When I was 13 subscribed to a course to obtain a degree as “Programmer and analyst” I got my degree at 14, now I am 34 and since then I have been programming with different languages, I started mastering Basic, then I go through Pascal, Turbo Pascal, Dbase, Fox/Fox Plus, C, C++, Visual Fox, VB.Net. C#, also I know the basis of Assembly, Ruby, Java and F# some of them in different OS like Fox/Fox Plus, C, C++, C#(with Mono) and Ruby, I have used(real use) a lot of Oss, DOS, Windows, Linux(Ubuntu, Red-Hat/Fedora, SUSE, Mandrake->Mandriva, Debian), Unix(SCO 3.2, Open Server, UnixWare, Solaris), BeOs, Mac OS, QNX and others that I don’t remember right now, I remember that most of my class mates from college and the people that I knew there liked programming and were passionate about building software.
The company where I am working on right now (Sciodev) has been having problems finding qualified developers, qualified developers are not local and don’t want to move from their current positions and some of them when they move they just quit after a few months for different reasons, so we turned our heads to the local universities, Morelia is a special place in México, it’s an small city but has a lot of Universities, most of them offering Computer Science related careers, my surprise was that most of the students of those computer science related careers were not interested in programming, they wanted to work on IT Support or they wanted to become Project Managers, there is nothing wrong working in IT or as PM, but only 5 students interested in software development from a whole group?!. I have been interviewing fresh graduates and I have been participating on our company’s training programs for Internships and I have found that most of the people don’t have a real understanding of Object Oriented Programming and other basic principles, some of them knew the theory but were not able to give a real example of how to apply OOP, some of them even thought that OOP it is not necessary!, how can this be happening?! What is happening at universities that they are failing to teach programming basic principles, other thing that I found is that many people that decided to get into Computer Science related careers is that they choose the career because they like to chat with the IM, or they like facebook or twitter and for some reason they think that that Computer Science careers are about to use an IM, facebook or twitter and not actually create an IM, facebook or twitter.
