Learn what you like

It's not important what language you learn - as long as you don;t think that it's important what job you want to end up with.

As an employer of programmers (developers, software engineers or whatever is the currently preferred job title), I'd have to broadly agree with the original article.

Too few recent graduates have an in depth understanding of how a computer and operating system work. I believe that this is because of the reliance of degree courses on very high level languages (when I learned to program, C was a high level language, but if Java and C# are high level now, then that makes C more like a low-level language).

The new languages insulate the programmer from the OS and internals so much that I constantly find painful bloat in code - for example, it is so easy to use strings in Java and C# that I even find my younger programmers using strings to store numbers, without the faintest clue about how inefficient this is.

If I want someone to write UI code I look for good graphics skills and then C# or PHP. For anything else you need experience with C++ (or C or even better assembler).

I don't blame the students, but I am more and more concerned about the University courses - the course designers should know better.

And finally - students need to realise that hardly anyone works in AI, even if that was the most enjoyable part of your degree it's pretty much useless in the real world!