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The University Is Like a CD in the Streaming Age

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Re: The University Is Like a CD in the Streaming Age

#81

Post by senux »

burntoutfire wrote: post #60
dougmwne wrote: post #16

I was having another one of those moments yesterday where I was questioning the value of higher education while reading a HN thread about teaching yourself CS. There was a healthy debate about whether the typical CS curriculum helps a modern software engineer at all. Some thought the degree was stuck back in the 70's. Others thought there was value, but had trouble articulating it. It seems that when the information…

Here in Poland there's a split between Computer Science (mostly lots of theory and fundamentals) and Software Engineering, which gives you some of those as well, but also prepares you for a typical programming job in a typical company.

I'm pretty certain that's true for a lot of countries other than the US. It makes sense after all.

Far from American Universities to make any changes to their curriculum to support people's actual objectives though.

Re: The University Is Like a CD in the Streaming Age

#82

Post by graycat »

dougmwne wrote: post #16

I was having another one of those moments yesterday where I was questioning the value of higher education while reading a HN thread about teaching yourself CS. There was a healthy debate about whether the typical CS curriculum helps a modern software engineer at all. Some thought the degree was stuck back in the 70's. Others thought there was value, but had trouble articulating it. It seems that when the information…

> ... was a healthy debate about whether the typical CS curriculum helps a modern software engineer at all. Some thought the degree was stuck back in the 70's. Others thought there was value, but had trouble articulating it.

I'll try a resolution of this dilemma: A few years ago I was talking with a university CS (computer science) prof, and his fast reaction was, IIRC, "The purpose of computer science is to identify the fundamentals of computing." I.e., make a scientific study of computing and find its basic laws.

E.g., there is the subject of computational time complexity that for a given operation tries to find the fastest possible algorithm. Turns out, this is not an easy subject, e.g., we are still struggling with the question of P versus NP; a lot of well informed people believe that solving that problem would be a biggie.

My guess is that the issue is cultural in that Einstein's E = mc^2 was seen as fundamental to the universe and other fields of research would like to get results also at that level of importance, fame, prestige, whatever.

So, apparently in computer science making a scientific or engineering study of software engineering mostly loses out to pursuing some version of E = mc^2 for computing. E.g., one such result was the Gleason bound (in the Knuth volume on sorting and searching in his The Art of Computer Programming) that shows that O(n log(n)) is the fastest possible worst case sorting of n items by comparing items (records, keys, ...) two at a time.

One response is that if medical schools were run like research university computer science departments, then no one would want to go to a hospital no matter how badly they hurt! I.e., a researcher deep into P versus NP might have never had occasion to use containers, Lisp, RUST, or even SQL.

Of course, in medicine we have some medical schools in university research teaching hospitals where some of the best medical research is done. And it is easy for a practicing physician to conclude that mere clinical experience is not enough for the needed progress and that fundamental research in biochemistry, cell biology, DNA/RNA, the immune system, etc. is necessary, crucial, and really the best hope for the needed progress.

So, it is fair to say that software engineering could be taught like medicine, not just as introduction to research but for practice, clinical practice, professional practice. E.g., if want to be the CIO of a large bank, insurance company, shipping firm, on-line retailer, etc., then how to manage an information technology (IT) department with 2000 employees to do well on data security, reliability, performance, software quality, software documentation, software system designs and revisions, growth, system management, etc.

Re: The University Is Like a CD in the Streaming Age

#83

Post by turbinerneiter »

Ya'll use University wrong.

The classes, etc. ... whatever!

During my time at Uni, I:

* designed a demonstrator car frame to show off a bunch of new manufacturing techniques, which was actually built in the end

* was part of a team who tested a new type of fiber optical vibration sensor on a sounding rocket

* worked with a PhD student on developing a sensor to measure water flow through a tank to validate his simulations

* wrote code that is now orbiting earth on board of a CubeSat we built with a team of ~100 students

We had groups who built race cars, a group who won ~all of the Hyperloop challenges, a group which builds rockets (seriously they have a lab in the basement of the cantina - the only rocket powered cantina in the world), a group that designs, builds and flies their own soaring planes (no-one died ... yet) - and that's just the ones I considered cool. All of this groups get access to top notch workshop and lab equipment and some of these groups are so present at their respective chairs that they end up driving a serious amount of the research happening there.

University is a place where teachers and students who are interested in a field meet to learn and research together. Modern Uni has often forgotten that, but if the students treat it as such it works in this way. We have to tell students how they can get positive experiences out of the current system - by trying to do so, they will change the system from within.

I honestly regret wasting my first couple of semesters before I learned about all of this stuff.

Re: The University Is Like a CD in the Streaming Age

#84

Post by GaryNumanVevo »

grenoire wrote: post #63
GaryNumanVevo wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The “debate” on racism was lost a long time ago. I would hope it’s well understood it’s a net negative for society. I don’t think debating it over and over again as if there’s merit to racist ideas is remotely a good idea. It’s like letting the flat earthers continue to teach science classes even though we know the earth is round.

I think understanding the history of racism why it's attractive to the masses is a great start in continuing healthy discourse over the politics and economics of the matter. You might think that there is no merit, but you can only convince others to rid themselves of racist ideas if you understand where they are coming from.

> but you can only convince others to rid themselves of racist ideas if you understand where they are coming from.

Absolutely disagree, the appeal of racism is well understood, it's only effect on society is to subjugate people, separate along racial lines.

> healthy discourse over the politics and economics of the matter.

"healthy discourse" implies that there is some kind of equivalency between racist and anti-racist, to believe that is to be willfully ignorant of situation and power structures which exist in the US today.

Re: The University Is Like a CD in the Streaming Age

#85

Post by non-entity »

I've done a good bit of research into online programs and there seems to be, with a few exceptions, online CS programs and online Liberal Arts programs. Of those the only "useful" degree is CS and the quality of the programs vary greatly.

For the most part this makes sense, a lot of cool or useful degrees arent really possible to deliver a quality program online because of expensive equipment for labs that arent available to consumers (be that for price or other reasons).

On an interesting note, I'm disappointed there arent more math programs. It's a moderately useful degree with wide applicability and doesnt have much of the way of physical constraints. The only issues I can imagine are ones that are common to online degrees in general. Yet only a few school have one.

> Indeed, that unbundling is already happening. Employers such as Google, Apple, IBM, and Ernst & Young have stopped requiring traditional university degrees, even for some of their most highly skilled positions

So... developers and tangential professions right? Self taught developers and those with non-traditional educations are hardly new. I doubt these companies are willing to waive for many "highly skilled positions".

I think I read some time ago about Elon Musk claiming he was removing degree requirements from job listings[0] and yet if I search for engineering positions at Telsa many require a masters degree in an engineering discipline. Everytime i hear something about how usless degrees are and how much better other options are, I assume they dont know anything about the world outside software.

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-college-not-for-le...

Re: The University Is Like a CD in the Streaming Age

#86

Post by tonyedgecombe »

intended wrote: post #65

American higher education discussion is usually misplaced because it’s a middle class jobs discussion with extra steps. create the factory jobs which don’t need a degree and many people will be happier and colleges will no longer be a part of a non-normally distributed outcomes market. People learn in a variety of ways, and the abysmal completion rates from MOOCs clearly indicate that IT enables education does not so…

I always expected the drop out rates for MOOCs to be high. The cost of entry is low.

If you look at organisations like the Open University it's a different picture. People have to put their hand in their wallets and that seems to be enough to fix the problem.

Re: The University Is Like a CD in the Streaming Age

#87

Post by FriendlyNormie »

turbinerneiter wrote: post #83

Ya'll use University wrong. The classes, etc. ... whatever! During my time at Uni, I: * designed a demonstrator car frame to show off a bunch of new manufacturing techniques, which was actually built in the end * was part of a team who tested a new type of fiber optical vibration sensor on a sounding rocket * worked with a PhD student on developing a sensor to measure water flow through a tank to validate his simulat…

No post body was provided.

Re: The University Is Like a CD in the Streaming Age

#88

Post by mattacular »

dougmwne wrote: post #16

I was having another one of those moments yesterday where I was questioning the value of higher education while reading a HN thread about teaching yourself CS. There was a healthy debate about whether the typical CS curriculum helps a modern software engineer at all. Some thought the degree was stuck back in the 70's. Others thought there was value, but had trouble articulating it. It seems that when the information…

> employers often look for the degree, but do not believe it is much of an indicator of quality and don't expect new grads to walk in the door with the needed skills

In other words, requiring a college degree (even in an irrelevant field) of applicants is a form of class gatekeeping for technical professions.

Re: The University Is Like a CD in the Streaming Age

#89

Post by acemarke »

WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #68
dougmwne wrote: post #16

I was having another one of those moments yesterday where I was questioning the value of higher education while reading a HN thread about teaching yourself CS. There was a healthy debate about whether the typical CS curriculum helps a modern software engineer at all. Some thought the degree was stuck back in the 70's. Others thought there was value, but had trouble articulating it. It seems that when the information…

Honestly, the CS degree is weird. Some classes are super basic and some classes are nintendo hard. The classes that are in the middle of the road are very few but those are the ones that are most useful. Operating Systems, Data Structures, Parallel Computing and Software Engineering II (Basic Project Management) were notable for being interesting, difficult enough to make not slack and endlessly applicable for progra…

I've always felt that a CS degree (at least based on the curriculum I went through) is really three separate and only partly related areas of study crammed together:

- Teaching people how to program for the first time. Most of us had never actually programmed before, so you've got to have the intro classes that both teach _how_ to think through breaking a problem down into steps, and also the specific syntax of expressing those steps in a specific programming language, moving on to the typical concepts like OOP and classes and whatnot.

- Actual CS. Data Structures, Algorithms, Operating Systems, Compilers, and the various more math-ish / "fundamentals" content.

- Software Engineering. The practical, hands-on work of actually writing meaningful code, working as part of a team, requirements, using version control, testing, etc. Some classes like specific web dev topics or something probably fit into here too.

Granted, I was going through this almost 20 years ago, and I only have my own experience to base this on, but it seems like this is a reasonable broad description of what a CS degree is trying to cover.

I feel like that gave me a good fundamental background, but at the same time 99% of what I do on a daily basis now is all stuff that I either learned on the job, or in my own free time.

Re: The University Is Like a CD in the Streaming Age

#90

Post by cwhiz »

m000 wrote: post #2

> as employers embrace new skills-based certifications, many students may question the value of the traditional four-year degree Of course employers will embrace skills-based certifications, as they essentially offload the cost of any specialized training to the employee. Until now, it was not uncommon for the employer to pay (directly or indirectly) for the additional training. But I'm not sure if getting a speciali…

> In the end, the problem is not the value of the four-year university degree. The problem is its price.

I don’t know. The piece of paper is worth more than I paid for it, but that’s just an issue of employers gate keeping.

If I think back to every course I took in college I would say all but maybe 4-5 were a waste of my time. All these ancillary required courses so that I can receive a “well rounded” education that I needed to get a job, but didn’t actually want to take.

Even those 4-5 useful courses were woefully out of date. I could have done a better job learning that material with 6 months on Pluralsight or some other learning platform.

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