Maybe it's just cause I live in Georgia...

I'm a college student.  I go to a small tech school in Georgia because it's 30 miles away and it's free (Georgia's HOPE program).  I am also preparing for a contest in Computer Programming held by an organization called SkillsUSA. 

And that's where my trouble starts.

You see, SkillsUSA is an organization that holds yearly competitions for high school and college students.  The goal behind the competitions is, supposedly, to "prepare students for the challenges of the workplace.

"Uh huh... So I guess every software company out there considers creating a dollar to euro calculator a challenge.  The reason I am so sarcastic about this is because the NATIONAL compitition project for last year was literally this:  Create an app that converts Dollars to Euros, Baht, Mark, and some others.  The NATIONAL COMPETITION.  No, you don't have to access a web service to get the current exchange rate, you don't event have to display an image of the type of currency; just convert and show the output.  And that's supposed to prepare me for the workplace?  A monkey and a stick can pull that app off!

It's just that I'm tired of the rest of the world thinking that every programmer is either this invinicible deity who can write 3DSMAX in 2 days, or a complete ****ing idiot who couldn't write "Hello World" if his/her life depended on it.

Now my qualms with the competition itself are too extensive to explain here (like how they put VB in the same list of allowed languages as RPG),  but I just think it's insulting to any decent student developer to think a competition like that is worth attending.

Please tell me someone out there feels the same way.

See, that's the problem.  The ONLY constraint for the competition is that the project be written in VB (any version, i guess), Java (any version here, too, i assume), C++ (a whole other story), and of all things, RPG (who in the world carries around and IBM i Series?!?!)

but whatever.  i supposed i could still reach wpf from C++ but my experience in that language doesn't go that far.  i'm more of a C# kinda guy.

would you like me to email you the conversations i've had with them?  you might get a kick out of it.

From another university student:

If it's that simple, I'd go for the competition to win. It's just another thing to stick on your resume.

yeah, i guess so.  i mean i'm going anyway just to get out of town.  it's just disapointing is all.

Actually, the competition sounds very relevant, depending on how and what is judged.

Most business applications have to deal with currency.  Many also have to deal with conversions.  Neither of those topics are as simple as they sound.  In the real world, I've seen MANY programmers mess it up in this area.  To get it right, you have to demonstrate some real knowledge of the field and language you're using, and probably have to demonstrate some real mathematical competency as well (hint, with a computer the simple mathematical formula for doing conversions is likely to fail you severely if you don't know what you're doing).

With some languages, the solution here is canned, and most of the real work for you will be done already.  But if you're not aware of that, or using one of the languages where there's no built in solution, this is a very non-trivial task.  Especially under a tight time constraint.

I'd suggest you go and see first hand how "lame" it is, before you judge.

zian wrote:

From another university student:

If it's that simple, I'd go for the competition to win. It's just another thing to stick on your resume.

If they get government subsidies, then they will lower the bar to allow more bad students into the program, no?

That's how it is in public schools, imho...

Many technical schools are more interested in federally guaranteed student loans than in their student's skillsets.

Take what you're given and look for better opportunities?

wkempf wrote:

Actually, the competition sounds very relevant, depending on how and what is judged.

Most business applications have to deal with currency.  Many also have to deal with conversions.  Neither of those topics are as simple as they sound.  In the real world, I've seen MANY programmers mess it up in this area.  To get it right, you have to demonstrate some real knowledge of the field and language you're using, and probably have to demonstrate some real mathematical competency as well (hint, with a computer the simple mathematical formula for doing conversions is likely to fail you severely if you don't know what you're doing).

vbrunner__ wrote:

The reason I am so sarcastic about this is because the NATIONAL compitition project for last year was literally this:  Create an app that converts Dollars to Euros, Baht, Mark, and some others.  The NATIONAL COMPETITION.

I have heard that in the state of Georgia that the men are men and that the sheep are scared.

Hmm, currency conversion. That was the first assignment of the very first programming course in my first year at Leiden University. It did turn out to be slightly more difficult than the teacher intended because of floating point accuracy issues. Still, it's not competition-level difficulty I'd say.

The reason they limit the languages is based on most high school and college curriculums. There is acommittee that is responsible for setting the standards each contest at the national leveal is based on. The committee is usually mostly/if not all industry people.

I would blame schools around the US. Look at any joe smoe college CS most are C++ and Java based. Thus the standard accepted languages.

I think you can show a lot of skills with a currency app. Thus there is a lot of extras you can include. Plus they could have time limits and feature sets within those time limits etc. It would be interesting to see the standards they judge on. I think you 'll be suprised how intensive the competition will be.

Let us know how it goes!

Josh
Virginia SkillsUsa President 2000-2001 (VA Post Secondary)
2001 National Competitor -Computer Matienance