
Did your college educate students on popular languages or current events? - drowninginnet
Last night, two fellow alumni and I sat down to talk with some of our professors from our university that we had graduated from two years ago. Unfortunately, I was not particularly savvy in my knowledge of the different communities surrounding various languages when I started my career, and went into the comparatively corporate .NET framework for my first job, and later second.  While there appears to be relatively little flexible work for mid level .NET programmers, there is an abundance for front-end and Rails.  Now I find myself in the unenviable position of trying to switch specialities while trying to find more flexible work, due to outside circumstances.  I was curious what, if any, education other developers received at school about the shape of the modern programming communities surrounding popular frameworks and languages?  Some ideas we came up with were a seminar as part of an engineering course, or write-ups of current events in the industry.
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canterburry
I must say I don't think I agree with the prevailing premise that college or
university should prepare you for a particular job or task. What college and
university is for, in my opinion, is to turn you into a human being capable of
critical thought, analysis, independent learning, interpersonal and
communication skills and working with other people.

These are all building blocks you can later leverage to do anything you want
with after you graduate.

Similarly, computer science degrees are not to learn any particular
language/technology you can later turn around and make money off of. Computer
science degrees educate you on the fundamentals of how computers function from
the ground up and provide you with the CONCEPTUAL building blocks for how to
build software or maybe even create your own programming languages.

Also, I would argue, you would be wasting your time and money going to
college/university in order to learn programming. All you need is a book or
the web. Not even one of these General Assembly type camps/places are
necessary.

If you however want to be come a top notch software/hardware engineer,
college/university is important.

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partisan
Having graduated in 2003, I can say I was not prepared for what was happening
in the real world. We were taught C++, but not MFC and not GCC, either of
which would have provided a grounding for a real world job.

I am a .NET programmer as well. I have considered switching over to other
platforms and still do consider it, but in the meantime I have turned my .NET
career, which was stagnant in 2010/2011, into something interesting by using
new approaches, new architectures, and learning as much as possible about
choosing the right tools for the job. By seeking out these choices, I have
opened up other ways of working which allow me to work remotely and with a
flexible schedule and with non-MS technologies such as Kafka, Cassandra,
Redis, etc.

If you are having trouble finding a way into the OSS world, don't give up on
.NET. Instead, double down on it by applying new and emerging patterns and
techniques that you pick up from learning other languages.

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gt565k
Most of my intro classes were in Java. Some classes were in Python, and others
were free to choose depending on the project.

I think it helps a lot to be well versed in a c-family / type language (C,
Java, C#...) and a a dynamic language like Ruby or Python.

While I was pursuing my undergrad, I had internships where I used Java,
Python, VB, C#, Ruby, and JavaScript.

I don't think that a college should be responsible for teaching students the
popular/hip languages. There are clubs and special topic courses for those
that are interested.

My college had a mobile development club, a web dev club, artificial
intelligence club, etc. Bleeding edge frameworks, languages, and other
technologies were usually the point of discussion.

I do wish however that the CS curriculum included at least one course on
functional and declarative programming.

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ju-st
If I search for "Rails" jobs in my vicinity I get 6 results. If I search for
".NET" indeed finds 316 jobs. 376 jobs for javascript and 1044 for "Java". But
I'm not sure about that flexible work you're searching. Even the largest
companies here allow you the work from home (partially) or reduce your hours
per week.

~~~
drowninginnet
In my case, I'm looking for fully remote part-time work. I've found
comparatively numerous examples of this type of work for Rails and front-end,
and very few for .net or Java. In reference to the original question though,
how did you come to understand these programming communities? Was it through
submission to open source projects, forums, or work?

~~~
gt565k
Keep in mind that the skills required for the remote jobs differ largely due
to culture. Most large corporations that use .NET or Java do not allow remote
work. Smaller shops, which tend to use open source software are more relaxed
when it comes to remote work.

