[clug] Software Engineering

[Eyal Lebedinsky]

Tarrant wrote:
> Quoted from http://softeng.anu.edu.au/education.html
> 
> "The ANU Bachelor of Software Engineering is a four year Engineers Australia
> accredited degree designed for bright and motivated people wishing to become
> leading edge computing professionals."
> 
> So it's an engineering degree.

I know that I come late into this thread, but for me there is a simple way to look
at this.

Do you want to participate in the development of applications, small or large,
using state of the art tools? Maybe even manage projects? Play a part in the IT
business?
A good IT degree will suffice. No maths. No compiler design or formal languages
and such.
But these vary widely and I cannot say which are better. I saw some people that
did nothing more complicated that learn to program, got to use some common tools
and were instructed in the ways of the IT world (product lifecycle and whatnot).
Choose carefully.

Do you want to develop state of the art tools for IT? Want to work at the core of
the IT world, often at bare metal level? Want to come up with new algorithms rather
than learn to use them?
A Computer Science Engineering degree is the way to go. Actually, *any* engineering
degree will arm you with the required basic tools, but an IT related one will
cover some speciality subjects. It used to be (late 60s)  that the first two years
out of a three (but one will often do four) years degree were practically identical
for all Engineering degrees (people actually switched easily at this point), is this
still the case?

<OT>
Someone mentioned Samba vs. Tridge. Well, I never looked and his code (which might
as well be atrocious) but it does not really matter - just look how it was picked
up by everyone and is trusted by many. And he did not really go for an IT degree
initially if I recall (someone correct me here).

Now forget Tridge (nothing personal) and realize that Engineering is a way of
thinking, a way of life. All engineers share a common language and should be able
to communicate effectively and move between disciplines with little effort.

The garden variety IT degree (whatever it is called) will usually not put you in
this position. Now decide what you really want to do.

<Even more OT>
And about UC vs. ANU. I think that it is a leftover from when ANU was the only
game in town and UC was CCAE and considered not a "real uni". I hired from UC
will continue to do so without hesitation. As I found it, between these two it
comes down to the quality of the individual.
</Even more OT>
</OT>

-- 
Eyal Lebedinsky (eyal at eyal.emu.id.au) <http://samba.org/eyal/>
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