71–80 of 167 posts
I tend to be a somewhat slow learner but once I've learned something, I seem to remember it forever (I only lose a little bit of detail). I remember most of the stuff from university 10 years ago including the brand and model of the microcontroller I programmed (ATMEL ATMEGA8-16PU) and the names of the I/O registers on that chip, the name of the program I used to program it with (AVR Studio). I also remember most stu…
You should invert the question: since EVERYONE forgets all of this CS stuff then perhaps teaching this CS stuff to us programmers is a complete waste of our time in the 1st place? So it's not YOU who is "wrong": it's the universities who have it backwards and are disconnected from the real world work that programmers do.
An even better question is why do people go to college, expecting it to be a trade school? There is nothing wrong with CS curriculum. It's just not for everybody. This is like going to college for Physics and then complaining that they didn't teach you how to fly an airplane.
Like yeah, go to college and get enriched and all of that, but honestly, if one can be self enriched by taking courses a la carte online, then is it really worth to pay out the nose for a degree that has not much (and even dwindling) monetary return? For some, yeah, because of a level of prestige you get from having a degree. For other fields, not so much.
No, people shouldn't take physics and then expect to become a pilot. On the other hand, computer science, which is not actually science but instead a fancy way of describing usage of computers, necessarily means applying algorithms and programming languages. If someone goes through an entire CS degree program but comes out with mostly knowledge that doesn't apply to real world usage of computers, well, what were they even taught in that case?
You should invert the question: since EVERYONE forgets all of this CS stuff then perhaps teaching this CS stuff to us programmers is a complete waste of our time in the 1st place? So it's not YOU who is "wrong": it's the universities who have it backwards and are disconnected from the real world work that programmers do.
The universities don't have it backwards, you do. Computer Science fundamentally isn't Software Engineering. If you have a degree in computer science and a job in (some particular subfield of) software engineering, it makes quite a lot of sense that the degree and the day to day aren't perfectly aligned. At any rate, not directly and frequently using all the theoretical underpinnings of networking/databases/etc hardl…
But then the universities teach them CS bullshit where 90% of it is unapplicable to the real world.
Why would you go to such an university which is so disconnected from the real world?
I've heard programming != Comp sci, so perhaps it's not a bad thing.
As a CS prof of mine once said, studying CS to be a programmer is like studying architecture to be a house builder...
You should invert the question: since EVERYONE forgets all of this CS stuff then perhaps teaching this CS stuff to us programmers is a complete waste of our time in the 1st place? So it's not YOU who is "wrong": it's the universities who have it backwards and are disconnected from the real world work that programmers do.
I think this is part of a more general problem with universities: they are designed to teach you academia, not practical industry knowledge. They don't teach you what you need to know because that was never their goal. (maybe this isn't true for every field, but in my experience it seems to be for most) Ideally a lot more people would be doing apprenticeships or vocational courses instead, not getting Bachelor's and…
Most plumbers don't need to be theoretical experts in hydraulics and pneumatics; but there certainly is time when such expertise is called for.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The universities don't have it backwards, you do. Computer Science fundamentally isn't Software Engineering. If you have a degree in computer science and a job in (some particular subfield of) software engineering, it makes quite a lot of sense that the degree and the day to day aren't perfectly aligned. At any rate, not directly and frequently using all the theoretical underpinnings of networking/databases/etc hardl…
People go to universities to learn how to tackle real world programming problems. But then the universities teach them CS bullshit where 90% of it is unapplicable to the real world. Why would you go to such an university which is so disconnected from the real world?
My personal experience has been that this knowledge is useful as a way of knowing “the lay of the land”. My brain knows that a cpu has a limited addressable space due to the length of bits used to represent memory addresses. It has a sense for how bits travel between networks. A rudimentary idea of how computers actually work.
Systems engineering makes you think about these things a lot more. e.g. I had to go back and relearn most of my networking knowledge to really grok DNS and firewalls in order to debug application connectivity issues. When you dig into them it feels like revisiting a garden you have been to earlier and you are excited to know how its changed over the years and whether there’s any new flowers in there.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think in every decent university you get to choose most of the courses, so you can fit it to your interests. Now it can be that somebody did the wrong choice, and now does not find a job where what he learned is useful. I think the university’s curriculum is not bad as it is. More specifically, you do not need to be a CS graduate to be a programmer.
I have a CS bachelor + masters and the only actually real-world useful courses were on the masters levels (and only 3 courses out of many, the rest were time wasters), 99% of the other stuff before it was a total waste of my time.
Also I wasn’t a very diligent undergrad and my memory isn’t exceptional :) YMMV