My thoughts on the need to teach software engineers how to communicate are on record at this site before. However, I wonder about the recruitment issue...

Firstly, do we really want to communicate to fresh young high school leavers, that software is a career which will take their social life, their health, their nerves and their sanity? Do we want them to know that it is not a profession but just a bunch of technically competent people lost in the wilderness? Do we want them to realize that they will work with well meaning people some of whom even read books but fail to grok the benefits? For the reality is that software engineering is badly practiced almost everywhere you go - quality is lousy, estimation is lousy, management is unreasonable, uncaring and lacks knowledge, projects run over time and under-deliver, architectures collapse under the weight of their own coupling, and software engineers the world over sacrafice their time or their health or their family life for a promise that things will get better. Then they quit and go somewhere else hoping that the grass is greener somewhere else.

From Jerry Weinberg's Quality Software Management Volume 1, of 28,250 software groups surveyed, almost 28000 are either 0-Oblivious [25,000], 1-The Super Programmer[300] (the single hero from the movies), or 2-The Super Manager[2,600] (the whip the troups until they drop leader). In other words only 1% of organizations in the survey are places you would truly want to work.

When you couple that to the macro-economic reality that basic programming is heading for low cost economies such as India, China, Eastern Europe and other parts of Asia, what do you do to motivate a promising flock of young Scottish brains? Software engineering today looks as promising as Mining Engineering did in the early 1980's.

My feeling is that you need to go up-market. You need to brand Strathclyde as elite and you need to brand its graduates as the best - people capable of getting to the higher levels on the Jerry Weinberg scale - the highest being "congruent". If there is a whole world of colleges out their producing mediocrity whose graduates haven't heard of Larry Constantine and can't spell "cohesion", don't know what structured methods are and look blankly at you when you try to explain that procedural begat, functional, which begat object-oriented, which begat both service-oriented and aspect-oriented. And I could go on...

In a world where as much as 80% of the funds spent on software are wasted on needless rework produced by charlatans what the world needs now is a profession of software engineers. It behooves the better colleges of the world to set about producing the members of that profession and to build a market for their services through appropriate branding and education of the marketplace to demand the quality the brand implies.

"It goes faster because it's Strathclyde inside" ;-) [said only slightly tongue in cheek] Why can't Strathclyde be the USC of the West Coast of Europe?