Maybe people in CS should enjoy learning things about CS and not do the bare minimum?
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
#122I appreciate a CS grad that doesn't know basic Git but then has it mastered by EOD.
Re: The number of CS grads who don't even know basic Git commands is astounding
#123CS 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.
This is theory. In practice, you should have done some work during your course and it's reasonable to assume that using version control (which you can learn in a day) is a skill you'd pick up at that time. If not, what exactly were you doing for all those years is a question.
Re: The number of CS grads who don't even know basic Git commands is astounding
#124CS 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.
Indeed, I've always been against filtering people on programming language. However, I wouldn't hire a developer that wasn't good at the language they had been using or learning for the last years. In the same way, I wouldn't stop from hiring someone without git experience. But I would definitely not hire someone who, in 2024, hadn't been using some CVS tool. Plus, I would be curious to know how the applicant had been sharing code with colleagues in group projects and why they had gone for solutions other than git. For someone more experienced I would be wondering how they managed to be insulated from the most widely used code repositories like GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket, and so on, which overwhelmingly are git focused (BitBucket even started out as a Mercurial solution and then slowly shifted to Git). This could actually be an interesting window into the applicant's decision making process. Even though I would be open minded, I think that the odds would tend more for me to find out reasons not to hire that applicant.
Re: The number of CS grads who don't even know basic Git commands is astounding
#125Earlier 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…
> yeah, but all of the VCSs before git could've claimed the same thing. if that's not a fad, what is?
Git being the de facto standard in the space is coming up on twenty years. That's about as far from a "fad" as you can get.
> i'm glad git is the soup du jourre today
The problem isn't so much with the "soup du jour", but that the whole concept of "soup" seems foreign to the people the tweet is talking about.
(But yes, given the twenty years mentioned above, "the concept of soup" in practice is pretty much equal to "the soup of the last few decades". Claiming to be a software developer nowadays while being unfamiliar with git is like claiming you were "computer literate" in the nineties but not being able to use Windows.)
Re: The number of CS grads who don't even know basic Git commands is astounding
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was a TA during that time. A part of the students that came in weren't familiar with concepts such as files and directories or desktop UI metaphors because they were used to mobile OS or in rare cases didn't have any actual exposure to computers. But because the last case used to be the rule and traditionally students mostly used the provided thin client labs and Solaris servers the basic intro to actually using a…
The iPhone came out in 2007, the ugly brown android in 2008 or 2009, what mobile OS were students using during the time period mentioned in OP’s comment?
Yeah, you're right. I'm off by a few years. Early 2000s was when these Sharp personal assistants came out. And some students would have been exposed to Windows 98 or XP and sometimes IRC or ICQ but on average they didn't have any actual computing experience apart from maybe playing games or chatting.
That was a bit before my time so they would have had to cope with actual UNIX-like CDE on Solaris until they figured out how to access the nicer Linux servers that had KDE. But in these days thin clients with 24" screens were actually pretty nice compared to what students actually owned. Even on Solaris with Mozilla and CDE.
The actual teaching material didn't change that much though because the university essentially taught the same sh course with here's latex, here's man, here's how you install whatever you need to ~/bin since the late 1980ies. It didn't matter if a professer wanted to use C++ or Modula2 or Pascal or Java because every student got that crash course in how to actually use the faculty provided computung pools.
First semester homework and midterm tests ensured that they were able to start their IDE or interpreter and knew how to compile their homework on the right architecture, how to search for documentation and how to actually use a keyboard to submit their math homework. The beauty of that approach was that it allowed the 10% or so who were really interested in learning more access to university resources while also ensuring that no math-cs double major graduates without at least a modest grasp of tools that were state of the art in Knuth's days.