The process of building a binary search tree or proving the pumping lemma are all exercises. Just like anything else being good at things takes practice, college is (or should be) as good of an environment for this as we can create.
Your examples are at least related to software. What good is Art History? The 6 courses of calculus, differential equations, and three or four other classes math classes I took over 20 years ago.
Another retort people say is that any specific language you learn in school will be obsolete soon as you graduate. That’s only true if you are teaching the latest $cool_kids_front_end_framework. Even that could be alleviated if you had courses your senior year focused on what’s in demand right now.
But, from my vantage point, the five go to industry languages haven’t changed in the past 10-15 years. By 2004, the web was already a big deal as was Jsvascript. Java and C# were big in the enterprise and while scripting languages that start with P (Python, Perl, Php) go in and out of style knowing one of them would help you move to another one and of course C/C++ will never die.
While I was in classes it wasn't job focused, or at least not directly....People telling you directly that college shouldn't be about job training are feeling a bit nostalgic and idealistic
Again, you had the privilege of not “being job focused.” So did I to an extent, I already knew how to program before going to college - I was hobbyist Basic and assembly language programmer for six years prior. The only thing four years of college did for me was expose me to two useful classes - C and data structures. But by then, I already had a C compiler for my Mac and was playing around with it.
But my parents growing up in the segregated south didn’t have that privilege. They knew their only way out was college. There only reason for going to college was to get a job. Middle class families aren’t sending thier 2.5 kids to college to be “better citizens of the world”.
So I say again, what's stopping the underprivileged student, paying for college with debt and loans, from broadening their mind, while getting the skills to pay the bills?
How much less debt could they have if society didn’t look down on “vocational training”? Schools/degrees that just focus on learning just what you need to get a job.
It seems to me that you equal Computer Science to Computer Programming. The later is just a really small subset of the former, and like you write most people already know how to do it before they attend University.
In my CS studies we never learned any programming, it was kind of assumed that you already know how to do it. Instead we focused on all the other things like computational complexity theory, computer graphics, programming language theory, design of computational systems, theory of computation, human–computer interaction, artificial intelligence and all the other much more interesting stuff.
After I left university I in practice haven't written any code yet (in 5 years), I've been only working with designing big systems which are later populated with components which are programmed by programmers.
But even though, the mantra at university was always, we don't teach you any specific language, we teach you the building blocks behind those languages with the goal so that you can take a new language and learn it within two weeks because you already know most of the paradigms behind it and you only need to learn the syntax, the libs you can look up in the documentation.
Learning a language in two weeks is easy. Every language has its own paradigms and way of doing things - you can write Cobol in any language.
I came in as a dev lead with “database developers” who were just learning C#. They wrote C# just like they wrote SQL - one long program in the main method.
Learning a language is not difficult. Learning that you don’t have to write your JSON yourself and you should use a library, learning the difference between structured logging and non structured logging and the libraries that are out there for each. Learning any framework is going to take longer than “two weeks”. Just because you know the syntax doesn’t mean you can write maintainable software. Get in front of C compiler and just “learn the syntax” and see how that works out.
Anyone who comes out of computer science thinking they can hit the ground running as a developer for any company, says a lot about the current state of “computer science” degrees and why so many “developers” can’t do FizzBuzz.
Ah something we can agree on. There should be nothing seen wrong with getting in depth job training at various kinds of vocational schools. As someone who works with a number of people out of bootcamps who are now great programmers I can only hope this is a good sign, at least in my field, some other fields are surly less progressive.
I agree that programming is something which totally sufficient can be taught in vocational schools, no need to do that in university. My brother never went to university and he is a much better programmer than me when it comes to specific languages, etc. The idea behind my Computer Science degree is to learn the theory behind it. I would consider it a failure if it was just programming which I would have learned at the university.
And 90% of developers will never use the “theory”. They will be writing bespoked internal apps and yet another software as a service web app.
Even if you are on the opposite end of complexity and writing drivers (few people will), embedded software, operating systems etc., you’re more than likely not going to be using a lot of the theory. Yes I have a CS degree, I was a hobbyist assembly language programmer before going to college, and I spent well over a decade as a low level C bit twiddler.
I’ll take someone any day that can hit the ground running and knows how to develop over someone who knows “theory” and can’t write FizzBuzz in the language that we are using.
Your examples are at least related to software. What good is Art History? The 6 courses of calculus, differential equations, and three or four other classes math classes I took over 20 years ago.
Another retort people say is that any specific language you learn in school will be obsolete soon as you graduate. That’s only true if you are teaching the latest $cool_kids_front_end_framework. Even that could be alleviated if you had courses your senior year focused on what’s in demand right now.
But, from my vantage point, the five go to industry languages haven’t changed in the past 10-15 years. By 2004, the web was already a big deal as was Jsvascript. Java and C# were big in the enterprise and while scripting languages that start with P (Python, Perl, Php) go in and out of style knowing one of them would help you move to another one and of course C/C++ will never die.
While I was in classes it wasn't job focused, or at least not directly....People telling you directly that college shouldn't be about job training are feeling a bit nostalgic and idealistic
Again, you had the privilege of not “being job focused.” So did I to an extent, I already knew how to program before going to college - I was hobbyist Basic and assembly language programmer for six years prior. The only thing four years of college did for me was expose me to two useful classes - C and data structures. But by then, I already had a C compiler for my Mac and was playing around with it.
But my parents growing up in the segregated south didn’t have that privilege. They knew their only way out was college. There only reason for going to college was to get a job. Middle class families aren’t sending thier 2.5 kids to college to be “better citizens of the world”.
So I say again, what's stopping the underprivileged student, paying for college with debt and loans, from broadening their mind, while getting the skills to pay the bills?
How much less debt could they have if society didn’t look down on “vocational training”? Schools/degrees that just focus on learning just what you need to get a job.