Joel Spolsky, whose books and website are essential reading for anyone involved in IT development, complains that today’s programmers can’t program, largely as a result of only having learned modern languages like Java, which don’t stretch students to the same extent as Scheme and C. I agree and disagree at the same time. Whilst I agree that these guys will never be able to advance computer science by programming up the next Google clustering system, maybe they will be able to solve the business, HR and user interface problems that cause so many IT projects to fail.