New York City gets a Software Engineering High School

I choose software (while most of my friends of that time choose electrinics engeneering). The next three years we had lots of subjects related to CS. This is what I learned there: - Computer architecture, - Networking (osi model, ip stack, that sort of things), algorithms, - Structural programming (1st year), then oop (2nd year) (with C and C++), then Events Driven Programming with VB6 (3rd year) - systems analysis and design, database design (er model) - internet programming (back then, that was ASP, CSS and Javascript)

And all along the final year, we had a subject called Final Project, where we had to develop (from the requeriments to the implementantion) a REAL system (mostly done for family companies or NGO's ).

When I finished high school I was really prepared to start working, so I did, while at the same time, started going to the university. I can tell that it was REALLY easy to do my grad career because of my background. Even when at University some topics where seen in much deeper detail, i did it much faster than other people, because I already had my mind used to that things, and I just needed to learn the details.

But then again, even when I keept studing CS, some of my high school classmates chose other things to study (e.g: medicine, law school, economics, etc). But I think anyway that I must have to be a good experience for them, at least to learn that CS was not for them, and dont lose their time later.

Hope it helps!

Thing is, I've called myself a "programmer" for well over a decade now, and I just don't see it. Where are these programmers who just "implement"? I guess if someone had wireframes and made all the technology decisions and handed it over to a programmer, maybe that would count?

A company I worked for tried this, they made me an "Architect" and gave me an offshore team, and it was a disaster. It could be that I wasn't good at providing precise instructions, but to me, precise instructions are hard to distinguish from code. Well, maybe that's why "programmers" have poor job prospects - all programming work is now done by "software engineers"...

Does google, or facebook use "programmers" who are distinct from "software engineers?" Any startups out there that do this?

Like many have said, it can be possible to have a "normal" school with all the usual subjects in addition to a prominent computer science program.

Take my experience, for example:

Freshman year I learned things like recursion, Scheme, dynamic programming, and cellular automata. Sophomore year, I learned basic data structures and algorithms and wrote a couple of games. Junior year I learned systems programming in C, signals, processes, network communication and wrote a filesharing system. The next semester I wrote a computer graphics engine from scratch --- all the way from line drawing to complex lighting and implementing an animation and scene graph language. I also took the independent research class where I worked on information retrieval research.

I am not bragging. This is typical (in fact, many of the projects, or variations thereof, are things that everybody in those classes does). And yet, I still took tons of math, physics, chemistry, european history, american history, classical literature, modern literature, tech shop, architecture, and many other things. This was also typical! Other kids took the same common stuff but instead of so much computer science and math they took special electives in philosophy, literature, history, economics, and so on.

You really can fit all that stuff in. Stuyvesant is a great example that you can have a serious, multi-year computer science program and still have more than enough focus on other subjects.