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The number of CS grads who don't even know basic Git commands is astounding

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Re: The number of CS grads who don't even know basic Git commands is astounding

#31

Post by Apreche »

Yep. When I studied CS in early ‘0X the lecture material was only about programming. Everything else you were on your own.

The labs all had Solaris machines. Most students had never seen Unix or a terminal before in their lives. The instruction on how to use it was extremely minimal.

There was a very wide gap between the students who were huge nerds who already knew, or learned in their own, and those who didn’t. There wasn’t even YouTube, or Stack Overflow, or anything much to help in those days.

The biggest difference was between the students who had to physically go to the lab to do their projects, and the others like me who knew SSH existed, and how to use it, doing our projects from the comfort of the dorms.

Re: The number of CS grads who don't even know basic Git commands is astounding

#32

Post by serf »

knighthack wrote: post #14
zeroonetwothree wrote: post #13

CS degrees aren’t meant to teach any particular skill. They should be teaching general knowledge that helps you adapt to whatever the FOTM is in industry. Realistically you can learn to use git in less than one day. It just shouldn’t be a significant barrier to hiring someone. None of the specific languages or software I learned during my degree do I even use now in my current role.

Git is not just a fad; it's a literal underpinning of most serious software development these days, especially if you need to work with others. That a CS grad doesn't even know basic Git is telling not of their degree, but of the individual themselves - that they have no desire to learn beyond what's taught, and couldn't even be bothered to look into the requirements of the industry that they want to work in. I argue…

>Git is not just a fad; it's a literal underpinning of most serious software development these days, especially if you need to work with others.

yeah, but all of the VCSs before git could've claimed the same thing.

if that's not a fad, what is?

i'm glad git is the soup du jourre today , it's a lot nicer to use than it's ancestors -- but it's not like there isn't room for improvement, either.

that's how git came about, I don't feel like we're at the end-all-be-all VCS yet, especially when there is money to be made by doing things better.

Re: The number of CS grads who don't even know basic Git commands is astounding

#33

Post by jordanpg »

Whether CS grads know this or that tech is irrelevant.

What matters is are they curious and how quickly they can self teach this or that tech.

And besides, learning the basics of git should be an afterthought for someone being hired for a programming job!! Come on.*

* Not gatekeeping here, I'm just trying to say that in the spectrum of tasks an entry-level programmer will need to get good at, git is a minor footnote. You can generally learn 99% of what you'll need to do in a short period of time, unless your team is doing exotic stuff, in which case they should stop doing that.

Re: The number of CS grads who don't even know basic Git commands is astounding

#34

Post by mr_mitm »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #13

CS degrees aren’t meant to teach any particular skill. They should be teaching general knowledge that helps you adapt to whatever the FOTM is in industry. Realistically you can learn to use git in less than one day. It just shouldn’t be a significant barrier to hiring someone. None of the specific languages or software I learned during my degree do I even use now in my current role.

To expand on that, and maybe my view is a bit too traditional, but my understanding is that universities ought to prepare you to become a scientist. At least that's how it was historically. They are not meant to be "vocational training plus" or to subsidize the industry by training the work force for them. (It might be different for colleges, I'm mainly speaking from a European perspective.)

I know times have changed, but I don't think git should be taught in a university-level computer science course. You teach graph theory and then many operations in git should become clear after reading the documentation. I don't think any implementation-specific skills should be taught, unless you use it as an example, like Java or C++ to teach OOP. Instead, you teach broad concepts that underpin all of modern computing.

Isn't there a saying along the lines of "computer science is as much about computers as astronomy is about telescopes"? When I was at university twenty years ago people were still claiming you could easily pass a computer science program without ever touching a computer.

Re: The number of CS grads who don't even know basic Git commands is astounding

#35

Post by cellis »

knighthack wrote: post #14
zeroonetwothree wrote: post #13

CS degrees aren’t meant to teach any particular skill. They should be teaching general knowledge that helps you adapt to whatever the FOTM is in industry. Realistically you can learn to use git in less than one day. It just shouldn’t be a significant barrier to hiring someone. None of the specific languages or software I learned during my degree do I even use now in my current role.

Git is not just a fad; it's a literal underpinning of most serious software development these days, especially if you need to work with others. That a CS grad doesn't even know basic Git is telling not of their degree, but of the individual themselves - that they have no desire to learn beyond what's taught, and couldn't even be bothered to look into the requirements of the industry that they want to work in. I argue…

As someone who has used GIT a fair amount over the last 15 years, it has literally one of the worst developer experiences, right up there with C, python’s package management, cuda kernel development or shader debugging, ffmpeg, Scala, MongoDB, and Rust. All of those tools are very useful in todays world but they’re not necessary to do the job,and unless I’m specifically hiring for that skillset I wouldn’t ding anyone who didn’t know them.

Re: The number of CS grads who don't even know basic Git commands is astounding

#36

Post by Dylan16807 »

serf wrote: post #24

who cares? git is a tool, not a discipline. It's made to facilitate work, not to create a whole knowledge domain unto itself. I wouldn't fault a seasoned and well trained mechanic for not knowing the specifics of a specialty tool necessitating the need to find the manual; similarly although git is the current VCS-ish thing of choice right now, it doesn't represent all of computer science.

> git is a tool, not a discipline.

> the current VCS-ish thing of choice

It's not like they're using mercurial instead. There's a lot of concepts here they should be familiar with.

> the specifics of a specialty tool

Are you calling VCS specialty in the context of a CS degree? I wouldn't.

Re: The number of CS grads who don't even know basic Git commands is astounding

#37

Post by WolfeReader »

serf wrote: post #32
knighthack wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Git is not just a fad; it's a literal underpinning of most serious software development these days, especially if you need to work with others. That a CS grad doesn't even know basic Git is telling not of their degree, but of the individual themselves - that they have no desire to learn beyond what's taught, and couldn't even be bothered to look into the requirements of the industry that they want to work in. I argue…

>Git is not just a fad; it's a literal underpinning of most serious software development these days, especially if you need to work with others. yeah, but all of the VCSs before git could've claimed the same thing. if that's not a fad, what is? i'm glad git is the soup du jourre today , it's a lot nicer to use than it's ancestors -- but it's not like there isn't room for improvement, either. that's how git came about…

Accept my upvote. The silent cowards who are downvoting you hate that what you're saying is true - or at least are tacitly admitting that they can't actually form a counter-argument.

Git deserves credit for popularizing distributed VCS - which is HUGE - but it was not the first or the best DVCS. Its CLI is full of footguns and it's too eager to irreparably erase history.

Re: The number of CS grads who don't even know basic Git commands is astounding

#38

Post by WolfeReader »

mopsi wrote: post #30
vunderba wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Graduates of a computer science program don't know specific commands around versioning software that they can learn in 10 minutes on the job. Gasp. Algorithms, mathematics and logic are timeless, tooling is not, and it baffles me that people can't distinguish between the two. EDIT: Furthermore, where did they pull this statistic from? I didn't realize that the census also included questions around git knowle…

How can you graduate from a CS program without having had to learn git somewhere along the way? Do you never collaborate on any project? Do you never check out a repo or make changes to it?

Believe it or not, it is possible to collaborate on a CS project without automated source control!

It's very painful though.

Re: The number of CS grads who don't even know basic Git commands is astounding

#39

Post by mleo »

Every college student’s “free” time is different. Whether sports, work, clubs or drinking, people fill there time with what the have to do or interests them. I was lucky my work was mostly free time to further play and learn computers, OSs and software. I learned networking with PERL, Java in my free time, lots of Solaris and AIX. I didn’t spend any time on VCS, but this was back when RCS and SCCS were dominant.

Re: The number of CS grads who don't even know basic Git commands is astounding

#40

Post by WolfeReader »

knighthack wrote: post #14
zeroonetwothree wrote: post #13

CS degrees aren’t meant to teach any particular skill. They should be teaching general knowledge that helps you adapt to whatever the FOTM is in industry. Realistically you can learn to use git in less than one day. It just shouldn’t be a significant barrier to hiring someone. None of the specific languages or software I learned during my degree do I even use now in my current role.

Git is not just a fad; it's a literal underpinning of most serious software development these days, especially if you need to work with others. That a CS grad doesn't even know basic Git is telling not of their degree, but of the individual themselves - that they have no desire to learn beyond what's taught, and couldn't even be bothered to look into the requirements of the industry that they want to work in. I argue…

SQLite is not written using Git. Perhaps you should distinguish VCS - a category of software - and Git, one example of that software.
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