouldn't have got anywhere near where we are today - they might never have been a relational model to give rise to an RDBMS like SQL Server. Do you think that no-one should have been recruited to work on computers before about 1958, since there were no academic qualifications in Computing or IT way back then? :hehe:Alan Turing: PhD from Princeton
Fred Williams: Doctorate Magdalen College, Oxford
Grace Hopper: Ph.D. in mathematics from Yale
John McCarthy: Ph.D. in Mathematics from Princeton
etc etc
Given the time and the contributions, these guys had some pretty solid academic chops and while not disrespecting the ability they in all likelyhood displayed before these academic achievements, they none the less weren't uneducated. Given the state of the art at the time, the sorts of academics they pursued were exactly what you would expect from someone doing the sort of work they did.
I'm not saying that there aren't counter examples of folks without academic qualifications attaining success in computers, but I'm pretty surprised that folks who actually did have the chops were used in the unattributed quote to highlight the supposed uselessness of academics.
Quite true, but IMHO, you're providing an example of the "chef" problem. The leader in computing were academics. Many of the leaders in the tech field today, who are amazing programmers, would be PhD level people if they chose to pursue that. However many of the people teaching in colleges aren't high level computing people. Some are, but as more and more universities have added CS programs, by definition, the talent level has watered down.
We've also seen too many colleges lower their standards to ensure they don't drive too many people away from programs.
It's not to say that someone coming out of a university isn't qualified, but I'm not sure the degree validates this. In some sense, it only validates that they can pursue a 4-5 yr project to completion, not necessarily at any level of quality.