I don't agree with the statement that college boys have a better insight due to their degree and algo's that they learned.
Noone said that. That would be stupid. It is not at all the idea I wanted to explain. Many programmers in the 70's or 80's learned how to program by themselves. It's my case. It's also the case of my father. But also many programmers learned it at school. When your job is to rewrite code produced by these two populations, I can tell you that you will quickly prefer the "academic" way of writing apps. And experience put apart, the programmer that learned mathematics, logic, and computer science at school have more strings to his bow than me (I have diplomas in electrical engineering and linguistics, which do not really help in my everyday job). I have two friends who are 10 years younger than me. They have the same passion for computers but, contrary to me, they learned their job at school. Their knowledge of algorithms and new technologies is a lot greater than mine and, without pretention, I think I'm far from being bad in this domain. I know probably more languages and write probably a more robust code because I'm used to the pitfalls of many kinds of problem, but I can't tell that I'm better or they are better. We are just different, with different approaches, and in the end, what matters is: is the job done? Does the app work as expected?
Nowadays, most programmers freshly hired around me come from universities. Self-made programmers seem to be more and more uncommon in my professional environment. Is it a good thing or a bad thing? It's one of the subjects of the debate initied by HotShoe.
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