Problems in the cultivation of good IT-specialists, as well as Uncle Vasya was the manager of the programmers department

The idea of ​​the article was inspired by this .



So, we will assume that the problem of finding young professionals, or rather the problem of finding a job with them, we have already partially discussed. Everything seems to be clear, but let's try to go back to the roots of the problem and find out - why is it so difficult for young specialists with diplomas to find a job worthy of their qualifications? First of all, the variant of the underdevelopment of the educational system in the field of computer technology suggests itself, and many will agree with this. It is certainly not difficult to find fault with the system, and the reason for this problem is also known to everyone - quite a large number of teachers in schools / universities that do not meet their requirements. The requirements seem to be clearly not regulated anywhere, but for example, as students, after 1-2 courses of study, I think we can easily figure out which teachers deserve to teach us in computer disciplines and who are not :)



I think each of us who studied in any of the computer-related specialties can remember at least one, and possibly several teachers, who remembers with a smile on his face and is grateful in his heart for the knowledge gained in lectures / practical classes, and at the same time a dozen others, which we probably don’t remember, what is their name :)

')

I think many would agree that a good half of the teachers in the universities wipe their pants, or in other words, "parasites." Well, why answer me to read on the specialty “Computer systems” 5-10 or even more different kinds of disciplines like digital circuitry, electronics and so on. And all this is taught by a certain uncle of Soviet-style hardening, most likely a candidate of some sciences or higher. For clarity, we call him figuratively “starper” :) A familiar situation? Well, isn't it a “parasite”? So these "old fart" in part and are an obstacle to the preparation of good professionals. But given the title and merit of our “starper”, no one will trample him anywhere, and already being retired long ago, he will still carry his “science” to the masses of poor students.



The problem of "old fart" is hardly possible to solve so immediately. The starting point should be the revision of programs and disciplines at the level of universities and / or government programs. If there are no obsolete disciplines, they will leave as superfluous. Perhaps, of course, few of them will remain if they can adapt to new trends and have time to study a couple of new technologies :) But most likely all or most of them will remain as universities need a certain number of candidates / doctors of science to maintain their status and accreditation. Therefore, we will assume that this problem will go away by itself in a dozen or two years, and that the new teachers will be more advanced in modern technologies.



All of the above is quite subjective, because as a university I finished more than 4 years ago. But having had time to communicate a little in my department after receiving a diploma, I was able to spin in this environment from the “reverse” side and find out in more detail what the system breathes, without this there would not have been this topic. I left the university, but I maintain small connections with those who still remain (mostly with their peers, of whom there are few), so I know that the situation has not changed much for the better. Here I also would venture to discuss these young guys. Half of them went to work in an IT-company like me, some still teach part-time. And others remained to be taught in universities. Of course, you won’t live much for a teacher’s salary without a degree, but someone has to work there and teach the younger generation. But if the young teachers work only in the university for a small salary, the reason for this suggests only one - some graduates could not compete and could not catch on in any IT-company / freelance, etc. and it remained to transmit their “experience” to the youth. What they can teach is also quite a controversial issue, because reading a book on programming and retelling students is not difficult.



Of course, I rather exaggerated the situation, there are exceptions to the rules, and there are quite a lot of them. I just described the unpleasant trends inherent in education in the field of IT.



As an example, I will cite one case from real life. A certain teacher, conditionally we will call him Uncle Vasya, worked in the university for more than ten years and read computer disciplines such as programming, databases, etc. By the way, I did not have any serious degrees, just a senior lecturer at the department of information technologies. His age is 50+. At first glance, Uncle Vasya taught quite well, and the disciplines are quite popular. But since he worked only at the university, he didn’t have any relevant experience in these areas. Having a pendant language, Uncle Vasya had no difficulty in retelling students' books on programming and databases in lectures, and even running simple programs in laboratory work. It seems that everything on Uncle Vasya arranged at this job, except for one thing. As you probably already guessed it - payment of its hard work. And now Uncle Vasya thought and decided, why would he not go to work for his uncle, just not a pure programmer, of course, but some kind of boss. After all, Uncle Vasya is also not so stupid, he knows his strengths and weaknesses perfectly well. He knows a bunch of scary words from the field of IT, but he has a real practice, as I said, zero. But how to be Uncle Vasya in this case? A very simple. Uncle Vasya goes to one of the foreign employers, let's call him John. So, John is working as a director of a small foreign IT-company. One day, John sees that more and more of his IT business managers are hiring employees from less developed countries. After all, there you can find specialists who are often not inferior to theirs, and you can pay them an order of magnitude less. Well, as you yourself understood, John opens a small branch of a company somewhere here :) John really wants to find a more or less well-coordinated team of programmers, and not search for them one at a time. So he sees the ideal option of opening a branch, which actually advertises on one of the relevant sites. And who finds this ad, guess who? That's right, our clever uncle Vasya! And uncle Vasya has already decided that he will easily assemble a small team of programmers. He did not go far and gathers people from among the most advanced senior students and their friends who are well versed in the topic of interest. A team of a dozen people gathered, and - voila! Uncle Vasya is no longer some kind of senior lecturer, but the development department manager at John & Co. Well, well, he thinks, he hooked, and now you can just sit yourself quietly, watch out for everyone to work properly, in general, kick the noodle to work hard. But it was not there. As already mentioned, in the university Uncle Vasya taught by books, and even then it is not up to date. John, being a smart enough person, but not getting into the details of modern technologies, was confident in Uncle Vasya as in his right hand, and therefore decided to rely on Uncle Vasya in all technical and close to technical organizational issues. Well still, after all that has collected the whole team of programmers in such a short time! In general, a huge those. The task for product development has come, and work has begun to boil at full speed. It seems that there are programmers, testers, and ... Oh, yes, there is no architect, but does Uncle Vasya need him? It takes a month or two or three, and John asks Uncle Vasya and his team for some alpha version of our powerful program, and without much warning. With grief in half, Uncle Vasya manages to persuade the team to build a build for the test bench. The first review of the program by the customer ended, you guessed it, if not complete, then a rather serious fiasco. John, as already mentioned, was not a stupid man, and if the team worked badly, then he decided to look for the reason ... correctly, in its leader, that is, in Uncle Vasya. John decides to fly to the branch and talk in more detail with all members of the team, because before that he had communicated only with Uncle Vasya. Do not overclock the same team, all the same money invested, so it is necessary to thoroughly understand everything. And being a person who doesn’t know much about the technical side of the development process, John takes to help one of the leading developers of his company, Jack, to more precisely put everything in his place with his help. And so, John came to the branch office and after talking in turn with all the members of the team in turn, in the presence of Jack's assistant, made some conclusions for himself and understood his biggest mistake, which he made initially. As it turned out, Uncle Vasya is absolutely not familiar with such concepts as Agile, SCM, Unit Testing, etc. etc. And what happened next you ask? I think it is easy to guess that the team continued to work further after passing a series of trainings on development methodologies. And naturally, already without Uncle Vasya :)



Well, it was John’s first such experience in creating a branch, so the oshbika was taken into account. One of the guys was chosen as the manager of the department. He was the one who understood most of the above things. By the way, he more than once offered to introduce them into the development process, but his requests did not reach Uncle Vasya’s consciousness, and being a modest man, he could not jump over his boss’s head. But justice prevailed and everyone got what they deserved :)



By the way, Uncle Vasya, in disgrace to himself, calmly returned to his native university and continues to teach students high technology. I really hope that he will make at least some conclusions for himself and at least he will googling for those keywords on which he stumbled and lost a good job :)



Fuh, the story of Uncle Vasya somehow took a long time and I forgot all the main things I wanted to tell you. Well, in general, summing up, I would like to say that the education system in the field of IT is still very lame in our country, and there are not so many ways out of the situation. Probably hardly anything will change, until the state makes teachers' salaries so worthy that people who have the ability and desire to teach others and pass on their knowledge and experience to them do not want to work for an uncle or for a foreign market. In the meantime, the majority of students will be some "Uncle Vasya", those who could not stand the competition in commercial projects.



Good luck!



PS The story of Uncle Vasya is based on real events. All names are fictional :)

PPS During the preparation of the topic, no hamster was hurt :)