Sorry, Mitch. Want to be a software engineer? Better make sure you go to university. By Matt Barrie, CEO,Freelancer.com

I read Mitchell Harper's opinion piece "Want to be a software engineer? Don't go to university" in the Sydney Morning Herald on Friday with horror. I know Mitch personally, I've had him lecture at my Technology Entrepreneurship class at the University of Sydney, and I know he's passionate about improving the Australian technology industry. I also know the point he's trying to make about improving our education system, which is a personal mission of mine. And yes, there are a lot of problems with the Australian education system in technology. However his piece is case in point about why you need to go to university if you want to be a good software engineer. Mitch simply doesn't get it. Mitch is a self-taught technologist who didn't go to university- and it really shows in his opinion piece. The job of universities is not to teach the latest fad in languages, it's to teach the fundamental concepts and theory. Mitch complains that universities teach concepts that are up to 25 years old. That's the whole point. Technology today is changing rapidly, and it's accelerating. Ever year there's a new language or set of tools to use. The fundamentals behind algorithms, compilers, languages, computer architecture, logic and so forth on the other hand don't tend to change so much. So after you've had a university education in computer science, you're equipped to learn any language or tackle and technology that gets thrown at you in a week or two. Good engineers don't say "I'm a PHP engineer", they say they're a software engineer. PHP looks so many other languages that almost anyone can start writing in it anyway. Arguing that students are ill equipped for industry because they don't know PHP is like saying a graduate journalist is ill equipped to enter the industry if they don't know Microsoft Word 2011. I was particularly horrified because the opinion piece is damaging for Australia's technology industry. The fundamental problem with the technology industry in western countries is that not enough high school students are being encouraged to go into the technical disciplines at university. Some high school student who is passionate about technology is going to read that article and use it as an excuse not to go to university, and that's potentially going to screw up a career.

I've run technology companies now for over a decade and hired hundreds of engineers and programmers. We never, ever , hire engineers that don't have a degree (and good marks). I've done it in the past, and while someone might be highly skilled in certain areas and interview well, what you will find is that over time there will be huge gaps in their knowledge. At university, a curriculum has been developed to give you strong building blocks. Furthermore, as every student will tell you, there will be subjects they love and subjects they hate. With the self taught engineers I've hired in the past, what I've found is that they will be brilliant at the stuff they love, and won't have spent much time at all on the areas that they hate. As a result, you'll find that when you look at something they have designed, sometimes you'll scratch you're head and ask why they didn't use a certain data structure, or consider the time complexity of their algorithm- and you'll get a blank look back. Then it dawns on you that they never studied these subjects because they didn't like them, they were too maths heavy, or dry. I have found this to be a serious problem, and you don't want to be in a position to find out that their knowledge is Swiss cheese when something breaks down the track. Today, we put all technical candidates at Freelancer.com through an extremely rigorous technical exam, and we only hire people with degrees and excellent marks. It's easy to build a website - but it's not easy to build Facebook or Google. There are fundamental 25+ year old concepts that need to be understood, no matter what the technology of the day is. Mitch will discover this quite quickly as BigCommerce gets more successful and grows, which I'm sure it will. I'm also in a fairly unique position to comment on his remarks about US institutions like Stanford and Harvard, and how they compare to Australia. I did my undergraduate at the University of Sydney, doing both a Bachelor (and honours) in Computer Science and Bachelor of Electrical Engineering, as well as doing my Masters in Electrical Engineering at Stanford. For the last 10 years I have been an external lecturer for both EE and CS at the University of Sydney teaching cryptography, and more recently, Technology Entrepreneurship. Yes, Stanford's curriculum tends to be more to up to date in terms of technologies being used, but the concepts are universal. At Stanford I did subjects like Ed McClusky's class in Digital Logic Design that I bet hasn't changed much since he came up with the Quine-McClusky algorithm in the early 70s. Sir Isaac Newton may have died over 350 years ago but we will continue teaching many of his discoveries for some time to come. Declining enrolments is a problem that is not unique to Australia. In the US, the number of students entering engineering and computer science have been dropping since Apollo 11 landed on the moon. Back then, every little kid wanted to be an astronaut when they grew up, and to do that you had to enrol in engineering. Since then, enrolments- even through the dot com boom - have been declining. Over the last twenty years, the number of engineers, mathematicians, physicists and geoscientists graduating with bachelor's degrees have declined by 18 per cent and the ratio of university students achieving bachelor's degrees in these fields has dropped by 40 per cent. Fewer than 15 per cent of US high school students have sufficient mathematics and science qualifications to even consider beginning engineering in the first place. This trend is the same in the UK, Japan and other western nations. The only bright spot we've had in encouraging kids has been Mark Zuckerberg and particularly The Social Network movie, which has had some effect in the consumer internet space.

On the other hand, China now has more English speaking engineers than the US, and India is going through a once in a lifetime boom with a net injection of 14 million people into the workforce every year, and now exceeds over 2 million enrolments in engineering and science per annum - even though only 10 per cent of India's teenagers enrol in tertiary education. I think that the single biggest thing we need to do to get the technology industry growing in this country is to get more high school students enrolling in the technical disciplines at university. More students enrolling will mean that over time, more funding will flow to universities, more graduates will enter the industry, in time more will stay on to do PhDs, research and become lecturers. More grads will leave to enter the technology industry or start their own companies to solve the problems of others. Encouraging passionate young students to forget university because the latest fad of a language isn't being taught isn't just fundamentally wrong, it's dangerous. You won't find a job very easily, and if you want to join the tech boom and start your own company, you'll find it an order of magnitude harder to get someone to back you. I commend Mitch on starting BigCommerce, building it up to $15 million or so in revenue and attracting General Catalyst to make a big investment. But it's a statistical anomaly being able to do so without a tertiary education in technology. For a lot of Australian investors, they will want at minimum to see a degree from a good school, and in many cases a Master's from a top US institution. I know there are quite a few highly vocal entrepreneurs who will say that's not true and point to themselves as examples, but having worked in venture capital and raised tens of millions of dollars either for companies I have been running or assisting, I know it is most certainly true. Most of the successful entrepreneurs that didn't go to uni or dropped out of uni managed to figure out how to bootstrap their businesses (which is the best way to do it). Furthermore, should that bright spark want one day to seek their fortunes in Silicon Valley, they'll have a hard time getting a visa without a bachelor's. It's also pretty hard to go back to the peasant life at uni after going out in the workforce and making a little bit of money and taking on responsibilities like a house, mortgage or children. The problem with our universities are numerous; they are starved of funding - we blew billions building toilet blocks for primary schools that didn't want them, instead of attracting the best lecturers to teach here. We don't get enough fresh new blood into academia, and instead the lecturers I teach alongside are mostly the same ones that taught me back in 1991. We don't encourage (or force) lecturers to go work in industry, for the most part many of the lecturers have never had a job, and thus struggle to start companies, build industry linkages or encourage students to go start a technology company.

We've turned our education system in part into an educational tourism business, where departments are forced to offer dumbed down masters programs to overseas full fee paying students in order to survive, at the expense of our local bachelors students. Don't get me wrong - most of the overseas masters students are truly brilliant, and a large percentage of my engineering team at Freelancer.com are from China or elsewhere. However every year there is clearly a minority in my class that are here for a holiday and when they turn up to an exam with no preparation and get zero because they literally wrote nothing at all on the exam paper. Nothing. It makes me wonder sometimes if Flight Centre is selling a master's upgrade as part of the checkout process on their website. This year, I was forced to move my classes which are taught to a mix of final year bachelors and masters students to 5-7pm at night just to cater for more Masters enrolments. This is horrible for the bachelors students whose lectures start often at 9am and also need to work part time to eat. I've been told in the past to remove the mathematics from my cryptography course to make it easier, which is like trying to make water not wet. I'm not trying to point at the universities, they are doing what they can to survive in the face of dwindling enrolments, scarce resources and lack of funding. But we need to do something to fix this quick. As Marc Andreessen says, software is eating the world. Industry after industry is being disrupted by software, and if your industry hasn't been transformed into a software business, you'd better start worrying now. The biggest bookseller - soon to be the biggest retailer in the world- is a software company (Amazon). The biggest direct marketing platform in the world is a software company (Google). The fastest growing telecommunications company in the world is a software company (Microsoft/Skype). Software is eating the world, and unless we make it a national imperative to build a world class technology industry, someone else's software will be eating us. For those of you reading this in high school with a passion for technology, or if you know someone in high school thinking about a career in technology, get them to enrol in the National Computer Science Summer School. It's an absolutely brilliant program run by Dr. James Curran at the University of Sydney, takes students from all over the country, and Freelancer.com is a sponsor. Last year you got to write your own version of Facebook or program a robot, and it was heaps of fun! It runs over 10 days in January and only costs $360.

Matt Barrie is CEO of Freelancer.com and a lecturer at School of Electrical and Information Engineering, University of Sydney. Want to be a software engineer? Go to university By Adam Brimo, co-founder of Mijura.com Over the past few years I've developed software for large corporations, started the Vodafail campaign, co-founded Mijura and represented Australia in the global Robocup (humanoid robotic soccer) competition. I graduated from University of New South Wales School of Computer Science & Engineering this past year with a Software Engineering degree accredited by Engineers Australia. I am technically a Software Engineer, but what does that mean? Engineers learn to design and build complex systems, sometimes without specific requirements or clear constraints. They mull over the tradeoffs of design, the conditions under which a system might fail and how to properly ensure that it doesn't. This is the job of any decent engineer, regardless of tools or discipline and it is exactly what I learnt at university. We also learnt about industry and an internship in a software company was required to graduate.

My co-founder at Mijura, Prashant Varanasi, studied Computer Science. Computer scientists focus on theory, the inquisitive search for knowledge and understanding. They explore the past while developing theories that push computing forward and lead to new and better tools and techniques, including programming languages. We were both lucky to have the freedom to choose courses from all aspects of computing, regardless of degree. University didn't teach us how to code in the exact languages that some software companies have chosen. It taught us about the ecosystem of computing, how it all began and how we went from the 1 and 0 to search engines like Google, which answer billions of queries a day. Throughout this journey we learnt many languages, patterns and paradigms but that was secondary; once we understood the theory we could pick up a new language within weeks. Both of us are also programmers and we write code on a daily basis. We each learnt how to develop operating systems and algorithms, artificial intelligence and networks, web applications and graphics. We spent five years learning the theories and concepts that underpin the industry yet we only reached the tip of the iceberg. Our education wasn't too different from Harvard and Stanford, which teach the theory of computing much in the way we experienced at UNSW. The greatest threat to Australian startups isn't American companies taking their customers; it's those companies recruiting our talented graduates (and they certainly do). The goal of university isn't to produce the model employee that companies and industry demand today. The aim is to produce educated citizens that can learn, adapt and push the industry forward in the years ahead. If you want to be an electrician then you can learn the trade at a TAFE, if you wish to be an Electrical Engineer then you go to university.

Anyone can learn to write code but they will never be a Software Engineer or a Computer Scientist. They won't be able to design large scale financial systems, search engines or contribute to the next powerful programming language. They can build you a simple website for a thousand dollars but they can't build the next Google and they won't create the technologies of the future. They will be displaced by them. Loading Adam Brimo is the co-founder of Mijura.com Follow IT Pro on Twitter