Things Many People Find Too Obvious to Have Told You Already

I think he's arguing that the average wage in our industry is low simply because the workforce leans so young, so a disproportionate number of software engineers are still junior—and making junior wages—compared to other industries where the age curve is more spread out.

Universities can study porn under the heading of the humanities or social science. The fact they don't have an explicit "Department of Pornography" is both an accident of our culture and a reflection of the fact our "top-level categories" for academics are more abstract than that.

My point is, libraries maintain a very curated collection, and choose their holdings and resources based on very restrictive criteria, including funding and shelf space, making them relatively poor at keeping broad and deep holdings. Until you give the library an Internet connection, which brings us back to the origin of this sub-thread.

Tech does not pay for experience.

A new grad's compensation is often equal and some times greater than someone who's been in the trenches for 20 years. I don't know any other profession with this absurd inversion. And with a few notable exceptions, the idea that someone with 5 years of experience is Senior-anything is ridiculous. I remember myself at 5 years out, I didn't know shit compared to today. Yet, adjusted for location-cost of living and inflation, I'm making today about what I made back then. The compensation plateau is very real, I assure you. You'll probably find out in 20 years or so.

EDIT: There also wouldn't be so much persistent discussion about ageism in tech either, if experience was valued/compensated.

>Well, that's because CS programs are designed to teach CS, not to be a vocational school for programmers.

And which is why they should be moved out of the College of Engineering and placed into the college that has mathematics. Curiously enough, the only school he mentions where he can reliably know their grads have programming experience actually does place CS under mathematics.

I think being able to program basic tasks should be a requirement for all engineering programs. They all require a course in CS - mostly not because they want ME's to know CS, but they want them to be able to program basic things.

Yet, many/most engineering grads are really poor at it. I feel for any given engineering degree program, we should make all seniors who have declared they will graduate that semester to take a basic exam on very basic concepts that all grads of that program should know (strong emphasis on the word "basic"). If it's acceptable for them not to know basic material in an introductory class, then remove the class from the curriculum!

Example: I was in a top 5 school helping an grad student in CS do basic probability homework. We were disagreeing on the correct answer, so I suggested he write a simple program to simulate it and compare with his calculated answer.

This is the simplest program possible: A for loop, and a random number generator.

He had no idea how to do it.

I'm not picking on him because he's a CS student. I think it's a valid question for people in all engineering programs that involve introductory programming courses. What's the point of making such a course a mandatory requirement if they can literally do nothing based on that knowledge?

Similarly, an electrical engineer who does not know, say, Kirchoff's laws should not be allowed to graduate.

Yes, I do think universities are for education, but if they cannot apply what they learned, they are not educated.