as a self taught individual I always find it outstanding how much things they are able to pack in a CS degree and how fast people forget all this stuff after graduation. Like how many of your coworkers from top CS schools remember most of the material in their compilers, cryptography, comp bio courses? EDIT: To clarify, I'm not criticizing this approach, I think it's great to expose students to as many subfields as p…
I was self taught and then got a CS degree. The degree filled in a lot of holes and actually I could still write a compiler if I had to.
Does anyone know which of these courses are great to learn more about system design?
"Grokking the systems design interview"
This course is incredible. It's short, and it's a course aiming to teach people how to ace their systems design interview, yet (perhaps unknowingly) teaches you almost everything foundational you might need to know about systems design and the reasons behind each choice.
FWIW, I've never seen any value whatsoever in these ethics classes (note: I'm not saying it's not an important topic, it's extremely important). The hypotheticals and situations presented and discussed in many of them are very similar to yearly mandatory classes we have to take at FAANG (and many other workplaces I assume) and it boils down to having a checkbox that says "I'm not stupid". Real world ethics is much mo…
Sounds like you just haven’t taken a good ethics class. I was required to take one in grad school (comp bio/biost at) taught by a law professor. Every week we were assigned a case study on a real-world ethics problem, such as the Duke/Potti scandal [1]. We wrote up answers to 5-6 discussion questions ahead of class, then spent the class time in small group discussion rather than lecture. I think it was one of the mos…
I don't understand, what's the controversy with Potti? The dude was a piece of shit - what else is there to discuss? I'm not being condescending I genuinely don't see any nuance like you're stating. When is it ever okay to fabricate data?
Having the computer science department, specifically, offer more ethics classes is controversial and has gone different ways at different universities. It may seem like an obvious win if you care about society, but many people interested in tech ethics (esp. those who don't consider themselves computer scientists) think it pushes in the wrong direction as far as systems and institutions go. At one place I've taught,…
Interesting, thanks for the context. I get that its tough to find the right dividing lines on these in a university context, though I admit I'm partial to more integrated approaches. Like, I can't help but imagine teaching ethics within a tech context would be far more stimulating for CS students than a general ethics course. I guess the good part about a general ethics course would be exposure to students in other m…
From my personal experience, the introductory ethics classes taught under philosophy often feel like "philosophy of ethics", with tenuous connections to anything taught elsewhere. Classes taught under science and technology studies are more useful, because the field is empirical. Even if none of the case studies are from your field, the ways STS approaches them are widely applicable.
The best parts of education is not primarily the material you remember. It's the effect on your thinking patterns as a result of studying and the familiarity with a school of thought. For example, I studied Greek before software engineering. I've forgotten quite a bit, but theres an entirely different set of thought processes I have access to while doing software engineering because of it.
> It's the effect on your thinking patterns as a result of studying I've heard this over and over again, but I don't believe there's a shred of evidence for it.
I see this type of like used to justify whatever it is the speaker enjoys being forced on everyone else. Something like "everyone should learn philosophy because it trains the mind" usually means "I like philosophy and wish it was taught more at schools".
The best parts of education is not primarily the material you remember. It's the effect on your thinking patterns as a result of studying and the familiarity with a school of thought. For example, I studied Greek before software engineering. I've forgotten quite a bit, but theres an entirely different set of thought processes I have access to while doing software engineering because of it.
> It's the effect on your thinking patterns as a result of studying I've heard this over and over again, but I don't believe there's a shred of evidence for it.
I strongly believe it's a rationalization for having to spend so much time studying.
Given the power tech has over the daily experiences of billions and how many questions of values and ethics it is now directly confronting in society, I'm a little surprised there's just one ethics course and one law course that cover these subjects, and they're electives [1]. We all know much of the learning in engineering is on the job anyways, so the role of formal education is less about particular job skills and…
This list is also a bit incomplete, or more likely just refers to classes taught in the current school year. I co-teach a different ethics-focused class in the Stanford CS department (CS 181, which in this incarnation started in 2017). I think it's a pretty good class too, although as you suggest, there are limits on how much a quarter-long class can realistically accomplish. (We try to push the envelope with our pro…
Thanks for the practitioner perspective Keith, this makes me feel a lot better about the approach Stanford is taking (and makes me want to return to the farm!)
Honestly the ethical questions being brought up are some of the most interesting things happening in tech right now. Society & the human API is like the next abstraction layer for tech, and the dust has hardly settled. It's really created a lot of opportunities to ask ourselves what kind of society we want to live in. Your CS181 syllabus looks great!
Given the power tech has over the daily experiences of billions and how many questions of values and ethics it is now directly confronting in society, I'm a little surprised there's just one ethics course and one law course that cover these subjects, and they're electives [1]. We all know much of the learning in engineering is on the job anyways, so the role of formal education is less about particular job skills and…
When i was at uni (definitely nothing as high powered as standford) we had one ethics class. It was the most useless class i have ever taken.
The prof seemed very uninformed about the computer side of the material (it was taught by someone from philosophy dept). Examples were from like the 80s (cyberstalking people logged into the mainframe via finger and w) and just generally had nothing relavent to any actual ethical conundrum.
Given the power tech has over the daily experiences of billions and how many questions of values and ethics it is now directly confronting in society, I'm a little surprised there's just one ethics course and one law course that cover these subjects, and they're electives [1]. We all know much of the learning in engineering is on the job anyways, so the role of formal education is less about particular job skills and…
I'm a lawyer and now developer, I'm not sure how many classes would be enough? Ethics in the technology sense is not the same as legal ethics and may be closer to philosophy?
Sounds like you just haven’t taken a good ethics class. I was required to take one in grad school (comp bio/biost at) taught by a law professor. Every week we were assigned a case study on a real-world ethics problem, such as the Duke/Potti scandal [1]. We wrote up answers to 5-6 discussion questions ahead of class, then spent the class time in small group discussion rather than lecture. I think it was one of the mos…
I don't understand, what's the controversy with Potti? The dude was a piece of shit - what else is there to discuss? I'm not being condescending I genuinely don't see any nuance like you're stating. When is it ever okay to fabricate data?
> When is it ever okay to fabricate data?
When you want to deliberately sabotage something. What may have its place, but obviously not in such case (obviously not applicable in cancer research like in this case).