Doing Things Differently

I graduated from Durham College’s Computer Systems Technology program over 3 years ago and have been working for a software company since.  With that said, I still think the 3 years spent at Durham were a complete waste of time and here’s why:

According to a recent Network World article, some of the skills taught at the college are a little, well, outdated.

Not to offend anyone, but in 2004, VB6 was already starting to be replaced by C# and VB.NET.  With the .NET Framework 1.0 released in 2001, and 1.1 in 2003, VB6’s days were numbered.  In 2005, the .NET Framework 2.0 release all but put the nails in VB6s coffin.

Our ‘database’ class was a joke, using an old version of Microsoft Access.  Not that access is a bad program, and I’m sure there are tons of general ideas that you can take from it… but it doesn’t hold up against the needs of today and the ease-of-use that is SQL.

Also, learning about Netware was a joke.  Often the demos didn’t work properly and the labs couldn’t be completed.  Then, add in the fact that we then had to manage properly dual-booting a machine with a single physical disk and you’re just looking for problems.

Next up, is our Hardware oriented classes that revolved around OLD IBM Compatible PCs, and the out-dated iMacs.  In these courses, there was no USB, Firewire, AGP, etc.  Heck, I’m surprised these had PCI devices and not some nice old ISA and EISA boards.

I also remember a big chunk of our CISCO classes being on IPX/SPX, and how they worked.  Ugh, big waste of time considering 90% of the world is using TCP/IP.

Needless to say, I was always a tech rebel and was always using the latest greatest and was always one step ahead of the trend.  It did me good, but I’m afraid all the others I graduated with were left so far behind they’ll need to go back to school just to catch up.

*sigh*