Web or Software development? What does the modern student think?
Posted by Jesse Rodgers on February 05, 2007 at 07:49 PM
Last week I spent a day in the Tathum Centre (Co-op building) interviewing a bunch of UW students for the position of Web Developer here in CPA. Later in the day I sat in on the end of Mike Potter’s (from Adobe) presentation on Flex/Apollo and the jobs Adobe has available for Co-ops. It was an interesting day for me and I just wanted to share some of my impressions…
At least a few students seem to think web jobs are simply copy/paste text or creating inventive ways to covert documents to HTML. I know some I interviewed have had those jobs and have stayed relatively clear of web jobs since… why those jobs are called a ‘Web Developer’ position is beyond me. It was good they asked me and it points out that I need to make sure it is clear in the job description what a day as a web developer entails. I am really surprised how shy they are with regards to web jobs.
As for how Flex/Apollo was received, I was a little surprised. At 4:30 pm the room was full (I am sure it had nothing to do with the pizza) and Mike was doing his thing. I missed a large part of it but I did get to listen in on the questions. Most had not seen Apollo before but instantly they had some good ideas, hopefully some of those ideas will appear on the web sometime soon as working projects.
But what got me is that the students in the room do not see that as a web job even though working on Flex/Apollo apps is essentially web application development. Is it that the classic software development world (the place these students are learning) is spending the majority of its time thinking about the browser as a platform? Perhaps.