[LINK] Young Aussies losing ground in digital economy

[David Lochrin]

On 2016-01-21 09:40 Tom Worthington wrote:

> I suggest that Australians not wanting to code mobile apps for startups shows good common sense. Your chance of earning a living this way is minimal. It is the 21st century equivalent of sewing t-shirts in a sweat shop.

Hear! Hear!  I was horrified to hear Shorten advocating "coding" a while back and disappointed to hear others doing so since then.  Who advises him on technology?  Did Bill's advisers forget all that rhetoric about "agility to meet the challenges of the 21st century" and having "two or three careers in a working life"?


> Last year ANU started offering IT students the option of a start-up for their group project. Students still have the option of doing a software development project for an existing company, or government agency, but they can instead opt to start their own business. This is called "ANU TechLauncher": https://cs.anu.edu.au/TechLauncher/

How do you normalise the assessment of projects which might vary widely in scope & difficulty?

In my experience at another university students begin with little understanding of the importance of the boring design process, especially a well thought out and clearly defined specification of User Requirements which has nothing but _user_ requirements and is free from untestable assertions ("the system shall be reliable").  They're all too ready to start coding (:-).

How many IT projects have come an expensive cropper because everybody was focussed on "the vision" when they rushed to implementation?

I think there's a tradeoff between teaching the fundamentals, which tends to require a systematic waterfall development methodology, and agile development which can go seriously off the rails unless the project leaders, at least, have a solid understanding of these fundamentals.

Sorry, I got carried away...

David L.