[plt-scheme] A first experiment with HTDP

On Tue, Jul 1, 2008 at 3:02 PM, Jos Koot <jos.koot at telefonica.net> wrote:
> The idea that companies take their own responsability of training their
> employees sounds good.

It is important to distinguish between the different types of training
the companies often provide. The two most common kinds of training
that I see are:

1) Long term training for a technology used by the company. For
example, a custom programming language used only by that oil company.

2) Highly compressed training for a generic technology that can be
used just about anywhere. For example, large consulting companies tend
to hire folks with 4-year degrees, send them to a 3 week course on
Java, and start billing them out immediately following that.

In both cases, they primarily serve the long-term interests of the
employer and not the programmer (I've got nothing against companies
making money, just making a clarification here, and in the long run
both approaches won't serve the employer very well, either).

I am interested in neither 1 nor 2, instead I think about the
questions we face like "How do you teach someone to be "good"?", how
do you teach someone the skills that will serve both them, and their
employer, for years and years to come? How do you teach someone to be
a critical thinker and problem solver? How do you help someone hone
the skills that they will need 1 week from now and 10 years from now?
How do you literally teach someone "How To Design Programs"?

> There should be a golden path between the principal goals of eductation and the more practicle ones. Is there?

Learning how to program, and how to program in Java, are not mutually exclusive.

The other question to ask is that if only %5 of programmers get the
skills that both they and their employers need from general education,
than what is to be done about the other %95 of programmers who lack
those skills?