>>>But Computer Science is not Liberal Arts. I think people major in that figuring they want to get a job (something we thought was a vulgar goal in the 60s <s> )
>
>>>And for those reasons I think Pluralsight is a much better bargain
>
>Agreed, Charles.
>I was fortunate to be hired right of college (liberal arts) by a large company that sent me to a fulltime 8 week programming school run by IBM.
>Along with some of my colleagues I went from a dead stop to being able to produce a fairly decent commercial mainframe program in that 8 weeks.
>We really lucked out. Our lead instructor, Ted Climis, went on to head all software development at IBM, so we had a chance to spend 8 weeks with a superstar.
>Ted was a tough taskmaster. A third of the group flunked out after 4 weeks.
>As it turned out, the liberal arts grads did better than the math, science and business majors in the group, but that was probably just the way things turned out. It could just as easily have gone the other way.
>Since then, I've rarely spent more than a month or two learning enough of a new language to get going.
>I can see a need for mentoring, though. Someone to spend a few hours with me just to get past the roadblocks that inevitably pop up.
>I've used Pluralsight several times and had good results, but I personally prefer E-books on my Kindle fire.
>
>I can't imagine spending 4 years learning this stuff.

I had a very similar experience except it was with Arthur Andersen, not IBM. (As it turned out the small company I worked for wound up working very closely with IBM, back when they ruled the waves the way Microsoft does now, and were eventually bought by them). We had good software and very few people and the Androids had tons of people and software no one wanted to buy. Before they got in all the trouble they had a terrific training site in St. Charles, a little west of Chicago. Every Android around the world went there at least once, for their principles of programming course. It was amazing how much you learned about programming in 5 weeks.

It was a fish out of water experience for me. I was and remain a pretty no-frills kind of guy. My classmates were anything but. Lots of blue bloods and all people who had known nothing but success their entire lives. AA's approach was to hire all these incredibly talented people and pit them against each other. It was up or out. If you hadn't made senior staff by a certain age and partner by a certain age you were supposed to take the hint and leave. A very memorable experience. I got to benefit from it -- training as well as contacts -- and never had to play suck-up politics. I count it as one of the luckiest breaks of my life.