Which is a good thing. They should be teaching the cornerstone principles, not offering vocational courses.
my old CS prof at my uni used to say when this question came up "do you sign up for an astronomy course and expect they teach you how to build a telescope?" It's always puzzled me why people sign up for an academic education that has 'science' literally in the name and then complain when they get a theoretical education. It's not a tool workshop
A single course... no, but if I was majoring in astronomy I would expect to understand telescopes enough to put one together.
Something tells me it was always like that. My university professors were teaching things nobody wanted to learn, and people were practically begging to be taught more up-to-date hireable skills. Every time there was project work, we would be recommended using Swing or similar because that is what professors knew, but everyone used React because nobody hires Swing developers. Someone once said "Our SQL professor's SQ…
Someone told me that once a good idea came about it took about 5 years to process it into a book and then it took another 5 years to be accepted by people teaching outside of consultancies. Of course, by then, it was antiquated.
Of course the other extreme that's taken over the industry is the frontend flavor of the week. Where you learn one in first year, and by the time you graduate it's already been replace (once if not twice over).
You think most people spend tens of thousands of dollars on college and expect not to be employable?
What you're after is a technical college with vocational training. They are definitely important and have their place. Some students at university would be better off going to technical colleges. But technical colleges are not the same as what universities do.
Considering how many are struggling to find a job, evidently it’s the universities that need to change.
The Pythagoras theorem doesn’t change even if you use an LLM. Fundamentals shouldn’t either. Don’t see why schools should see this any differently.
I agree. That's why universities should never teach any practical real world programming languages. They should stick to Scheme and MMIX.
I don't mind Scheme - love it. But MMIX is one heck of a convoluted, "fantasy-alien" assembly language that I cannot stand. Gave up reading TAOCP because of it. Knuth should have stuck to pseudo-code or plain C.
I am not in a CS program myself, but I guest lecture for CS students at CMU about 2x/year, and I'm in a regular happy hour that includes CS professors from other high-tier CS schools. Two points of anecdata from that experience: - The students believe that the path to a role in big tech has evaporated. They do not see Google, Meta, Amazon, etc, recruiting on campus. Jane Street and Two Sigma are sucking up all the ta…
When I was in college in the early 2000s, it was the same. Most professors were at least a decade behind current technology.
I went to school in the same era, and I never felt that mattered.
It's simply not possible to cover all the languages, frameworks, databases, and whatever else you might use after graduating. They have to teach somewhat generic skills.
This applies to every degree. No one expects to learn all the latest developments in mathematics when majoring in that field.
I'm in a CS program right now, I've seen wild shifts from ChatGPT 3.0 to the current models: 1) I've seen students scoring A grades in courses they've barely attended for the entire semester 2) Using generative AI to solve assignments and take-home exams felt "too easy" and I was ethically conscious at first 3) At this point, a lot of students have complex side-projects to a point where everyone's resume looks the sa…
Hadn't considered the side project issue.
There have been a couple of reports of artists being asked to draw, as they lost trust in the portfolios.
"The professors use AI themselves and expect their students to use it, but do not have a gauge for what kinds of problems make for an appropriately difficult assignment in the modern era." I'm a prof, recently retired but still teaching part-time. This is exactly the problem. AI is here, people use it, so it would be stupid (plus impossible) not to let students use it. However, you want your students to still learn s…
Not just that. As a 31 year old developer even I feel like acquiring new skills is now harder than ever. Having Claude come up with good solutions to problems feels fast, but I don't learn anything by doing so. Like it took me weeks to understand what good and what bad CMake code looks like. This made me the Cmake guy at work. The learning curve delayed the port from qmake to CMake quite a bit, but I learned a new sk…
I can't imagine that you aren't learning a lot in just getting the AI to do what you need it to do. I haven't learned as much as I have in the last 6 months in a long time, including grounding theory and new kinds of testing. I feel like a PhD student again.
I'm in a CS program right now, I've seen wild shifts from ChatGPT 3.0 to the current models: 1) I've seen students scoring A grades in courses they've barely attended for the entire semester 2) Using generative AI to solve assignments and take-home exams felt "too easy" and I was ethically conscious at first 3) At this point, a lot of students have complex side-projects to a point where everyone's resume looks the sa…
> 3) At this point, a lot of students have complex side-projects to a point where everyone's resume looks the same. It's harder to create a competitive edge. This one of the things that breaks my heart personally. I have personal projects I am so proud of that took me years to build or considerable effort to reading through papers and implementing by hand. I used to show these in interviews with such pride, but now t…
You put this well, now that you mention it, I sometimes find myself trying to defend my earlier work as "Pre-ChatGPT," as if that even matters. Relegating future such work to some sort of romanticized "artisanal craftsmanship" feels hollow. That being said, I'm more productive than ever and finally got projects that have stalled out going again, and these projects have made my own life easier as a result. More utility from the result than from having walked the journey perhaps.
I'm in a CS program right now, I've seen wild shifts from ChatGPT 3.0 to the current models: 1) I've seen students scoring A grades in courses they've barely attended for the entire semester 2) Using generative AI to solve assignments and take-home exams felt "too easy" and I was ethically conscious at first 3) At this point, a lot of students have complex side-projects to a point where everyone's resume looks the sa…
> 3) At this point, a lot of students have complex side-projects to a point where everyone's resume looks the same. It's harder to create a competitive edge. This one of the things that breaks my heart personally. I have personal projects I am so proud of that took me years to build or considerable effort to reading through papers and implementing by hand. I used to show these in interviews with such pride, but now t…
Everything returns to dust eventually.
Your contributions are part of what helped humanity to get to where it is now.