Misconceptions that IT professionals seem to have about CS education

"but once you leave the sphere of companies ... the atmosphere can become rather absurd"

Total agreement here. A lot of the issue is ignorance. Most small to medium business owners and managers do nto code and do not know how to. They see a CS grad as a white, male, 135 lbs., pasty, skinny genius. Just like Bill Gates, Zuck, and countless movie 'hackers'. They expect your skills to be just as good to, ie. able to 'code' a website in minutes and hack NORAD as well.

Why? They just plain do not know anything about the discipline. They have to go on what little they do know, and that stuff oversells the CS degree by a lot.

I had a boss once that thought I should be able to program a microcontroller in an afternoon. Mind you, the spec sheet is ~650 pages. But he really really did think that it was that easy. Like it was speaking Spanish, it just took a long time to get up to speed, but when you are there, it's super simple.

Its the same disconnect as with dentists, accountants, lawyers, and mechanics. Most people can't begin to think in the way required, and they are helpless without you. That breeds resentment and suspicion.

To help with these issues, a level of trust needs to be established. You have to trust them, and they you. Many employers think that the trust comes from the degree granting agency. University vetted you, so I can at least trust that you know how to do hacker stuff.

Unfortunately, the gulf is so wide between the layman and the professional that trust is ALL you have to go on and a degree is not enough. Possibly a better testing agency, like the Bar, AMA, or ASE is needed as 'hackers' are more and more needed.

>I’ve gone through a postgraduate qualification and nine years of experience to get to where I am, so don’t presume to know more than me about how to teach children - and if you do, expect that I will be justifiably miffed.

This is the thing about teachers that just irritates the hell out of me. I had plenty of teachers who went through postgraduate qualification and had 20 years of experience who couldn't teach for shit. Getting trained as a teacher doesn't mean you're going to be automatically good at it, just like getting trained in CS doesn't mean you're going to be a good programmer.

I've been taught by plenty of people who didn't have the title Teacher, who taught me way more than my Teacher ever did. I've also talked and taught plenty of people who thought they were stupid because their formal University Teacher, armed with postgraduate qualifications and years of experience, couldn't communicate a simple concept to them. They go through life thinking they're dumb because this trained teacher made them feel that way because the teacher failed at teaching and passed that failure to the student.

So to see this person talk about their qualifications and how she thinks these qualifications confer teaching ability leaves me quite a bit miffed, because it comes off as just an arrogant dismissal of criticism.

Speaking of WRONG!, the University of Waterloo in Canada is not a high school. Not only is there a clarification at the top of the page, the entire article reads like it was written about high school classes. Not just subtle things like "I have studied education at the postgraduate level" or characterising herself as a teacher rather than a lecturer or professor, but complete giveaway lines like "don’t presume to know more than me about how to teach children", repeated a couple of times.

Computer Science trains students in thought processes. Since quite a few companies use a limited number of tools and frameworks, most CS graduates can jump in and be productive pretty quickly, given the proper on-site training. Problems arise when employers expect graduates to be immediately productive working with unfamiliar tools in an unfamiliar environment.

Several undergraduate programs offer engineering practicum programs in which students are paired with organizations to work on open source software. These opportunities can help to familiarize students with some of the engineering practices in the industry. Every company is a bit different and development practices change often.

Spoken exactly like what I'd expect from a teaching field that is doing everything possible to obsolete itself.

Look, let me sum up the problem with CS education in a nutshell: today, when I think about hiring someone, I basically don't care about their CS education. This is increasingly what I hear from my colleagues as well. Degree in CS means more or less nothing. Notice that that's not the case in Chemistry (since the author is fond of comparing fields). What does that tell us? That whether you like it or not, you are doing a poor job teaching them, or that we have very different definitions of CS. Which is fine, after all, there are degrees in accounting and degrees in math that are separate, maybe we need to move to that model.

If your program graduates students that have never used version control, never committed to a single open source project, or have a difficult time picking up new languages/technologies, then maybe you're teaching them "something", but that something isn't what the world cares about. So unless they go and become teachers of this thing you call CS as well, its time to change what you're teaching.

(BTW, I rarely find that these recent grads have done NP reductions or any of that kind of thing that would at least justify not teaching them all that "useless" industry stuff)