Java is the worst thing to happen to software development education

[projecttracker]

We see a lot of resumes and interview a lot of people. Our rate has been pretty steady-state at about 10-12 resumes per week; about 8 make it to the phone screen; a third of those to the code sample; and we wind up averaging about 1.5 in-person interviews per week

Comments

[ukelele]

MIT does its intro CS course in Scheme (or at least used to), basically to nuke out the brains and bad habits of kids who thought they were sexy programmers in high school.

[bellwethr]

You may like this article, which agrees with you...

[abernat]

How large is a byte

2 reasons

[projecttracker]

Number one, we care less about optimization of code than we do being able to reverse-engineer binary file formats, because we're in the business of forensics. So an understanding of machine architecture helps understand why they should look for data elements that are 8 and 32 bits long, and why a file from an older unix machine might not store ints the same way as one from a windows machine.

Number two, we use a reference-counted language, and the people who understand the basics of memory write about 1% as many bugs as the people who don't. It's that dramatic. I used to think that the abstraction was always good, but now I'm not convinced - it's the difference between people who can use the abstraction for its power, and people who don't understand that there's an abstraction there.