Zoho Don't Need No Stinking Ph.D. Programmers 612
theodp writes "When it comes to tech academic credentials, Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu has The Right Stuff: a Ph.D. in EE from Princeton. But Vembu has eschewed Google's Army-of-Ph.D.s approach to software development in favor of tapping into the ranks of high school grads who would not normally go to college for Zoho. Seeing his youngest brother succeed at programming without a college degree convinced Vembu that others could follow that example with the proper training and guidance. And studying the best employees in his own company led to another epiphany: 'What if the college degree itself is not really that useful?' thought Vembu. 'What if we took kids after high school, train them ourselves?'"
Re:Yay for common sense (Score:5, Interesting)
Many, many people have gotten themselves trapped into paying off student loans for the rest of their lives for a degree that is inherently worthless. Expect a lot of denial of this truth contained in this article because for some people the idea that they sold themselves into debt slavery for nothing is too much to bear.
That is how I started. (Score:5, Interesting)
I spot a slight flaw (Score:5, Interesting)
The students are taught very little theory, avoiding computer science altogether.
Yes there are many things you can do in programming without a formal education, and I'm all for rewarding people who want to make an effort. But by not studying theory they are missing out on all those giants whose shoulders they could be standing on. This will lead to wasted effort as they reinvent everything from the wheel to Unix badly.
Re:No degree, bad citizen (Score:3, Interesting)
Why would I spit on the military? What they do is necessary.
What university offers is a chance, not a guarantee. A chance that that kid who comes from a small town with evangelical parents might hear some things his town and family didn't plan. A chance that the kid whose family told him that not to be of a particular ethnic group marks someone as inferior. A chance that the kid whose high school science teacher believes in astrology might be exposed to actual science. A chance that the kid raised in a Yeshiva might meet some Muslims and get along well with them. No guarantees, but a shot. (Of course, these are stereotypes, but they are also often real, and I can put names to people in these situations and more that I saw when I went through college).
Re:No degree, bad citizen (Score:5, Interesting)
Do you have any data to back up your claim that non-college educated folk are dim-witted drains on society? Or are you just being a douche?
I know a lot of people that have no college at all. Some volunteer at shelters, most have traveled the world extensively, and continue to challenge and learn new things on their own just fine. The difference being is they don't pay some stuffy institution for the privilege.
Attending college doesn't make you better at anything. In fact most people I knew back in college were a bunch of binge drinking twats that hardly turned out to be better citizens.
Yeah, maybe (Score:2, Interesting)
This might work. This might not work. One thing, though, is clear from Google's example: hiring a huge number of incredibly well-educated people does, apparently, also work.
My two Google friends are both motherfucking good programmers. I was in college and asked one of them his strategy for handling exceptions in his code. He shrugged and said, without any sense of irony whatsoever, "I don't really know how to handle exceptions. I find it easier to just write code without any bugs in it."
For almost anyone else, I would have rolled my eyes. For him, I nodded in agreement.
Finally (Score:4, Interesting)
After some 15 years in the industry one thing is amazingly clear; Formal computer science education is more of a warning sign then a merit badge.
The vast majority of people I've worked with that actually had a CS degree have been inept to put it kindly. Regardless of experience, if they went to college for computers chances are good they have trouble wiping their own ass. While I've worked with a few very notable exceptions, the rule still firmly stands. Maybe it's because I'm a product of the dot.com boom, but most people that get a CS degree did it purely for the money and not at all because they had a talent or interest in computers.
The one unifying trait in good, practical computer professionals is an aptitude for music. Pretty much all played an instrument and most still regularly do. Any college degree they have tends to be in something random that interested them, like sociology, if they have a degree at all.
Re:Horrible idea, for both parties (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh, I don't know... coming from an environment where there are lots of well-degree'd coders writing crap code and doing stupid things with computer systems, I can see why there's a backlash. Many of my magnet high school friends did great academically in high school, but floundered in college for several years, despite being very clever coders. CS education in particular was crammed with weed-out classes and poorly-arranged "team" projects where most of the effort had to be carried by the 1-2 competent self-taught coders. The "deep theory" is neat, but most people who go out to work in IT aren't writing languages and compilers, they're just trying to piece together snippets of code to get lots of little buttons to do simple functions per customer spec. Maybe that makes them technicians or mechanics relative to the "software" engineers who truly need CS degrees, but that's what most of the work on software projects is all about ... I'm just kind of surprised there isn't a formal route for these technical coders vs. programmers.
As far as long term maintenance goes, it seems like high level programming work migrates to a new favored language or at least a new framework every few years anyway. So architecturally, as long as they can make well defined components, they'll often be completely refactoring software instead of maintaining legacy code.
These guys need to consider their own future (Score:5, Interesting)
Hiring coders out of high school may very well work for some projects, and those kids may be happy to have a "real job". But in the long run the joke will be on them. Unless they plan to spend the rest of their life in that company (unlikely, as they seem intent on using a cheap supply of fresh young kids) they will find that most projects do appreciate (and need) a bit more education. Back to school for them, and not at the time when it's most convenient - it's hard to go back.
On the specific issue of coding vs. education. 20 years ago I started working as a software developer full time before I had any education above high school. I did some useful things that seemed "cool" then and worked out well enough for my employers. 20 years forward and two masters degrees later (Comp. Eng and Comp.Sc./Infosec) I can see that I am by far a better engineer (and coder too, but that's almost secondary), in part due to all the experience and in part due to education. I would have never been able to do what I do now without additional years of studying.
YMMV
Re:No degree, bad citizen (Score:5, Interesting)
After high school (with AP Comp Sci classes) I joined the military. I became a 4067 (computer programmer) in the USMC. I did my tour and got a good conduct discharge (ie: Good citizen). I joined the ranks of software developer consultants and did pretty well for myself until the market went to complete crap after the .Com blow out. I figured I'd use the down turn in the economy along with my GI Bill and veterans benefits to go get a degree and make myself more marketable.
Picked up a Comp Sci Assoc first and followed it up with a double load BSIT and BSTM program.
All in all, I learned virtually nothing about writing code in college. I learned a lot about working with other people and many of the soft skills that go along with coding. But at that point, even the highest level programming classes at the school were child's play.
Point being, you can get excellent programmers from high school graduates, but their soft skills are likely going to be horrendous. If that's fine for your environment, then go for it. But realize that what you are getting is a junior coder, not a senior developer.
Then again, most high school kids picking up high tech jobs (in my experience) are freaking sponges. They suck up every bit of knowledge they get exposed too. College grads, especially the ones from more prestigious institutions, constantly rebut and argue against the tried and true. Any time I hear, "My professor said..." it makes me want to vomit.
-Rick
Programming is a craft (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:A testament to the value of CS education. (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not sure I'd call a majority of the coding that takes place on the planet engineering.
More like plumbing.
That includes most of the stuff done by degreed "computer scientists" working in industry, and it's not necessarily because they're incompetent (though it's often a factor) but because the work simply isn't engineering work; it's plumbing.
Re:No degree, bad citizen (Score:1, Interesting)
Do you have any data to back up your claim that non-college educated folk are dim-witted drains on society? Or are you just being a douche?
Here's one - the percentage of people who vote:
Those with at least some college
- 74% of the voters in the 2004 election http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/states/US/P/00/epolls.0.html [cnn.com]
- 53% of the population http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0908670.html [infoplease.com]
So having at least some college exposure makes one significantly more likely to participate in the governance of our country.
Most programmers don't have a CS degree (Score:3, Interesting)
I've worked with god awful programmers, and a few excellent ones. My conclusion is that the majority of programmer graduates of elite schools are very good; but the reason is probably that their degree affords them plenty of choices of career, and they would have no reason to stick to programming if they didn't excel in it.
There's another problem, though, and it hasn't got much to do with the reputation of their alma mater, but the vast majority of programmers did not study CS. I didn't (and I'm a sysadmin anyway) but I tried to educate myself in theoretical stuff. Take for instance compiler theory; formal grammars and what not. Most programmers I've worked with have absolutely no idea what the fuck it is. The result is brain dead regex-only based parsers full of glaring bugs. The other day I discovered that a piece of software I had been delivered stored financial transaction amounts in floats. I dare to advance that no CS graduate who didn't get his degree from a diploma mill would commit such a sin. But here the self-taught developer looked at me as if I was nitpicking.
Re:That is how I started. (Score:2, Interesting)
I started as a programmer back in the 70's at age 11.
I helped build a young software company at ages 14-20. Loved it.
and in the 90's I built my own software company, hiring teenagers initially, and training them.
It's a wonderful thing to bring in millions of dollars on software built by teens. Eventually, they moved on, and were thankful for the great experience, and a group of seasoned professionals took over.
I'm sure I'll do it again in a year or two. Still, it never ceases to amaze me thinking about the few who squandered the opportunity and wasted our resources just downloading torrents.
Re:No degree, bad citizen (Score:4, Interesting)
Maybe true in general, but most, if not all, of the brightest minds on earth got tired of college and did their own thing for much better results. Heck, I'm not one of the brightest minds on earth and I did the same. I learn better and faster on my own. With a book and an internet connection, I can pick up the basics of almost anything in about a month of spare time. I taught myself C++ basics over the course of a summer when I was 11 mostly out of boredom and curiosity, last time I was in a college CompSci programming class they didn't introduce that much information the whole semester.
College is a good place to learn to learn if you have the ability and haven't yet picked it up, otherwise, it's redundant.
Re:Yeah, maybe (Score:3, Interesting)
He must be one of the guys that thought that building an entirely new computer language without exceptions (Google Go, for a name that doesn't Google) was a good idea too.
Oh, how I love code that is written like this:
boolean ok = true;
if (!someMethod()) {
ok = false;
}
if (ok && !someOtherMethod() {
ok = false;
}
return ok;
Now you've got rid of all the exceptions. Oh, but the method calls are hidden within if statements, and although you have a single return at the end, the *triggering* of the return value is in the if block. You've already used up the return value too, and people can easily make the mistake of not checking it. Google Go solved this by being able to have multiple return values, but that just simplifies the argument handling a bit.
Of course in many cases Exceptions are NOT the way to go. I've created a nice lib that uses result listeners instead of exceptions on most places. Then the user of the lib (the business logic more or less) can make a decision on what to do with a result. That does not do away with RuntimeExceptions or the exception that the user can throw to stop after a bad result.
Hah, no need for exceptions at all? He must live in another world entirely than the one I'm living in. It *must* have been an exaggeration.
Re:Why else might he want high schoolers? (Score:1, Interesting)
In re-reading the Google PhD piece I was struck by a simple fact I learned long ago, kids fresh out of school are cheap. Even PhDs. They have no conception of what they are worth. My salary (with a BS in a hard science field, not CS) is almost half again what we pay PhDs in the same position. The same would be true with High Schoolers. They will work hard because they do not know any better about work-life balance and they are cheap to hire. A single employee like me can run several of them and when they burn out we just replace them. Who cares if their productivity is less than mine, in numbers they add up and you do not need many real workers like me to run the group. I know several people who left Google (Kirkland WA Google) and it is always for the money. Lastly too many of PhDs in an organization is pretty toxic. Somebody has to take out the trash or maintain the non-glorious customer usability code. Nope, a few cheap PhDs is fine but only after we crush their egos and they do not find out how little we pay them.
Re:No degree, bad citizen (Score:4, Interesting)
>>Do you have any data to back up your claim that non-college educated folk are dim-witted drains on society? Or are you just being a douche?
In a startup, I took a group of 6 very bright community college guys (active game modders and the like, but no formal training) and taught them technical skills, like programming, sys admin stuff, etc.
Verdict: I'd rather hire people with a four year degree in computer science.
As much as I liked the guys, they just didn't have enough background in computer science to succeed. I'm not in the business of running a four year university to train them, and they had the net effect of increasing my workload instead of decreasing it. Being involved in three other businesses already, I had to scrap the experiment after a half year.
Re:Yay for common sense (Score:2, Interesting)
CompSci Degrees & Programming Talent (Score:2, Interesting)
I once was the technical lead at a place where a CompSci degree (advanced preferred) was the norm. The project staff became divided into two groups, one which was the in-house staff with CompSci dgrees and those without (the division ocurred because in-house staff where administratively untouchable, resulting in that group being assigned their own code chunk to program anyway they preferred).
The CompSci degree'd inhouse(Insiders) staff advocated what they had worked with and championed techniques that their educations had given them. The outside (Outsiders) consulting staff were hired primarily because they had needed to learn programming on their own to get specific tasks done. The outsiders were goal oriented, the insiders were means oriented. None of the Outsiders had degrees in computer science, some had partially completed college degrees. Outsider degrees areas were electrical engineers, linguistics, sociology, and business real estate.
The Outsiders developed extremely robust debugging/optimization techniques which resulted in error-free code generation rates of about 150 statements per working day of productivity and had a debugging system built-in to a macro pre-processor that allowed anyone to quickly find and eliminate bugs. The macro pre-processor had debugging modes from trust nothing (testing new code) to minimal checking (for production executables).
The Insiders had very low code productivity where everyone did their own thing. Only the Insider who wrote some code could effectively develop it, resulting in major problems when Outsider code depended on Insider code. One memorable bug in Insider code took three weeks of intensive effort by the Outsiders to find where in the Insider code an error actually was.
The Outsiders controlled all of the interfaces, so they could permanently have code that never trusted any Insider code which resulted eventually in all Insider errors being detected as data structures and their contents were always checked coming and going between Insider and Outsider coding.
The net result was a 250,000 statement program (about half of which as comments) which ran for five years without a progamming error being encountered by end-users and which performed at near assembler-code performance levels (the system was developed pre-C era in Fortran) by taking advantage of compiler optimization techniques and replacement of most subroutine calls with in-line code.
Experience since then has indicated that programmers advocate what they have been educated in (e.g, inve$ted in), what they have used, or what is currently being paid most attention to by the trade press or coporate decision makers. The best programmers have turned out to be persons who learned programming to get something else done; the worst programmers where those who were defending the validity of their resume/C.V.
That experience has lead to the conlusion that most programming systems and languages do not place a design priority on maintainability by someone other than the developers. Also that most developers have minimal knowledge of cost-benefit trade-offs and related business matters.
Another major cause of problems is that top-level management being sold on operating system/development system/language/etc. combinations by very capable sales forces and hiring persons with experience in that combination whether or not it is doable.
The result of this is a very bad completed as initially budgeted and featured as initially promised record.