Who Should Teach Tech Job Skills
Relating to the linkedin post that spawned my last blog post a friend noted:
… why should it be the burden on companies trying to hire folks with those skillsets to also teach those skillsets? Isn’t that what educational institutions are supposed to do (git, etc.)?
Even though companies, if they actually cared about equity and diversity would be better served to take on this burden, the reality is that they haven't and it's either left for students on their own, or as I commented on in my post colleges.
I get where my friend is coming from but he is much younger than I am so he doesn't know that technical training was in fact all on the companies but somewhere along the line, probably in search of greater corporate profits, they stopped.
When I came out of college at the end of the 80s training programs were the norm. The training program could be a couple of weeks or it could be many months. You'd learn about the business - Wall Street in my case at Goldman and also the technical side. My training program had a track where they taught the C language and then my group, once I was actually assigned then had training in Windows programming. Outside courses were also free for the taking if they would make for a more productive employee.
Smaller companies didn't have training programs but they also had much simpler requirements. I interviewed at a smaller finance house and the only tech I would need was how to use Turbo Pascal. An insurance company just required Paradox programming - a popular PC database from back in the day. This is a far cry from today where complexity abounds and there's probably multiple courses worth of material one needs to be productive in the tech world.
This made sense for the companies at the time and it also made sense how it evolved. Prior to CS being "a thing" there was no specific college to prepare one for industry and as CS developed, it developed as an academic field like say Chemistry, Math, or History. Those subjects weren't directly focused on getting jobs so why would CS be? I guess finance and accounting in business programs are more job focussed but then so is IT (Information Technology) that developed also in business schools. IT, however, is not CS and what you learn in an IT major is very different other than some of the lower courses than the CS skills that are required to get a software engineering job 1
At some point between when I graduated and I started paying attention again the training programs were gone. Sure, companies like Meta still have their new hire boot camps but there's an assumption that you know far more non-classroom tech than they did back in the day.
I know, a lot of the CS major is not relevant to SWE jobs but you do need data structures and algorithms and sometimes more to get past the ridiculous interview process.
I'm guessing that moving forward, colleges will teach more of the practical side - this has already been happening with new courses like web development and new majors like software engineering. It's also something that created an opening for code schools and boot camps even though I think those are largely flawed.
It also reminds me that in a way things were better back then - a young college kid had more doors or at least possible doors open to them since the companies would take a more raw candidate but people today don't even know what they're missing.
Unfortunately, the same is true for things fare more important than learning git.