Go To University, Not For CS

I think the higher universities with older programs would be more inclined to teach theoretical than younger programs just starting during the dot com boom or during the past few years.

> Let's see if it's still standing a couple decades from now.

I didn't realise that it was solely teams of skilled engineers and artisans doing the riveting on Empire State back in 1930.

Probably not, if you look at magazines like the Communications of the ACM you will see that academia sees their "failure" to churn out programmers for industry as a crisis, and are more concerned with appealing to women, minorities, and people who may not find theoretical CS topics like algorithms and data structures easy or fun enough.

They want to increase their rolls basically, and they saw how switching from CS to learn java style trade schools during the internet boom helped do that.

Now that the market has stabilized a bit, they hate to see rolls dropping, they hate to see CS classes filled only with the right sorts of people (i.e. geeks and nerds for want of a better term) to carry the discipline further, so they want to dumb it down even further, make it more mainstream, get all the cool kids in.

I don't blame them I guess. It is mostly the fault of industry blaming them for not churning out experienced senior software engineers.

Computer Science should stay pure, the right people will always come, even if it won't be the biggest or coolest department at uni it will always have a rich culture.

People have their whole lives to gather experience and become great developers, they can do that on the job. You only have a few years at university so you shouldn't try to use it to become a good developer, you should use it to learn core CS theory and whatever else leading edge topics interest you that may or may not yet be used in industry.

Industry would be better off asking themselves why they don't do a better job training developers themselves, providing great career paths, and even contributing back to academia, cooperating with CS departments writing papers, doing research and taking part in conferences.

I will say, however, that there's a lot of CS ignorance in the industry. Even really paying attention to a weekend course about "two dozen good things to know as a programmer" would put someone ahead of about 1/2 of all the big-company coders out there. As an industry, we could probably reap billions of dollars of increased ability over a 4 year span from adopting this sort of continuing education becoming common. (Doctors have this sort of continuing ed.)

Once, at a company I worked for, there was a project that lost millions because they didn't know you can't translate one context free language into another with only Regular Expresions. (Before I got there.) And I keep on being some kind of guru because lots of corporate coders don't understand that naive Array add operations are O(n^2). (FFS!)

I also think I'm 1 of only 3 in my group who has any inkling of what you need to deal with concurrency.

Arrgh! I need a new job!