Let's be plain upfront: academia dropped the ball on software engineering. Go back to the genesis of the field, and you see that computing was being advanced mostly by needs in the public sector, with the private sector playing a role. The first publicly demonstrated computer was produced by Konrad Zuse in 1941, and marketed by his company Zuse Apparatebau. But it was actually funded by the Nazi government in Germany, specifically the aerodynamic research institute, for its use in designing and flying cruise missiles.

Regular readers of this column already know much of my personal story, including the fact that I am a self-taught software developer. They know that I started programming my Casio fx-180p programmable calculator in the 1980s. They also know that in 1992 I bought my first PC, a venerable 380 SX tower with a whooping 128 MB hard disk and 2 MB or RAM, where I wrote my first "Hello, World!" program in QBasic. What they do not know is how I dropped out of college. Not once, but five times.