Michael Wrinn of Intel has a post about points of view that were brought up in a panel discussion (The Academic Community Multi-core Programming Roundable) at this year’s Intel Developers Forum. Here is an excerpt:
“The recurrent theme: performance. The audience, mainly from industry, certainly picked it up; several identified themselves as hiring managers, and lamented the general ignorance of performance and architecture details. At least one of them said he prefers to interview only EE graduates - for software jobs - since CS students typically do not bring what his company needs (the industries represented here were quite varied: search engine, medical instruments, cluster consulting etc).
I wonder if the academic computing universe is splitting into two camps: those where students deal directly with architecture, low-level languages, concurrency, and performance, and those where students stay at a higher level of abstraction (typically expressed with Java or Python)? And, if that division is true, is that ok with everyone?”
Related Links
Thoughts on the IDF Concurrency Panel
Interesting observations on performance focus
