Ship's company, by W.W. Jacobs. Illustrated by Will Owen

But everyone knows this is a bit of a fib. Hackers at every college learn practical skills, and not by accident. What you should learn to get a job depends on the kind you want. If you want to work in a big company, learn how to hack Blub on Windows. If you want to work at a cool little company or research lab, you'll do better to learn Ruby on Linux. And if you want to start your own company, which I think will be more and more common, master the most powerful tools you can find, because you're going to be in a race against your competitors, and they'll be your horse. There is not a direct correlation between the skills you should learn in college and those you'll use in a job. You should aim slightly high in college. In workouts a football player may bench press 300 pounds, even though he may never have to exert anything like that much force in the course of a game. Likewise, if your professors try to make you learn stuff that's more advanced than you'll need in a job, it may not just be because they're academics, detached from the real world ...»