Special Report- The Epic Failure of some South African universities to properly educate

Some of you know why I am scarce on this forum- I am so bloody overworked its not even funny.

So the owner of the company, with the aim to relieve some of the pressure on me, got two graduates in for interviews, with the aim to add to our R&D team. One was from Wits, one was from UJ. Myself, and the owner of the company conducted the interviews yesterday.

The candidate from UJ held two degrees, one in IT and one in Electrical Engineering. The candidate from Wits did pure electrical engineering.
We found that, the universities are teaching engineering courses that are totally inadequate, and there is no practical classes being taught.

Both candidates know some theory, but were unable to answer some technical questions of a very basic nature, the chap with two degrees came right out and said "I don't know what that is" on more than one occasion.

- They cannot even read a schematic diagram
- They've never written a line of code in their lives- they get given a book, so they learn it parrot fashion, and pass the exam, done, dusted as   
  far as the varsity is concerned.
- Neither candidate could identify a standard power supply circuit (which I learned in Grade 12 in high school no less  ) when we tested them
   using one of our products.
- They can tell us how a diode works, but cannot identify same on a real PC board
- Neither has ever laid out a PC board or are aware of how PCB CAD works.
- In terms of design skill and flair, a big fat zero was scored in all cases, leading to the owner of the company to remark "you know absolutely
   nothing!!"

The candidate with the IT degree, could not tell me what MySQL is, nor could he tell me how I implemented our company's mail server. Nor could he answer basic concepts about TCP/IP and routing.

The dual-degree candidate also asked for a salary that is many times what any of us earn, which pissed off the owner of the company. Apparently they get told at varsity a fairytale about what is going on in the real world.

Needless to say, neither candidate was hired yesterday.

I foresee South Africa heading down the same road as the Yanks, with a country full of people who want to be managers and get big bucks, and no people on the ground to build, engineer, and design systems, of course, like the USA, we'll just get our good friends in China to do that for us.

It is also apparent the universities have "dumbed-down" the faculties significantly and are quite apparently, a joke.

I never had the benefit of going to varsity but it is quite apparent I didn't miss anything nor do I actually need the degree anyhow.

I do think that there are some people who go into careers in I.T. for all the wrong reasons (money etc.) and they do not genuinely have a passion for what they are doing.

Too true....

We currently have a 3rd year student from Wits at the office... let's just say I've redeployed him elsewhere, he fucked up my stuff because he's never even done anything as basic as hammering a nail into a wall and he gets on my tits!!!!