Trust me…

Why indeed? Stroustrup, new developers and accreditation.

In software development there’s not many times that you can disagree with Bjarne Stroustrup but I’m not sure I agree with his article “What Should We Teach New Software Developers? Why?”

I agree that the teaching in Universities isn’t aimed at industry enough and that some things just aren’t taught enough, well emphasized enough perhaps. At university I was taught Java in what seems to me now an awful way, teaching procedural programming in the Java language is just not sane - especially to extend it four weeks later to full OO and expect everyone to start writing properly structured programs. Code style was never taught, and efficiency wasn’t top of anyone’s priorities. It was all geared to getting the job done - a typical attitude in research.

However I consider myself a reasonable developer, I can write tidy efficient code - even in c++ - so I must have learnt it somewhere, which must be either in my own time or work (I think both have played their part) and it wouldn’t take much to add it to the material covered in the programming courses. However teaching things like Unit testing, effective code review technique and build systems just won’t happen at university, these things have to be learnt on the job, no one is going to take the unit testing course if they can pick robotics are they?

As for his suggestion that there should be some form of accreditation for Software engineers, well he can sit in his tower saying all of that but some of us struggle to make it through University financially - having to take a whole set of accreditation exams after that would exclude many people - me included - from entering the profession. That’s in addition to the extra time that this would require, you’d effectively be making people choose between a research career or a professional one as those that do Masters/Research qualifications would then have to get another accreditation before they can start practising professionally.

What would an accreditation scheme do for the profession anyway? Well I think that software engineering is one of the most innovative jobs out there and a formal qualification structure would halt that in it’s tracks. Every accredited engineer would have to follow a strict set of guidelines that would be agreed on by committees that people like Bjarne Stroustrup would sit on and if they strayed from this they would be struck off. Yes it would mean we inside the circle could earn more money but isn’t this why we all hate lawyers? How many start-ups would employ chartered software developers I wonder?

Maybe I missed his point.

Good Hunting