Intel’s Michael Wrinn comments on points of view expressed by panelists at the Academic Community Multi-core Programming Roundable

Which brings us to the recurrent theme: performance. The audience, mainly from industry, certainly picked it up; several identified themselves as hiring managers, and lamented the general ignorance of performance and architecture details. At least one of them said he prefers to interview only EE graduates – for software jobs – since CS students typically do not bring what his company needs (the industries represented here were quite varied: search engine, medical instruments, cluster consulting etc).

At the conclusion of the article he wonders if we’re entering a talent bifurcation

I wonder if the academic computing universe is splitting into two camps: those where students deal directly with architecture, low-level languages, concurrency, and performance, and those where students stay at a higher level of abstraction (typically expressed with Java or Python)?