Key on Caring

Our offshore coordinator asked this via Email:

What courses of technology would you recommend for your staff to take?

He had a list of classes (mostly specific to Microsoft Platform) in the body of email.

My answer. They shouldn't take any of those courses. They shouldn’t key on languages and platforms. They should key on learning to communicate, to think, and to work well with other people as well as to care for their craft. Once they have those, learning the languages and technologies become simple matters.

Reading principle-based books like Pragmatic programmer and Peopleware is by far a better start then blindly following those courses.