Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Responding to the Explosion of Student Interest in Computer Science [pdf]

lazowska.cs.washington.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 201 posts

Re: Responding to the Explosion of Student Interest in Computer Science [pdf]

#141

Post by sliverstorm »

jimmaswell wrote: post #110
nlawalker wrote: post #69

The problem is that 'computational thinking' has become expected of a university education, regardless of major , but universities haven't shifted to meet the need. All the other basic requirements of a university education are filled through entry level classes - credit-fillers that students have to take in order to graduate. This structure works out well for everyone: the university ensures that students are gettin…

>credit-fillers that students have to take in order to graduate. This structure works out well for everyone: the university ensures that students are getting a well-rounded education (as opposed to a trade-school degree) Do you really think the irrelevant classes are necessary at this level though? The student has had all of elementary through high school to be exposed to the broad subject range. By the time you ente…

You'd probably be surprised by the number of non-engineering disciplines that can leverage moderate programming skill these days.

A very easy example is biology. Many biologists may need to develop models or crunch data, and programming comes in handy. An even easier example is physics- one of the original uses for computers, along with finance.

It goes beyond that too. I can't think of a good example at the moment, but any time you see somebody using a hundred different Excel spreadsheets, that's someone who might be able to benefit from some basic programming skill.

Re: Responding to the Explosion of Student Interest in Computer Science [pdf]

#142

Post by sliverstorm »

kelseyfrancis wrote: post #120
nlawalker wrote: post #69

The problem is that 'computational thinking' has become expected of a university education, regardless of major , but universities haven't shifted to meet the need. All the other basic requirements of a university education are filled through entry level classes - credit-fillers that students have to take in order to graduate. This structure works out well for everyone: the university ensures that students are gettin…

Georgia Tech considers "computational thinking" to be an important component of a liberal arts education, so much so that it used to require all majors to take the same intro CS class that CS majors took. It was a legit intro CS course taught using SICP with Scheme. As far as I can tell, all majors still must take an intro CS course, but the school now offers a wider variety of intro CS courses, because many people s…

Well, you can definitely tailor even introductory computational thinking to different disciplines without necessarily dumbing it down. For example, literary majors would probably rather learn in Perl, and "hard science" majors might benefit from spending their time in Fortran or Matlab, etc. Spend more time on data analysis for biologists, perhaps...

Of course it won't be a course ABOUT data analysis or physics simulations, but if you make the projects more germane to the students, they will get more out of it.

Re: Responding to the Explosion of Student Interest in Computer Science [pdf]

#143

Post by hsitz »

unclebucknasty wrote: post #138
mhurron wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you really think universities believe in the "rounded education" goal This was the traditional role of Universities. It's only recently that they have become pressured to become trade schools and remove anything deemed 'unnecessary' or 'non-profitable.' Of course when Universities filled that role, you didn't have choices as to what to use as, as you term it, irrelevant classes. Everyone had to have a broader ed…

> It's only recently that they have become pressured to become trade schools and remove anything deemed 'unnecessary' or 'non-profitable.' They've come under this pressure because of the changed realities of the contemporary job market, combined with the rising cost of higher education. College is largely an economic decision for the vast majority of people who attend. Unfortunately, some only realize this soon after…

"In short, a trade school approach is exactly what we need, as it most accurately reflects the realities of the new job market."

Not sure who that "we" you're referring to is. Certainly the trade-school mentality helps the economy grow. Helping populate our country with thoughtful, well-informed citizens leading desirable lives, not so much.

Re: Responding to the Explosion of Student Interest in Computer Science [pdf]

#144

Post by netcan »

nlawalker wrote: post #69

The problem is that 'computational thinking' has become expected of a university education, regardless of major , but universities haven't shifted to meet the need. All the other basic requirements of a university education are filled through entry level classes - credit-fillers that students have to take in order to graduate. This structure works out well for everyone: the university ensures that students are gettin…

Another (possibly complimentary) is to make "programming for X" classes, the same way they make "statistics for X."

That way it can be a later year course and use tools and example relevant to those people. Degrees with a lot of statistics might have a "working with data" class which could teach SQL, R & such. Architects can learn Lisp for CAD. University students tend to learn writing by taking classes that require writing incidentally. Maybe programming could be similar.

"Introductory" classes are always in danger of leaving students with an expanded vocabulary but very little else for exactly the reason you describe whether they are "filler" courses or "major" courses.

Re: Responding to the Explosion of Student Interest in Computer Science [pdf]

#145

Post by Datsundere »

ktran03 wrote: post #34
benpbenp wrote: post #28

What I'd be interested in, if anyone has a perspective to share, is whether we should be worried? Will the job market change? Will our salaries stagnate or fall?

Personally, I think we are at a peak for outrageous programmer salaries. The market is currently correcting itself.

The bosses(Figure head manager) would still make more than programmers. How is that any correction

Re: Responding to the Explosion of Student Interest in Computer Science [pdf]

#146

Post by vorg »

pjbrunet wrote: post #112
timr wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at the chart for non-major interest in upper-level CS classes at Harvard: operating systems has no interest; "data science" is surging. Andrew Ng's machine learning class has more than twice the enrollment of computer architecture or software engineering (which is a particularly pathological case, since by definition, nobody else can teach Andrew Ng's class). This is not general-interest demand. Students are hop…

"Shortest path to a high-paying job." Big student loan needs to get paid somehow. Too many desperate programmers in the world is a bad scenario, IMO.

Better to have programmers who have learnt something about programming at college. Too many programmers without aptitude in IT shops who transferred into programming from some other non-technical job in the same company.

Re: Responding to the Explosion of Student Interest in Computer Science [pdf]

#147

Post by bagels »

xyzzyz wrote: post #124
aet wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should it? Most software engineers don't have significant equity i.e. equity that creates a cash flow equal to 100% of their salary annually. I only make this comparison since 141k is median at Google and you are saying lots of software engineers make 300k.

Standard new grad package at Google gives you over $120k worth of equity over 4 years, and I think additional $30k a year is definitely worth mentioning. For more experienced people it's obviously even more, and if you manage to stay for 4 years, the next stock grant will probably be significantly higher to keep you and your acquired inside knowledge inside the company.

30k != 300k

Do you get approximately 150k/yr of equity in the 5th year?

I think a lot of us are trying to understand the "300k/yr" part.

I wouldn't doubt to much that maybe a few people are getting paid that, but I doubt it's the median.

Re: Responding to the Explosion of Student Interest in Computer Science [pdf]

#148

Post by zan2434 »

The obvious answer is specialization. Computer science needs to be split, at the very least, into theoretical CS and Software Engineering. From there, both CS and Software engineering will need to contain specializations as well. Software Engineering will splinter into Networking, Javascript Performance optimization, Compiler optimization, etc.

Re: Responding to the Explosion of Student Interest in Computer Science [pdf]

#149

Post by webmaven »

capkutay wrote: post #54

Before people start preaching 'coding is the new reading/writing', let's get to high school CS requirements first (like any other common science/math class). Also, I think there's a sweet spot between a full-on academic CS degree and a level of software proficiency to make someone useful on the job. Whether it be data analytics or basic web development, you don't NEED to know the ins and outs of automata theory or co…

The point of 'coding is the new literacy' is that we also need grade school CS standards.

Re: Responding to the Explosion of Student Interest in Computer Science [pdf]

#150

Post by angersock »

kimdouglasmason wrote: post #99
enraged_camel wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>You should have used one of the many professions that currently involve no coding at all as an example. Okay, I'll bite. My dad is an ophthalmologist in Turkey. He runs his own private practice. When he opened the clinic in the early 90s, he quickly realized that keeping track of patient records in paper format was not efficient. So he taught himself Microsoft Access (which came out in 1992!) and wrote his own pati…

I'm still not convinced by those examples. My reasoning is opportunity cost. If you have to learn to code to write some software, and then write it yourself, you will generally be less efficient at it than contracting someone else to do so. Furthermore, the contractor has a chance of potentially reselling the software to other clients (thus increasing efficiency even more), which you do not. If it was cheaper for you…

Things you're not taking into account:

  1. Basic knowledge of programming gives you better odds of successfully interacting with specialists.

  2. Specialists are not always available.

  3. Specialists are not always affordable.
Just because there's somebody who's out there that can do it better doesn't mean that's the one true answer--I can damn well try to stop the bleeding before I seek a trauma doctor, to use an example.

In day-to-day life, learning just enough Ruby or Python or Perl to scratch an itch or Access to make a (terrible) DB is quite acceptable.

Post reply on HN