If you know mostly what you'd like to to, have a chosen path to get there, and time and $$$ to do it this model would probably work very well.

The problem is, I have NEVER seen that in my 15 years of developing. The technology landscape is constantly evolving, we need developers that know how to learn to do stuff ... not know how to do stuff. Assumptions and business requirements change, often daily. Developers need to communicate with businesses, persuade them to make good decisions (why I like developers with Arts and Sciences backgrounds). My guess is we'd get a lot more meaningless (not well thought out) stuff done which would buy us squat.

I don't want an army of semi-functional programmers, I want a FEW real developers.

I am in the beginning stages of teaching a lifelong MS developer and fanboy our Big Data environment. The poor guy basically needs to learn Nix, bash, sed/awk, SSH, cron, Ruby, MYSQL, EC2/S3 and Rails BEFORE we start talking about HDFS, Hive and Mahout. The ONLY thing I have going for me is his background in CS.

Education majors enter college with the worst scores and leave with the highest grades. And we are listening to them? http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505145_162-37245744/heres-the-nations-easiest-college-major/ From personal experience in the an undergrad Math department, the Math education crew were largely though of as do gooders along for the ride. They were conspicuously absent form upper level Math and CS courses, but the History of Math elective I took was filled with them. It is sad so few choose to get into teaching for the right reasons, but understandable. More links ... http://www.campusexplorer.com/college-advice-tips/7DF05979/Easiest-College-Majors/ http://www.thebestcolleges.org/top-10-easiest-and-hardest-college-degree-majors/ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/06/education/edlife/why-science-majors-change-their-mind-its-just-so-darn-hard.html?pagewanted=all

I call BS here ... Families are way more geographically spread out than when you were a kid. People fly more, including people with kids. Get over it.

Teachers are paid what they are largely because there are plenty of people who want to do it. If there weren't we'd have to pay them more. It is a fairly safe career choice choice (low unemployment rates, sackings unlikely, etc), and widely considered to be an easier route through undergrad than science, engineering, most ology's, etc. Conversely, no one wants to be a geek so most of us here on slashdot make the big bucks. Even bigger if you understand business concepts and are personable.

Hell, yeah! Give me some of that thimble sized action ...

I see a lot of grumbling here, but in reality many coders are awful at managing up. Somehow I always seem to end up in nearly totally unsupervised positions. This happens for a number of reasons, but really because I know how to look productive and delivery. More technologists need to sell their ideas, and and their accomplishments. Make the boss look good and generally give them what they like, and success will enviably follow. Manage your manager. Don't over engineer, and don't overwork. Do produce more than expected. Read lots, and have an opinion. Think LEAN. "Done is better than perfect, and perfect is the enemy of done."

One of the issues is we geeks have is there are so many titles, I rarely keep one for more than a year. I sometimes write a lot of code, sometimes very little. Sometimes I do strategy work, sometimes management, and sometimes I sell. But at the end of the day, I lean on my technology skills a ton. I was able to dive and and gain ownership of our Big Data efforts (my current gig) by noodling around with Hadoop at AWS. The following titles were scribed from my resume ... going back 15 years. Sr. Architect Team Lead ICT Volunteer Senior Software Engineer Lead Technologist Software Engineer / Senior Software Engineer I have a ton of friends with other roles ... Principal, CTO, VP, etc. The key is not to lose your head in the code, learn about business, people and process. I'd argue almost no one has the same job for 5 years, in technology or otherwise. Fortunately technology is a growing field, don't fight it ... grow along with it.

This stuff is given to pretty much all Peace Corps Volunteers in malarial zones. Speaking from long term experience, it sucks ass. I made it about a year before I nearly lost the ability to sleep. I was then placed on Doxycyclene which worked ... never got malaria myself. The other option, Malerone, is like 10x as expensive. Neither Doxy or Mal is nearly as good ad malaria prevention, as have to be taken daily ISO weekly, so medical officers are hesitant to make a switch unless things have gotten pretty bad. I would say 50% of my fellow PCVs made it two years on Larium, and many blamed their psychological evacuations (wacky-vacs in Peace Corps lingo) at least in part on it. There is no way in hell anyone with access to firearms should be allowed within ten feet of this stuff.

This response is total BS ... getting vanilla Android apps to work across devices and operating systems is trivial enough, but once you do anything interesting (use the GPS, camera, address book, etc) some phones will surely wet the bed. Write once, debug everywhere.

You really can't compare US and Euro/Brit mileage ratings because they allow for totally differing levels of pollutants. It escapes me now, but there is on chemical in particular that makes a massive difference. Anyone?