[bvw]

Nothing that I learned in physics, math, electircal engineering, mechanical engineering, industrial engineering or "computer science" has ever become obsolete. There is new stuff, sure. But a new language or a revsion or Oracle does not obsolete the basic stuff one learns if at a decent school.

Yet the market -- the buyers, the filterers of resumes -- they have a faddish view of what they need. That ignorance -- blindness -- is a malignancy born of fiat money, like so many other vices. Fiat money rewards no-account, risk-avoiding decisions and arbitrary randomness and penalizes rationality. The only rule is go-along.

[Feldkurat_Katz]

Nothing that I learned in physics, math, electircal engineering, mechanical engineering, industrial engineering or "computer science" has ever become obsolete. There is new stuff, sure. But a new language or a revsion or Oracle does not obsolete the basic stuff one learns if at a decent school.

Yet the market -- the buyers, the filterers of resumes -- they have a faddish view of what they need.

Morons are in charge. An HR woman once asked me if I know C, after seeing C++ on my resume. Then there is the "you have to have rev 5.4 in your skill set and if you have 5.3 then you are useless" mindset.

Ballmer and his ilk want the government to graduate more fresh engineers, even though retraining the ones who already have 80% of skills needed could be done at a fraction of the cost of training a new engineer.

[TheFrog]

Hmm, I have to throw the BS flag. "There is new stuff, sure. But a new language or a revsion or Oracle does not obsolete the basic stuff one learns if at a decent school."

Have you used Punch Cards, tape on a "new" TI Silent 700? So you are telling me you still Oracle Forms 2.0?
Do you still write DOS batch files, ALGOL?
How many of the 200 programming languages that existed in 1960 are still in use today?
Do you even know who Grace Murray Hopper is?

Hint when I obtained my first degree Interactive System Corp. had just started selling Unix commercially.