US soldiers preparing for civilian life taught coding skills by Microsoft Microsoft has launched a new program aimed at teaching programming skills to active-duty US soldiers as they transition out of the military. Dubbed the Microsoft Software & Systems Academy (MSSA), the program is a 16-week course designed specifically to prepare veterans for certifications in such fields as software engineering …
I didn't know Microsoft's products supported GIT. Anyway, Visual Studio indeed does via some plugin or other. Eclipse of course does too.
Anyway, this is fine by me. I kind of agree with Thorne actually, it might be trial by fire compared to using a nicer API (if they are using Visual C or C# in VS, which seems likely.). But, *shrug*. Once you've learned to use one language it's much easier to learn other ones later, the techniques generally apply. (Well in general... I mean, C or .NET programming will not really prepare someone for the likes of LISP, but not much will.). I do all my programming for Linux and Android myself (C,Python, shell script). I've done some on Windows programming too; I found the API to be a real unholy mess in comparison but I got it to do what I needed.
IT is taught in prisons... IT is taught to soldiers (16 weeks to become a software engineer? C'mon!).
When IT became something for "hopeless" people? Why don't they teach them how to cook, for example? Or became lawyers/accountant? Or how to run a bank? The latter is far easier... if something goes wrong, the government bails you out with taxpayers money....
"hopeless"? It would be news to most soldiers that they're considered hopeless.
Also, IT is nothing special. It's a big industry that needs lots of people - why shouldn't soldiers (or anyone else) retrain to enter the industry?
I did some work at ICL back in the day, which was notoriously staffed by ex-military types.
The methodologies and mentality were... interesting. PRINCE2 and "You have to do things this way because you've been ordered to".
Courtesy of the Peter Principle the military types quickly found their way into management positions because they couldn't problem-solve or code for shit. But they sure knew how to dress crispy and brown nose the clients.
The thought of guys like this running round engineering departments shouting "hut hut hut" and using the language of the battlefield ("Executing on the homepage mission was a tough campaign, but the lads dug in and refused to quit. God Bless America.") frankly makes me feel a bit queasy.
Posted anonymously for obvious reasons given how these days questioning anything a soldier says or does is tantamount to peddling kiddie pr0n.
I suspect that's more to do with PRINCE2 and ICL than any military background. I've had good and bad leaders in and out of the military. Granted, a couple of the worst leaders I've had have been in the military, but they ended up in leadership positions through luck; the military process weeds out a lot of the worst. On the other hand, management in IT seems to actively recruit PHBs.
You said it yourself:
"Granted, a couple of the worst leaders I've had have been in the military"
As for ICL, the ex-mil types were there because all their ex-mil mates had jobs at govt, BT and the like.
And as for PRINCE2. Ive never seen such a waste of resources. Filling in a form in triplicate every time you need to take a sh1t is beyond retarded. Then another guys comes and fills in another form saying he came and checked you flushed. What a brilliant way to demotivate professionals and slow development time to a crawl. But these guys loved it.
One day, just for a lark because by this time I was beyond caring, I inserted the populate nursery rhyme "Mary Had a Little Lamb" into the middle of a test spec. It got through all the PRINCE2 BS reviews and checks and double-checks. The only thing I was asked to change was a typo. The reviewers had literally just passed it through a spell checker. They hadn't read it through. Nobody did.
When I pointed out to the military type that all this process was a joke because nobody took it seriously he demanded to know who the reviewer was so disciplinary action could be initiated. He missed the point by an absolute country mile. But thats the problem. They cared more about their top-down precious edifice of process bullshittery than supporting an environment that promoted productive engineering.
I quit a couple of days later. I never did give up the name of the reviewer.
Lots of govt work is the same. That 10bn we just p1ssed away on a failed healthcare project?
If someone ever cared to look, they would find the same kind of thing. Its an utter joke.
Of course, there are I am sure ex-mil types who understand supporting their people is much more important than simply ordering them around and I may have simply had a bad experience. But one look at British Aerospace (EADS these days), Nimrod and the sub fleet will tell you all you need to know about how tax payer $ get spent between govt/defence brass and their ex-military defence contractor chums.
I think the problem is the type of ex-military people you encountered. There's a certain small subset of senior officers who don't actually have any talent aside from following a process and giving orders - which makes them very similar to most senior civil servants or senior bosses in big gov contractors.
It's this unholy triage - big contractors, senior civil servants and senior brass - which make MoD procurement such an utter, ongoing disaster.
The majority of leaders I have met in the Army are good, by necessity. It's in the civilian world that management seems to be generally awful.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
