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Misconceptions that IT professionals seem to have about CS education

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Re: Misconceptions that IT professionals seem to have about CS education

#61

Post by psychometry »

tolmasky wrote: post #59

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 (sinc…

The comparison to chemistry is certainly odd. I think most fresh-faced chemistry graduates would be able to work in a chemistry lab...as a lab assistant. After all, chances are they had a student position doing just that. They wouldn't be able to do anything else since the other positions require post-graduate study. That's an entirely different problem than the one faced by IT managers.

Re: Misconceptions that IT professionals seem to have about CS education

#62

Post by marcus_holmes »

rlayton wrote: post #60
tolmasky wrote: post #59

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 (sinc…

I think the degree-inflation problem is the key here. There is no reason why a person needs a degree to be able to program. That wasn't the original purpose of such degrees. In a nutshell, academic certifications assess whether you know things, while industry certifications assess whether you can do things. For a business, there is a strong focus on doing, rather than knowing. Who cares about whether certain classes…

The solution is apprenticeships. University is academic, not vocational. Universities were never intended to teach specific job skills, they were/are supposed to teach how to think, or the broad sweep of the entire subject.

Apprenticeships were the vocational education, and they were done in the workplace. Apparently they still do coding apprenticeships in Germany and they work really well.

Employers need to stop expecting new hires, and especially new graduates, to be able to hit the ground running at full speed, and train more.

Re: Misconceptions that IT professionals seem to have about CS education

#63

Post by mikeash »

MarcScott wrote: post #28
bicknergseng wrote: post #21

"Do you expect Chemistry students to walk out of school ready to begin work in a lab?" Yes? As someone who didn't major in chemistry or go into a related field... what the hell does someone with a degree in chemistry do when they graduate? Go and work in a coffeeshop? Edit: the original post seems to have been edited several times since my original comment, including the clarification that she's a high school teacher…

The author teaches CS to 11-18 year old students. In the UK School != University

I think there's a major problem with terminology here, because high schools don't teach computer science. They may teach programming, but I've never heard of one that taught anything remotely resembling computer science.

Re: Misconceptions that IT professionals seem to have about CS education

#64

Post by vacri »

tolmasky wrote: post #59

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 (sinc…

The author is not teaching degrees, she's teaching a high school class. There's a clarification at the top of the article (in italics, directly after the heading), appropriate commentary peppered throughout the article body, and half a dozen comments here on HN to that effect.

I'm astounded that so many people are pinging the author for not being on the ball, yet missing all the massive signposts saying "This is a high-school environment, not university".

Re: Misconceptions that IT professionals seem to have about CS education

#65

Post by zarify »

tolmasky wrote: post #59

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 (sinc…

You realise that the post was about high school, right? It's all very well getting on the high horse about degrees in CS, but that isn't the case in point.

Re: Misconceptions that IT professionals seem to have about CS education

#66

Post by [deleted] »

tolmasky wrote: post #59

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 (sinc…

[deleted]

Re: Misconceptions that IT professionals seem to have about CS education

#67

Post by tolmasky »

zarify wrote: post #65
tolmasky wrote: post #59

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 (sinc…

You realise that the post was about high school, right? It's all very well getting on the high horse about degrees in CS, but that isn't the case in point.

Yeah saw after the fact that that was mentioned, my point stands for college degrees though (which I have indeed heard similar opinions on).

In this case... I guess I just find the premise that a bunch of industry people are telling her what to teach some high schoolers a little hard to believe/overblown (but I guess I'm not from the UK so maybe its common there to do that?). But yeah, sure, teach them whatever you want in high school, I agree.

Re: Misconceptions that IT professionals seem to have about CS education

#68

Post by MarcScott »

tolmasky wrote: post #59

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 (sinc…

Once again I'll reiterate that the teacher in question is in a school for 11 - 18 year old students, although I'd have thought this was clear from the article.

Her complaint is the way in which "IT professionals" complain about high school education, not degree level education.

In the context of the original article, this comment is therefore a little unrealistic. >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.

I teach CS to the 11-14 age range for 1 hour a week, and 2.5 hours a week to 14+ students. Good luck teaching core CS theory, multiple languages and version control in that amount of time.

Re: Misconceptions that IT professionals seem to have about CS education

#69

Post by vacri »

benihana wrote: post #53

> 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…

The important word is 'presume'. She's not saying that you can't know more than her, but that she gets miffed when an armchair quarterback dismisses her lengthy experience in the field. Hackers are constantly telling each other war stories of the weird, naive impressions people outside their industry have of them; why should it be different for teachers? If you have zero experience teaching, then there's a ton of pitfalls that you're almost certainly unaware of, particularly when teaching minors.

And yes, there are some terrible teachers. But there are a lot more terrible armchair quarterbacks.

Re: Misconceptions that IT professionals seem to have about CS education

#70

Post by cproctor »

I'm a middle-school Computer Science teacher at an all-girls' school where CS has been promoted to a core subject. And a software developer.

I don't see much substantial disagreement between the OP's post and the comments here--she's basically making three points:

1. The (secondary) education system's role is to show students how to engage with the field, not tailor their training to the specifics of a job posting. It's more important that students be able to pick up new paradigms than it is that they know any particular language.

2. Education is iterative. It's ok to learn something that fudges the details or that's not a best practice if it means you're making things now. We all return to domains of knowledge with finer granularity when we need it.

3. Content knowledge is important for teachers, but their expertise is in pedagogical content knowledge--the knowledge and skills of how to productively open a domain to new learners.

Do we disagree about any of these? Sure, there's some unnecessary heat in the post. But that's true of the comments here too. I wish some folks here were able to bring more introspection and empathy to conversations about education (yielding insights about who they are as learners, and how others are different). And I wish we stopped dumping on teachers as the source of all our problems (let's talk more about why this is happening later...), so teachers didn't have to feel resentful and defensive in public fora.

If you're interested in CS education and you haven't spent any time in a classroom/after school club/coder dojo, I'd invite you to come get some firsthand experience. I teach in Palo Alto, come on over...

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