Microsoft Mindshare

Interesting experience today... I had the opportunity to interview several people for a series of contract-to-hire positions. Since the positions are "entry-level" (i.e. guaranteed to be extraordinarily boring, at least in the short term), several of the applicants were new college graduates.

Here's where it gets interesting. One of the questions I usually ask is the open ended, "You are tasked with developing a dynamic website that does..." question. My aim is to see the interviewee struggle a bit with the pros and cons, prodding every now and then for the opinions and biases that the applicant might have. Two straight applicants, who I had already ascertained to be pretty bright, willing to learn kinds of people simply stated:

"Microsoft products. Likely ASP with ActiveX".

No hesitation, no thought as to the environment. WIth a little prodding, I got the following further answers:

"Microsoft is not including Java anymore, so I think Java development is a bad choice for new applications."

"UNIX can't scale to handle larger volume websites."

"Windows is a better development environment."

"Windows is better for business environments."

Okay ... now I'm baffled. I realize that I have a small sample set, but the sudden 'conclusions' really caught me off guard.

What types of things is Microsoft doing on college campuses to influence mindshare amongst college students? (I'm also a little ashamed of the two college comp. sci. departments that I always thought would be 'technology agnostic'..)

Grief. And I was looking for the "pros and cons of Servlets vs. CGI" answer. CGI didn't even enter the equation!

-- ChadThompson

What types of things is Microsoft doing on college campuses to influence mindshare amongst college students? I don't know, but my guess would be, giving away lots of full-strength licences for all their development tools, server products, etc. to the colleges. Maybe even paying for, or subsidising, wintel hardware. Students don't generally have time to explore different technology families, especially ones that the college doesn't lay on for them.

I'm slightly baffled that a graduate in computer science would be expected to have an opinion about monkey-see monkey-do work like building a "dynamic web site" anyway, but that's another issue, you'll have your reasons. Perhaps I'm just out of touch. By the way, for the scale of problem that you'd give an entry-level developer, my answer would likely be: do it from the ground up in Scheme. Would I get the job? Not that I'd be applying for an entry level position anyway.

Some courses here in the UK now seem to be sponsored by corporations, who get a corresponding amount of influence over the curriculum. Possibly this is more in FE Colleges and former Polys than 'proper' universities, but even so. I work with someone who emerged from college knowing literally nothing but Java, having followed a Sun-sponsored course which taught no other languages. If Sun does it, MS is certain to, so it's possible that these people have been taught things like 'UNIX can't scale to handle larger volume websites', and believe them to be settled fact.

How "they" try to corrupt "us" ( EwDijkstra )

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd12xx/EWD1283.PDF

When I tend to interview, I usually like to look for biases and signs of "entrenched thinking". Even though the position is 'entry level', I'm likely going to be spending quite a bit of time with the new hire in the initial stages, and I absolutely *hate* working with brain dead stooges, and actuallly hope that some of the 'college blood' will be able to teach me a thing or two. Typically the really passionate interested people will have opinions about doing varied tasks. And, actually, I would be pretty intrigued by a college student that wanted to build something from the ground up with Scheme... ;-) -- ChadThompson

But of course you don't have to built it from the ground up in Scheme, since it is all available as the PLT webserver in DrScheme.