Coding standards are great and all, but creativity in problem solving is much more important in a software developer. In my experience, this is something that the Indian developers lack. I have worked with developers in other countries such as Brazil, NZ, and elsewhere who do a better job on the creativity front.

I completely agree with Andrew, from my personal experience.

Additionally, the day that programmers are nothing more than code monkeys, following instructions and turning out code that a machine could turn out, is the day that I leave the industry forever. When people break the rules and step outside the boundaries of frameworks, standards, or tools, then we should be asking "What do our current frameworks, standards and tools lack that would require a person to step outside of them?" Perhaps our entire Test, Build, Test, Build, QA, Release paradigm is un-evolved. Perhaps our entire notion of computer languages and frameworks and standards and software development lifecycles and processes is flawed and un-evolved.

This is no time to give up and turn into apes.

Having worked in the IT department of two Fortune 500 companies, I believe that the "Hacker Ethic" is actually probably a good counterpoint to the very common cookie cutter IT that is seen in very large companies. True, if your working on packaged "COTS" software that your company is shipping out, code standards, and maintainability are very important, and in those cases, the Hacker Ethic can be harmful to getting software out the door quickly, but in the world that far more of us live in (Enterprise in-house software, corporate IT "Problem Solving"), creativity, and the ability to drive down costs through interesting and unique solutions is a very valuable skill, far more than the ability to code to a spec, and use the "framework du jour". Likewise, in the Game industry (one of the largest sectors of software development), creativity and "hand tuning" is a must.

Now, Six-sigma and Continuous process improvement certainly have their place. They're great at finding local minima for the cost vs schedule vs performance equations but teaching them at university will probably just result in executing them by rote, which doesn't help anyone who doesn't understand them.

While it is great to show the motivation to lean a language from 'scratch' (like many of us did with ActionScript/Flex), but one thing formal education gives you that learning by yourself dosen't is the theories as to why you do or don't do certain things. For example, a good academic dicsussion on things like pointers, and/or why you would want to send a variable by reference, vs a copy of the variable is one thing that is often missing from many self-taughts. They often just take it for face value, and don't know why one would choose one or the other -- or even worse, have a hard time identifiying issue that arrise from not knowing the differences.

I think a great combination of both -- learn theory in school, and self-teach (becuse we all know you need to know more than what school teaches you to be functional in real life), would be best for most people that want to be on the upper-crust of programmers.

Engineers need to be literal minded, its essential for the type of work being done. Now artists and management are on the other side of the spectrum.

I'm american (west indian / latino), and I've worked as SW Eng in major companies for over 10 years, and Asians are definitely the majority in the engineering fields (college and industry). I think its more of a cultural thing, as mathematics, science and engineering isn't the focus in America.

In regards to the Hacker Ethic, just visit any major universities Computer Science department, and you'll find that its necessary to be in that field.

Now Information Technology is different from Computer science, hence in IT, it may be an unproductive viewpoint.

-M