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The skills startups want are taught at coding bootcamps, not universities. The degree is called computer science for a reason.
> Students are taught formal testing methods such as static analysis, which checks code without actually running it. This helps them understand how to test software programs, but it doesn’t address the testing of distributed systems, web services, and infrastructure resiliency. Examination of these types of user interfaces and back-end systems is essential, Devadiga says.
This is a good observation. In my experience, the biggest hurdle new grads have to overcome is to learn to develop in a context where users and co-workers are going to depend on the projects they build, and need to be maintained. I didn't learn how to set up instrumentation, deployment pipelines, outage alerts, and other important pieces of infrastructure in keeping a web service online in my university classes.
> Because startups are heavy users of cloud computing platforms, it’s assumed that most software engineering students understand how these systems work—but that’s often not the case, Devadiga says. Students need a practical understanding of infrastructure architecture design patterns, DevOps, and cloud platform services like compute instances, object storage, and queueing services. The ability to create applications that can execute in services like Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud is important.
Another one that I think is on point. I did use AWS in a networking class, but that was just because the class instructors didn't want to deal with building dev environments for windows, mac, and linux. I didn't really get exposed to deploying and running a web application on a cloud computing platform. For how universal cloud computing is nowadays, it's surprising how little I was exposed to it in university.
I think it'd be great for universities to offer a "practical software development" class that didn't really focus too heavily on any one particular academic topic, but was more emphasized on imitating the kind of work that developers do in industry. It'd be cool students went through the whole class building, maintaining, and extending a single web service over the course of a semester or quarter. It'd be neat if grading was based not just on application functionality, but also uptime, average latency, and similar metrics - though that would probably be too variable to be fair, a student's site might go down while they're away on a sports competition or something like that.
This is a valid reason to consider a trade school model ("coding bootcamps") to fill this niche. Let Computer Science programs focus on the Computer "Science", while trade schools focus on fulfilling direct company needs. Of course, we need a _ton_ more oversight involved to ensure that bootcamps are actually graduating people with a job-ready skillset.
This won’t happen until the signalling that comes with hiring from [elite school] diminishes and/or the signalling that comes with hiring from [code bootcamp] surpasses it.
A startup can hold out for MIT grads for as long as they want, but they ain't getting one if every other startup is doing the same.
_Someone_ is getting hired at the end of the day. A company that's looking to grow rapidly can't hold out forever.
Some highlights that I felt were very on point: > Students are taught formal testing methods such as static analysis, which checks code without actually running it. This helps them understand how to test software programs, but it doesn’t address the testing of distributed systems, web services, and infrastructure resiliency. Examination of these types of user interfaces and back-end systems is essential, Devadiga say…
The latter is another complaint I've heard from company owners. Too many graduates who just don't know how to work with a company's non-engineers, as they've told me.
Really? Cause it seems, based on my interviews, startups couldn't care less about my background in leading customers through beta demos, collaborating with scientists, participating in sales presentations and outreach, writing documentation, or any of the issues described here. They do seem awful interested in whether I can find all matching subtrees in a binary tree, though. Which, now that I think about, is the one…
The skills startups want are taught at coding bootcamps, not universities. The degree is called computer science for a reason.
I disagree with this. A good Computer Science program must have enough software development curriculum that people actually learn to write code.