Collaboration WAS: E-mail Privacy

[Tim Chown]

In <287 at bria.UUCP> mike at bria.UUCP (mike.stefanik) writes:

>In an article, tjc at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Tim Chown) writes:
>>But a degree is awarded on the basis of *your* skills at design/coding
>>and on *your* ability to interact in a group project, not somebody else's!
>>A good CS degree has management/teamwork skills built in (ours does,
>>quick plug ;-), but should still demand individual performance.

>Hardly.  A degree is awarded on the basis of yours skills at taking tests,
>and conforming to the norm.  If the goals of universities in the U.S. are
>to produce thinking, well-rounded human beings, they are failing miserably.

That, then, is a fault of that degree course.  A challenging course
combines the essentials of design, teamwork, management, programming,
and so on and bases a large proportion of the degree on individual
and team assignments, and less on sweating out exams.

>By and large, the best programmers I have met have no papers.  Personally,
>I got rather disgusted with the entire fiasco years ago.  I walked into a
>class, and here was one of the most repected CS professors talking about the
>value of goto's in programming languages, and that structured coding was
>a passing fad.  It still makes me ill to think about it ...

Respected amongst who?   A good programmer doesn't necessarily make
a good manager, and vice versa.  A programmer just sits down and
implements the spec (whether formal or not) given by the boss; rather
like sitting on a producion line.

I suspect your experiences are from one bad apple, or at least I hope
they are.  Computer science as a discipline is still not that well formed.

Anyway, which group should this discussion be in ??? Perhaps we need
a comp.courses.content  ;-)

Tim
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