Are there any good, dedicated and passionnate developers in Montreal? (4)
I have spoken recently to Arach Tchoupani, aka MontrealPython instigator, who said that he had some really bad memories from his classes, where it seemed he’d had in front of him a long, boring career. Most young people who go to computer engineering programs go there because at one point, they hoped to join Ubisoft, because they’ve heard the story of Google or Yahoo!, or maybe because they want to code some sort of cool image treatment algorithm. What they find though, in Montréal universities at least, are programs that teach them to be a nice, profesionnal, and good consultant or programmer at a big firm like IBM, CGI, or Bell.
I remember reading an article 10 days ago at La Presse. The author was a top VP from Bell, who claimed that students were actually shying away from computer science programs and related fields. He was concerned as the IT industry, in Quebec at least, would need at least 20.000 IT engineers, developers, and technicians in the next few years.
What the author doesn’t understand though is it’s because of the way they treat their tech people that youngsters are actually shying away from technology. He was in fact considering these people as mere resources, people you would give a small cubicle at the very back of your offices, and ask them to crunch code every day. It’s this kind of language and attitude that gets heard to university deans and make them adapt their classes to big employers like Bell. But nobody thought in the process that practically every student would loose their enthusiasm and hopes in the process.
Nobody should then be surprised to have a hard time finding truly good and dedicated developers in Montréal. I have just read Éric St-Jean’s post at Akoha’s blog, where he tells their quest for interns. It seems they are doing everything, reaching out to universities throughout Quebec and Ontario, speaking to supervisors, but at the end of the road, Akoha still have open positions.
I am wishing them good luck. They’ve got a great website which tells in detail their personality and their story, and Akoha is most certainly one of the most exciting startup to work at currently in Montreal.
In the great scheme of things though, what I wrote above still stands true. There is a big problem in universities in how technology is presented. At the end of their studies, a student coming coming from a Montréal university has to be either crazy or completely inaware of its immediate environment to think about joining or launching a startup. And as far as I know, this is not going to change anytime soon, unless someone starts a startup school, with exciting, challenging and relevant classes, like what Ubisoft has done with their video games schools.
What you are talking about is far from new. When I got into college for a DEC in computing some 24 years ago, most youngster wanted to develop computer games… or work on mainframes in a bank.
When they got out of school, students headed for banks in big companies to work in Cobol on mainframes, wear suits and ties.
I was an intern on Unix and C and everyone was telling me Unix would die and C would not pick up… that led me straight to the Internet and I was using Mosaic and installing NCSA HTTP server(for those who don’t know, the first ever web browser and server) the day it came out.
Everyone agrees schools needs to be more “connected” to employer realities. It’s a struggle between teaching long lasting concepts or coaching apprentices for what is needed at this time in companies. What Ubisoft is doing is great and there should be more initiatives like this one.
Hi, I’m a second year CS student at McGill and I fully agree with you.
I’m one of the few that want to go work for a startup and eventually start one. The problem is that we don’t learn the tools/technologies to build/work for a web/software startup.
What we do is mostly theoretical and not applied so that anyone that would want to go and start a startup out of university as a huge learning curve.
For of my classes I had to do a website in html/css/c/cgi/perl/java applet to learn how to integrate stuff but when you’ve used rails you know how ridiculous that is and how this exercise is pretty useless.
Anyways, I hope I can get an internship for this summer in one of montreal statups to learn real applied technologies.
LP
Stephane, I think what’s important is also the way teachers present technology. They should present it as a field where one should always be curious, challenged, trying out new ventures. I know however that most teachers in cs have the same courses over and over, each year, without changing the content, and this brings a very dull image of technology.
LP, I hope we’d get in touch with McGill teachers one day, and include events like Blitzweekend in the cursus. Who knows… technology might be exciting once again in Montreal universities
Heri: Good post. I wanted to point out that efforts like Blitzweekend, Barcamp, demoCamp, facebookCamp, MontrealOnRails and others like it :) have an incredible impact in creating awareness and reaching out to new people (incl. students). Each of these initiatives reinforce a growing tech scene. I love that.
I’m the first to point to Universities for their faults, but I know that the constructive attitude is to help them see “the light” on this issue. In the near term, we should put together a serious communication channel with Universities and work w/ them to improve their curriculum with regards to … the real world. As you pointed out by saying “I hope we’d get in touch with McGill teachers one day, and include events like Blitzweekend in the cursus”. That’s a good idea! I would add to that École Polytechnique, Concordia, ETS and Université Sherbrooke.
BTW. I always knew there was something better than what was portrayed in Uni. and I found it :)
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