To their credit, the advisors at my college urged us VERY strongly to all get internships by our senior year. They explained frankly that not only would an internship be a crucial complement to our classroom education, but that it would dramatically improve our job prospects after school. I know it was so for me on both fronts.

Businesses don’t perceive code bases as long-term assets, so there isn’t a lot of effort put forth to create systems that are sustainable over a period of years.  This is due, in part, because many of the decision-makers don’t understand how one chunk of code can be considered “good” and another “bad” if they appear to produce the same results — even if they produce the same results most of the time.

I’ve been in organizations that “get it”.  I don’t believe this was ever ubiquitous, but I think it’s becoming rarer as time goes by.  I think you can trace some of this back to education, but I really believe that the schools are giving businesses what they’re asking for.  Maybe what we really need is some education for business school majors so they can begin to appreciate why they might be interested in code bases that don’t collapse into a steaming pile as soon as someone sneezes on them.  I remember some finance classes where we discussed depreciation and accounting for computer systems, but nobody ever said “boo” about the idea that the quality of the code in the system had any kind of appreciable effect on the cost of maintenance for a system.

Maybe we’re fighting this fight from the wrong end…