Nowadays you could just throw a rock, and you're bound to hit a Software Engineer. I myself am one of them. So this is some kind of a confession as I am completing my graduation.
Today, a majority of Computer Engineers in our country don't even have a clue about what is happening inside a computer. The toughest computer problem that they know how to solve successfully is, finding the factorial of a number, or checking whether a number is prime or not. I could do them when I was at school, so I threw away all my college time, thinking I was way ahead of others, but now I realize, though its a bit late, that I never was even a peeling of a real Bachelor of Technology.
The flaw is inherently in the perception that Computer Science or Information Technology is quite an easy stream, well its not the fact. If you were to code the solution of the Tower of Hanoi problem, or were asked to implement a Fibonacci Heap you'd get to know about it. Our generation of Engineers, were misled into believing that designing a Website, which can fetch a couple of records from a database, and insert a few in it, is the greatest feat that you could achieve in your academic life. All the final year projects are about some kind of system. .NET or Java, that is really what matters, just make this one important choice and feel like its the career defining moment of your life. Really it just takes 3 months for an average person to learn any of these platforms, and start doing stuff. Even a 12th Standard student, I'm sure would be able to intuitively create stuff on Visual Studio or Netbeans, it really isn't rocket science. So if all this is that easy, what is tough in the curriculum? the Software Development Life Cycle or the various types of Software Testing? No, tough is the Data Structures, Design and Analysis of Algorithms, Cryptography, the Operating Systems. We just need to go beyond the theories and look into their practical implementation to know of their importance, but bless the University, all they want to test of is whether the students know about the advantages of R-B Tree over the binary search tree.
The times of mass recruiters are done now, those companies which would just take a bloke of any stream for a software developer, have already got their benches full now. And with global austerity setting in, the IT Services Sector wouldn't be booming out of proportions like it used to.
Anyone who'd like to learn from my experience should check out what other undergraduates in other countries are upto at the moment, and also gauge the level of Computer Science before you label it as easy and theory oriented.
Solve some of the problems on these sites, and you'd get to know the real depth of shallow sea :P
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