A good programmer knows that it is how you think, not the language you code in, that determines your ability.
Recently a director at a huge bank asked me
Do British students learn algorithms?At first I thought he was joking, but even though he was paying three times what the average new grad gets paid, he felt despair. Because of similar experiences I was surprised to read that only 17 per cent of CompSci grads from last year haven’t got a job yet.
Many are Java programmers. OK, I’m no fanboi, but many seem to know no other language, with bog standard languages like SQL, VB, Perl, et al being alien to them. I’m an old git, but still value leading edge stuff such as F# and CUDA, which show you are able to do stuff that others can’t. I am uniformly disappointed.
Yes there are many people doing Java, but that is of almost no importance. What matters is the number of jobs per person chasing them, and that has an awful ratio. Everyone in India, from waiters to religious gurus, knows Java, and so do all recent western CompSci grads. That is the supply/demand ratio from hell, and it’s getting worse.
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