Version Control and Higher Education

Which is not to say that universities shouldn't make these tools available and encourage their use for class projects. But that doesn't require them to "integrate version control into their curriculum" like the article suggests. The documentation for git is freely available on the web and anyone who wants to can read it on their own time and ask their fellow students about it.

The larger philosophical question here is whether higher education is a vocational program for creating good "team players" who are productive with the current technology on the first day of their employment, or rather to provide an education that teaches them fundamental knowledge and how to learn new things on their own.

Side note: I've taught a first semester CS course in a well-known university, so I have some experience with the difficulties that even some very smart students face while trying to pick up the basic concepts. Adding in version control would have made it harder for some of them to successfully complete the course.

To turn this around, why should businesses pay former students to learn about this on the job instead of paying them to be productive?

From my experience, there's a large number of developers (both young and old) out there who are very capable programmers, but seem to not spend any of their spare time learning things on their own after leaving school. It's insanely frustrating having to teach new junior developers how to properly use a tool like git when they've never even been exposed to version control, all while they're supposed to be productive. It really can become a waste of company resources.

Are they capable of learning version control on the job? In most cases, absolutely, given enough time and buffer for mistakes. However, I believe, as part of professional development in the field they chose, it should be something they learn outside of work and preferably before getting the job. University seems like a very valid place to at least introduce and encourage use of version control systems early on, if not at the very least in a higher level course.

Then I get to my internship and have to learn Team Foundation Server... Sheesh.

Because it's expected that entry-level employees don't have a lot of experience. It's even possible that these young people have taught themselves all sorts of useful things on their own already, but haven't gotten around to teaching themselves version control or the particular database system or development environment that your company uses. I think it's a better investment to hire someone who is smart and a fast learner than it is to hire someone who happens to know the particular tools you currently use.

In the software field, we've somehow decided that it's normal for entry-level employees to have lots of practical experience. But in most other jobs, that's not the case: they learn at their employers' expense. How many new hires on Wall Street have ever used a bond trader's workstation? How many newly-hired railroad employees have ever driven a train? How many newly-hired lawyers have ever represented a client in court?