The article looks good Woody and there aren't any glaring omissions that jump out at me.

You do make a very good point though Woody and I agree completely that there is some selfishness involved in posting on a forum, if it is only to the extent that it keeps your skills sharp in areas that possibly would be overlooked otherwise for whatever reason.

Honestly, about 20% of the time when I am responding to someones post I have a general idea as to how to solve the problem but normally find myself researching the problem to give the OP an accurate response and, I guess, that is the ironic part. What I net from a very rudimentary google search to construct my reply could of just as easily been obtained by the OP had they taken the time to look.

Ankur does provide a very good point though, people that are starting to get into the world of programming are at a serious disadvantage because technology is moving so fast. (.NET 2.0 became a final release 4Q of last year and .NET 3.0 is already in the works) The only way to be truly on the bleeding edge of things like this is to be working for Microsoft (or whom ever) developing the technology along with them.

Will this problem go away, no, I am pretty sure that it is, as woody said, the nature of the beast and it comes with the territory. However, I do think that Universities should be putting a greater emphasis on the methodologies involved in the debugging process, how to think in a more abstract manner etc as I think failing to do so puts potential programmers at an extreme disadvantage.

Case in point, I have a very bright intern working with me right now and left to his own ends does a phenomenal job at pushing out code but, given a piece of problematic code ,he is utterly lost as to what should be done or how to solve the problem.

To sum this all up: "If you are going through hell, keep on going." -Churchill.

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^^Modified text taken from gbianchi profile^^
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Discussion:
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