IS professionals

Sometimes doing group projects make me think about stuff. That is, group projects in learning institutions. Usually its not very good stuff that I think about. I was thinking some people might identify themselves with the things I might say, so I don't think I'll say anything. (no karen, not you, u just pretend ur dumb)

Instead, I thought I'd talk about what an Information Systems professional is. If you want the short version, its basically someone who pretends to know what they're doing with computers. If you've ever actually talked to most of them though, most of them wouldn't know any other kind of operating system other than windows. Oh sure they know what a Mac is, but when you tell them it doesn't actually run windows, they look shocked (it actually runs OS X, an apple propreietry OS based on UNIX).

For most of the people who complete an Information Systems degree, they won't actually know too much more than before they started. Oh sure they'll learn that TQM stands for total quality management, and that GPRS has something to do with mobile phones, and if you're lucky, you'll find that they might even know what UNIX is. Personally, I think going to do a technical college might get you a better job.

Sure Information Systems is a new area of study and nobody really knows much about it. However, they try to teach you a lot of timewasting crap. Things such as system design, organisational change, and inefficient code. Yesterday I was told by Joey that 'for' loops are technically incorrect, and that while loops should be used instead. Now excuse me if I'm wrong, but I'm sure you can write the equivilent of a while loop with a for loop without any complications at all.

Thing is though, a lot of the academic staff in the department pretend to be experts. Rox works in the industry, and she rekons that if she does a specialist course, the company can 'sell you off as an expert' when in fact, you don't actually know that much more than anyone else. Lucky academics have the benefit of hindsight when looking at other peoples' mistakes. Case studies of information systems are usually analysed, and they can tell you what went wrong, but only after it happened. I'm sure that if they were in that situation as well, chances are they probably would have made similar mistakes.

This is actually starting to sound like economic theory. Maybe I'm being too harsh again. Students probably don't really go home and sit around on the computer everyday like I do. They probably haven't set up their own computer network at home, nor have they built their own computers from scratch. Maybe I'm just a computer science geek in denial.