121–130 of 167 posts
Everyone experiences this eventually, but not everybody realizes it at first.
Now that you know your capacity I recommend doing an annual round up of the things you still remember and can confidently put in your CV.
Also take note on how job interviews all but ignore this phenomenon.
Academia, at its worst, is a closed system; it should be regarded as a lucky coincidence if any practical ("real world") skills are obtained in the process of earning a BS/MS/PhD.
My alma matter focuses on undergraduate education emphasizing real-world applications.
When you see a problem that would benefit from application of CS theory you might end up applying it without realizing that is what you are doing.
Academia, at its worst, is a closed system; it should be regarded as a lucky coincidence if any practical ("real world") skills are obtained in the process of earning a BS/MS/PhD.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your commennt exudes a particularly unpleasent pretentious tone. The average software engineer does not need to remember compiler design, digital logic, esoteric datastructures etc to do their job well. If people are forgetting "fundementals" (of which I would not classify specialised subjects such as compiler design), then it's because they don't need it for the job they're doing. Although I do agree that Computer S…
So then, computer science puts you passed average.
Some people manage to use that knowledge to bootstrap an understanding of the software ecosystem they find themselves in, and others really struggle with it and flail around. Then some other people manage to bootstrap these things from a biology degree or art history degree (or no degree at all)... somehow. I'm not entirely sure what correlates with success on that front actually.
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?
That's your problem right there. Also, the term 'university' seems to be overloaded in so many different ways (multiplied by different countries and cultures).
To me, it seems that the American descriptions and their derivatives are pretty bad, same with the "poly"-prefixed educational institutions. There are so many factors that should be irrelevant (i.e. the "name" of the institute, the cost, the location) where only the subject matter and accreditation should be the actual factors.
If I were to categorise it, you'd have to split it in three directions:
- Academia, scientific research (University)
- High-level education, scientific principles and theory, but with application of said principes and theory in mind (College perhaps?)
- General or vocational education, aimed at learning how to do a job (Trade school?)
The world needs people in all sorts of varieties, but the real-world workload is overwhelmingly one of execution, not one of theory. Of course, when people are stuck in the (rat) race, one must go to university because that is the best, and only the best is good enough. So even if going that far risks people into diving headfirst into their own Peter Principle, it is what people do anyway. The end result are a bunch of people that barely made it through university and aren't all that useful in the real world right away (not advanced enough to propel the entire field or niche forward, not practical enough to perform less theoretical work).
Of course, FAANG only wants the best, and since they can't go screen the 100k+ applications in their inboxes in detail they just start filtering based on paper promises or previous experience, with the end result being a stack of people who either already did the job, or who came out of university with advanced enough results to be malleable into the positions that are available. And thus the path is biased towards "if you want to make a ton of money so you can rent a broom closet in the bay area, you have to work at a FAANG and you can only do that with a university background". Ironically, as large and advanced as those companies may be, most people in the world don't work there. And trading in 80k for half the amount of work and normal living arrangements really isn't a bad deal when working anywhere else that's not a FAANG.
The other thing is that it's normal. As systems get more complicated, the number of interactions between N elements grows as O(N*2). Thus, most "engineers" spend the bulk of their time organizing and arranging things, fitting things together, troubleshooting, dealing with vendors, etc. In some fields, manually operating tools such as CAD becomes more efficient than understanding the algorithms programmed into the tools. This is basically human powered information processing. The work needed to make the things that are fit together, such as algorithms, falls to a small fraction of the workforce, who are not necessarily the most highly rewarded, as their work is not so visible.