Title: From the Coalface

"ACCU is your bad influence. That is why you are so biased and don't trust the competence of large, well-established companies and their training courses. Do you think that a company with bad methods can become big? Journals are commercially influenced and are usually full of new "ideas" that never become reality. I know, because we've done critical reviews of journals on my course. C is just one language, and they've sold it to you. Don't bother with journals. You don't need to keep your methods up-to-date if you have methods that work, and big companies have methods that work. Join a big company, and you'll be OK."

This quote is my summary of a conversation with a friend (a mature student at a leading university), who has lots of work experience in various disciplines and is well on the way to being a management consultant.

Could this be an explanation of why the membership of ACCU is not as large as it could be?

Maybe, but many of our strongest supporters come from the world of industry. We could never run conferences at the rates we do were it not for the willingness of employers to release their most skilled staff (and often also pick up the costs) There are really two worlds out there, those that are genuinely professional users of IT (companies like AT&T, Lucent Technology, IBM to name but three) and those that have no idea an employ amateurs (even if sometimes gifted ones) I will not name names here but many of you know from bitter experience just how much professional incompetence in software development is costing industry. Maybe it is attitudes such as your friend's that are the cause of the billions that are wasted every year (and not just on unravelling Y2K problems)