Universities Have a Computer-Science Problem (msn.com) 112
theodp writes: "Last year," Ian Bogost writes in Universities Have a Computer-Science Problem, "18 percent of Stanford University seniors graduated with a degree in computer science, more than double the proportion of just a decade earlier. Over the same period at MIT, that rate went up from 23 percent to 42 percent. These increases are common everywhere: The average number of undergraduate CS majors at universities in the U.S. and Canada tripled in the decade after 2005, and it keeps growing. Students' interest in CS is intellectual -- culture moves through computation these days -- but it is also professional. Young people hope to access the wealth, power, and influence of the technology sector. That ambition has created both enormous administrative strain and a competition for prestige."
"Another approach has gained in popularity," Bogost notes. "Universities are consolidating the formal study of CS into a new administrative structure: the college of computing. [...] When they elevate computing to the status of a college, with departments and a budget, they are declaring it a higher-order domain of knowledge and practice, akin to law or engineering. That decision will inform a fundamental question: whether computing ought to be seen as a superfield that lords over all others, or just a servant of other domains, subordinated to their interests and control. This is, by no happenstance, also the basic question about computing in our society writ large."
Bogost concludes: "I used to think computing education might be stuck in a nesting-doll version of the engineer's fallacy, in which CS departments have been asked to train more software engineers without considering whether more software engineers are really what the world needs. Now I worry that they have a bigger problem to address: how to make computer people care about everything else as much as they care about computers.
"Another approach has gained in popularity," Bogost notes. "Universities are consolidating the formal study of CS into a new administrative structure: the college of computing. [...] When they elevate computing to the status of a college, with departments and a budget, they are declaring it a higher-order domain of knowledge and practice, akin to law or engineering. That decision will inform a fundamental question: whether computing ought to be seen as a superfield that lords over all others, or just a servant of other domains, subordinated to their interests and control. This is, by no happenstance, also the basic question about computing in our society writ large."
Bogost concludes: "I used to think computing education might be stuck in a nesting-doll version of the engineer's fallacy, in which CS departments have been asked to train more software engineers without considering whether more software engineers are really what the world needs. Now I worry that they have a bigger problem to address: how to make computer people care about everything else as much as they care about computers.
I get it, he doesn't like introverts (Score:5, Insightful)
With that said, does he ask the same question of psych majors? Bio majors? History majors? That they care about the rest of the world as much as their field.
I read a hatchet piece attacking CS people because they are introverted and need to be cut down to size and put in the employ of other fields so they can focus on the *real* problems, according to him.
Re:I get it, he doesn't like introverts (Score:5, Insightful)
If you get getting a CompSci degree just for the money -- don't. I have had many employees over the years and there is a direct correlation between people who don't really like to program (ie in it for the money) and getting yourself fired. Go find something you actually want to do for a career.
Re:I get it, he doesn't like introverts (Score:5, Insightful)
If you get getting a CompSci degree just for the money -- don't. I have had many employees over the years and there is a direct correlation between people who don't really like to program (ie in it for the money) and getting yourself fired. Go find something you actually want to do for a career.
I think part of the problem is that a lot of employers don't want programmers. They want experts in aviation, automotive, finance, etc, who also happen to know how to write programs. While these people exist, I don't think they are as available as companies want, and companies should be willing to team experts in the field with experts in programming to develop whatever application they need.
Re:I get it, he doesn't like introverts (Score:5, Insightful)
I think other than knowing how to code, that is the most important set of skills a software engineer can have: being able to work with a domain expert, accurately capture their requirements, and be humble enough to defer to the expert when it comes to use case design, and not trying to bully those experts with a bunch of computer jargon - they have their own jargon they are sitting on as well as they try to dumb things down for you.
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the most important set of skills a software engineer can have: being able to work with a domain expert
Exactly, and that is why I don't see CS separating from the rest of science because it is too intertwined, like maths. Indeed, what I do see happening is more options to combine CS courses with other science degrees either directly into programs or via "data science" options leading to subject experts who can more easily communicate and work with CS experts.
Indeed, the dotcom bubble suggests that massive surges in demand for CS grads is unlikely to end well since surges like the current AI/ML one while
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They are in fact required to. Otherwise they won't get the results they want. Making your programmers into pseudo-experts isn't the solution.
Failing to integrate domain knowledge into the development process is a project management issue, not an issue with your developers.
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Developers need to know enough to be on the team. Developers should not be in a silo waiting for a detailed set of instructions. It is not at all rare that I will find bugs in the hardware, bugs in the math, or bugs in the process. Plus lots of suggestions and discussins along the way. The "project management" very often does not know very much overall, they may be experts in the customers and what the customers want or are experts in supply chains.
Plus, where does "project management" come from anyway,
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PMs are people who can't do, usually. They used to be said to 'teach'. Now they do project management.
But more seriously, it's a combination of soft skills and guidance. The best company I worked for in this regard knew that the guidance part comes from a different place than the soft skills, and made sure the roles were separate. The PMs were more like 'programmer managers' and the CRM person was the guidance part.
I personally think people grow into these roles and identifying them at the start is hard
Re:I get it, he doesn't like introverts (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, companies think they want experts in their fields. But as a developer who has worked in healthcare, construction, retail, education, insurance, genetics, and mortgage, I can confirm that the domain knowledge is the easiest part to learn. In each of those fields, I became an expert in the domain, as part of my job as a software engineer. This is possible because the primary job of an engineer is to figure out how things work, and then figure out how they can work better. It doesn't really matter if what "domain" those things pertain to, the problems to solve are largely the same.
Re:I get it, he doesn't like introverts (Score:4, Insightful)
Indeed.
It is way easier to train a programmer about healthcare billing than it is to teach C++ to a healthcare admin.
I've worked in many domains, and I often end up knowing more domain knowledge than the "experts" because to code it, I have to actually understand all the details, while they just need to talk about it, so can fake much of it.
C++ for healthcare billing? (Score:2)
Sad!
Re:I get it, he doesn't like introverts (Score:5, Insightful)
This is an interesting look into the Dunning-Kruger effect. The reality is that these are areas that require learning and experience. I do not doubt that you are able to understand a narrow silo with those fields. However, you need people who are very aware of those fields in the design and testing stages or you will produce garbage that, while it minimally meets the contract specifications, will be nearly unusable.
The idea that, "what these people do is pretty simple," is in part irresponsible for large and expensive systems that end up being scrapped.
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I wouldn't put it the way you did. What I would say is that understanding and building processes is the specific skillset that engineers, especially software engineers, possess.
If I'm a plumber, I don't really care whether I'm fixing a leak in a factory or a restaurant or a DNA lab. It rarely even matters whether the plumbing is part of a complex piece of machinery. The principles of plumbing apply to any customer's domain.
It's not that different from software engineering. I can just as easily build a data
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You can fix a hundred leaks in a hundred restaurant sinks, and come up with a dozen really clever ways to do that well. It doesn't mean you know anywhere near enough to use the kitchen to prepare a decent frickin' meal. And you may have made yourself very familiar with the needs of _chefs_who_use_sinks_, but not familiar with the needs of _restaurant_patrons_.
I've worked in just as broad a range of industries as you have, as a software developer. After 30+ years I know enough to know the Dunning-Kruger e
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Yes, you indeed spotted a hole in my analogy.
By contrast, software engineers do in fact have to learn who the food is made in the kitchen. If a software engineer learns the business well enough to be effective at building the software the business needs, then that engineer could indeed do the actual job.
In the mortgage industry, for example, a portion of my job was compliance reporting. In that role, I had to learn all the ins and outs of what is required and what is not. Within a year, the compliance depar
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What you've said above boils down to, "I become an expert in any domain I program for, unless it's too hard, and in that case it doesn't matter."
I think I'm just going to quote David Dunning for you:
"Not knowing the scope of your own ignorance is part of the human condition. The problem with it is we see it in other people, and we don't see it in ourselves. The first rule of the Dunning–Kruger club is you don't know you're a member of the Dunning–Kruger club."
You know compliance reporting in-and
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Dunning–Kruger goes both ways. It also applies to what you think you know about my abilities, or those of other engineers.
It's not that programmers stop at things that are "too hard" for them, it's that they don't worry about problems that programming isn't able to solve, or at least problems that programmers aren't asked to solve.
I didn't learn to be a doctor as I wrote hospital management software, because knowing how to be a doctor wasn't in scope. If wasn't among the problems that hospital managem
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You can't have it both ways.
You're re-stating "I become an expert in any domain I program for, unless it's too hard, and in that case it doesn't matter." Except you've papered over "too hard" with "out of scope". E.g., you could build a coding system for a doctor, but not be a doctor, because being a doctor involves skills beyond the scope of a coding system. No need to learn those, therefore ... you are not an expert in the domain of healthcare. You can stick with the braggadocio and the condescension,
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Perhaps I am a member of the club. I'm not really worried about it.
But I also know that I, and many other developers like me, can adapt to any domain. I've done it over and over, and I believe any developer worth his salt can do so as well.
Companies that are worried about developers having experience in their domain, do not typically understand how software development relates to their particular domain.
You go ahead and stick to your domain-specific development. Personally, I like variety.
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Now that you've reduced your claim from the initial "I become an expert in every domain I write code for" to "I can adapt to any domain I write code for", I have no issue with it. It stinks less of rock-star attitude.
I do find it strange that you consider the variation in your career to be exceptional, though. Just about all the programmers I meet at my age (who aren't already long retired) have had careers just as weird as mine. And I know people who worked their entire careers at one large company, but
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I haven't backed off my statement one bit. We've just danced around definitions of words like "domain."
My career isn't exceptional, and that's my point. I think any good developer does just what I do, and can learn any domain that comes their way.
Plumber (Score:2)
for a high-level containment infectious disease lab?
Pipe fitter for a nuclear power plant?
Something tells me there are added requirements.
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Excellent! You've put your finger on two edge cases that account for maybe 0.001% of all businesses. For the other 99.999%, your journeyman plumber will do just fine.
Ignore edge cases (Score:2)
Now that is an excellent mindset for developing software.
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Yes, it is easy to "believe" that I've become an expert in a field that I've built software for, especially when "regular" experts regularly ask me for advice in their domain of expertise, or when they send other people's questions to me, because they don't know.
I have very little regard for "PhD" as an indicator of expertise. A PhD means that someone is good at the things schools want students to do. For example, when I hire developers, I've learned to consider a MS in Computer Science as one strike agains
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Yes, companies think they want experts in their fields. But as a developer who has worked in healthcare, construction, retail, education, insurance, genetics, and mortgage, I can confirm that the domain knowledge is the easiest part to learn. In each of those fields, I became an expert in the domain, as part of my job as a software engineer. This is possible because the primary job of an engineer is to figure out how things work, and then figure out how they can work better. It doesn't really matter if what "domain" those things pertain to, the problems to solve are largely the same.
C'mon man, I'm a BSEE which worked with construction for years and don't consider myself an expert in civil or mechanical engineering. I can understand the processes involved in construction, BoM, project manager, supply chain, builders management but there are a lot of other things involved. I can help a lot for sure but far from been an expert. If you said to me I'm an expert in electric engineering, I would say ok just to go ahead and do the project and installation of your own house, without insurance f
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You are reading much more into my post than was there.
If you write software related to domain A, why would you be expected to become an expert in domain B? Just because A and B are both facets of construction, doesn't make them the same thing.
If you write software dealing with supply chain or project / builder management, why would you then become an expert in electrical or structural engineering? I didn't assert that. But if you write software that is a core tool used by electrical engineers, then yes, you
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"Programmers" are kind of useless without other knowledge. You don't want someone who programes to build your airplanes if they have no concept of how airplanes work or what the software should be doing. And yet this often happens. Programmers with a bad understanding of floating point numbers very often screw up the mathematics (I know, this is one of my bugbears but it keeps happening). Or even programmers who can't do integer arithmetic properly and end up with over and underflows. Now try to add som
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Or like working middle-management anywhere in Russia.
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If you get getting a CompSci degree just for the money -- don't. I have had many employees over the years and there is a direct correlation between people who don't really like to program (ie in it for the money) and getting yourself fired. Go find something you actually want to do for a career.
If you get getting a *ANY* degree just for the money -- don't. I have had many employees over the years and there is a direct correlation between people who don't really like to *DO X* (ie in it for the money) and getting yourself fired. Go find something you actually want to do for a career.
FTFY.
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Oh yeah, came across at least one such person. Got the paper due to pressure from his parents but with absolutely zero interest, cos it is an "easy way to earn a respectable income".
He told me about it after he joined my team and he was gone soon after, when he was found to be very lacking.
I understood from him that his interest was in culinary line. Hope he got to do what his passion was.
Re:I get it, he doesn't like introverts (Score:5, Interesting)
The issues is deeper than that. While Liberal Arts might have been the preponderance of students 30 years ago, they would be highly varied majors-- English, Languages, History, Sciences. What is happening now is you end up with a monoculture in CS and no breadth into the Liberal Arts and other programs.
Those programs are really foundational; even I as an introverted engineer know that and am happy I had them even if it was only ~20% of my credit-hours in school (take out math and it was down to 7%). When nobody has a major within the liberal arts those schools flounder and the broader university suffers.
And that is all even before the inevitable CS downturn that comes in cycles.
Re:I get it, he doesn't like introverts (Score:5, Interesting)
Everybody should study liberal arts in college. Also, everybody should be studying mathematics, including computer science, and science in college. But, very few should be *majoring* in liberal arts.
Liberal arts departments can survive just fine teaching mainly to non-majors, just as mathematics departments do.
The problem is that the job market has a limited need for liberal arts majors, and it also, believe it or not, has only a limited need for computer science majors.
Options yes, but not compulsion (Score:2)
Everybody should study liberal arts in college.
No, everyone should have the option to study liberal arts but nobody should be compelled to if they do not want such a degree. Exposing students to different subjects and giving them a basic education in a broad range of fields is what school is for. Universities are not there to fix a broken school system. People should be free to choose the subject, or subjects, they would like to master at universities and should only be required to take the courses needed to achieve that. If you want everyone to have s
Re: Options yes, but not compulsion (Score:2)
Calculus? Most people will never need that. The math everyone should learn is statistics. That, they actually have a regular use for.
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Choice is Key (Score:2)
Universities can and do require a breadth of subjects
Not everywhere - UK, Canada and several other countries have very focused undergrad degree programs although, at least in Canada, you can choose to do a broader liberal arts degree but then you do not go to university but a liberal arts college. Choice is the key here. It's fine to do a liberal arts degree if that's what you want (my wife did and she thoroughly enjoyed it). While I would thoroughly have hated a degree where I would spend a lot of time doing subjects I had zero interest in and saw little to
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Also Liberal Arts majors can make great programmers: you use the same/similar parts of your brain to write production code as you use to write an essays (and liberal arts majors write lots of essays). The kind of code CS majors write is often *less* similar (it's much closer to mathematical proofs).
I say this not just as a Liberal Arts major programmer myself, but also having worked with many great ones. And there are even famous examples: eg. one of the co-founders of Python's Django was a Literature maj
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Or Larry Wall of Perl. Was a music and chemsitry major, ultimately did linguistics and language.
I'm also a Liberal Arts major and grad schooler. I was 2 classes shy of an undergrad computer science major (2 prereq math classes I didn't care to take) and I've never felt that has held me back!
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Pretty sure you aren't my sister... but she was an English Lit major and her entire career has essentially been programming and data science.
Mine was engineering, but the bulk of my career has been Adult* Daycare.
*If you can call your clients and junior engineers adults.
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I'm not convinced you know who Ian Bogost is.
This isn't some normie whining about introverted programmers.
He's complaining about the same thing Slashdot tends to complain about with Microsoft, Alphabet, and Meta: the single-minded pursuit of machines for converting code into money.
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You're correct, I had no idea who he was. That said, after having found out who he is, I still don't think his ideas hold water. He got famous for a game I never played and probably wouldn't have played even if I knew about it.
He's proposing a codependent model of employment which makes the skill sets we have utilitarian. No one lives in a bubble, but the discipline required to write code means dealing with the personalities associated with it and spacing it away from the normies. While the current mode
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I believe in a liberal education (and I am a CS graduate). An Computers College risks turning the college experience into something totally vocational, like DeVry.
So the problem...? (Score:1)
One extreme is the MCP from Tron, and the other is the Dalai Lama? The truth is ALWAYS a difference of two extremes....
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The truth is ALWAYS a difference of two extremes....
That's not true, but it is a common enough fallacy that it has a name: Argument to moderation [wikipedia.org].
It is also known as the "Middle Ground Fallacy".
Re: So the problem...? (Score:1)
If you do not know the value of the two extremes then there is no defineable medium. Yet the search for a solution will always leave you some where in between the two extremes. Actually closer to one extreme or the other depending on what you call an acceptable solution.
Everyone else is philosophy and art departments (Score:4, Funny)
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Computer science did not emerge from math; it emerged paradoxically from electrical engineering.
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Computer science did not emerge from math; it emerged paradoxically from electrical engineering.
That depends on the college.
When computer science emerged as a separate discipline, some colleges separated it from the EE department, while others separated it from math.
That legacy is still evident in many departments. The CS departments that came from EE tend to be practical and hands-on, while those from math are more theory-oriented.
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Because BA is Bachelor of Arts, and the Math department is in the Arts side of things. Whereas if you got a BS - Bachelor of Science, it was because it came from the EE department, which is in the Science side of things. I got a BS myself.
What seriously? (Score:2)
they are declaring it a higher-order domain of knowledge and practice, akin to law or engineering.
Higher-order domain of knowledge can be attributed to engineering but law is more akin to opinion. The outcome is determined by the opinion of the day and the whim of the political and economic class. Law is about enforcing a group's desires rather than an educated, knowledge based domain. The evidence is apparent in the world today. If law was a knowledge based domain we wouldn't have ecological issues. There would be peace and war would not exist. Borders wouldn't exist and there would be no us and them s
Oof, that many? (Score:5, Insightful)
Still, haven't seen any degree graduates as disappointing as Cybersecurity in the last 5 years. I swear it's the new "I have to take something" degree and they teach the students fuck all about actual computers, networks, or how they work.
Same (Score:5, Informative)
I have interviewed a lot of straight-out-of-college Computer Science degree holders, and many of them could not solve even the most basic coding problems. They could talk about the concepts at a high level, but could not write code that does it in the programming language of their own choice.
A few said that they never had to do that sort of thing in any of their classes. That's what really bothers me. These aren't trick questions or advanced edge-case sorts of things, really basic stuff that should be homework assignments in CS courses. The very few that could figure it out during the interview got job offers immediately, precisely because there were so few who could. I think I have only ever met one fresh-from-college graduate who could solve multithreading problems, so I don't even bother bringing that up in interviews for anything but senior level candidates.
All this interest in Computer Science has motivated colleges to water the curriculum way down, so they can cash in on all that money. They are doing a terrible disservice to the students though, handing out degrees to people who should have been prompted to switch majors after their first CS 101 course.
Re: Same (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not surprised by your observation.I've been teaching programming for 40 (!) years, and one constant has not changed: most people cannot learn to program beyond the very basic level. The discussion as to why is not important here, but this is simply true.
Used to be that students self-selected to some degree. Now that CS is popular, more and more people try it, who will never succeed. University administration does not like seeing large numbers if students fail. So we are now getting all sorts of CS-like degrees that omit the hard technical stuff.
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The thing nobody seems to accept is the vast vast majority of software tasks don't require any engineering - well at least not until they often very suddenly do but that is a management / operations problem.
The truth is the computers are so big and fast now; data structures and algorithms often make little difference. On that 4Ghz machine with 32GB of main memory and fast SSDs; what can't can't you bubble sort, linearly search for, etc? Not that many things. For the things you can't knowing enough to call .
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memorize a lot of NEC rules
It's rare to find an EE who has read the NEC. They study UL
standards.
NFPA 70 is the *first* book electricians learn. There are other books
on fire safety, hazmat, lightning protection, etc. that must also be studied.
its not the same work an EE does
You mean delegating the work to technicians then rubber-stamping
the results without double-checking the work? Or having such bad work product that it could be confused with a technicians?
I'm an Estimator. I have just described *every* set of prints that has come across my desk.
Re: Same (Score:3)
Sure, coders can churn out content, using frameworks they barely understand. There are a lot of them doing exactly that.
Of course, that's why web pages are now 10s of megabytes. It's why injection is *still* the most common security hole. It's the reason behind a lot of other woes.
Mind, I don't have an answer. There aren't enough qualified people to produce all that crappy content. Nor would they be interested in the job.
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Programming requires creativity, out-of-the-box thinking, introspection, and a high aptitude for analysis. These TikTok kids (and the TV kids before them) have done nothing but consume content their entire lives and never had to do anything with it.
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So much THIS ^^
Programming requires creativity, out-of-the-box thinking, introspection, and a high aptitude for analysis. These TikTok kids (and the TV kids before them) have done nothing but consume content their entire lives and never had to do anything with it.
Piling on of THIS!
The good programmer gets a bit of an endorphin buzz after searching through code to find the typo that kept the program from working.
The TikTok kiddies (and 99 percent of others) brains would short out looking for that typo. Programming is a talent, sort of like singing well or being a eliete athlete. You can either do it or you can't.
Of course most of those kiddies think that there is no need for desktops any more because all the product they consume just happens automagically.
Re: Same (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not surprised by your observation.I've been teaching programming for 40 (!) years, and one constant has not changed: most people cannot learn to program beyond the very basic level. The discussion as to why is not important here, but this is simply true.
So much this! Case in point - me. Some people consider me pretty smart. I go beyond basic skills, but am mediocre at best. I know enough to stumble through and fix problems, and can write a bit - but I'd never hire me as a programmer. Programming is vast, and I'm halfvast. What I can do is tell when a programmer is trying to bullshit me, and can serve as a liason between programmers and others.
But the very attributes that will make a person a good programmer are not something that you can take Joe or Sally Sixpack off the street and edumacate them in a CS program, and unleash them on the world to write proficient code.
Indeed we seem to have forgotten that so many really really good programmers are self taught, not products of the CS programs. Also that there is a relationship between the ability to be good, and introversion. It's in the thought process. It's a certain mode or form of concentration that is not all that common. And while we call it logic, it's a process, not specifically logic.
I suspect that is the cause of my lame programming skills. I have the concentration, but not the deep seated introversion. And that's okay, the things I am good at are things I am pretty darn good at.
Used to be that students self-selected to some degree. Now that CS is popular, more and more people try it, who will never succeed. University administration does not like seeing large numbers if students fail. So we are now getting all sorts of CS-like degrees that omit the hard technical stuff.
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If your Comp Science or Cybersecurity degree doesn't teach you what an IP address is, and you did not pick it up on your own at some point, you probably shouldn't apply for network/cloud/dev-ops/IT jobs.
Concurrency is hard Re:Same (Score:1)
I think I have only ever met one fresh-from-college graduate who could solve multithreading problems
Managing concurrency correctly is fraught with pitfalls. Best to use a library that handles things like that for you.
I had only one class as an undergrad that went into the nitty-gritty of concurrent programming beyond "just use this library and don't worry about the magic behind the curtain." I don't remember if it was a required course or not.
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Graduates from CS schools have a degree calling them "Software Engineers" but they are not. Most of them have a glorified IT degree and no real algorithm work. All but two of my best software engineers have had EE degrees. The two exceptions, one was a CS dropout who was bored, and the other had a CS degree from Carnegie Mellon and an MS in Engineering from RPI.
They have a man problem (Score:3)
Other than that, a few years into the industry gets rid of a lot of people.
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Every programmer over 30 that I know is married. I'm pretty sure programmers in general figure out how to navigate dating and relationships as well as any other group.
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Every programmer over 30 that I know is married. I'm pretty sure programmers in general figure out how to navigate dating and relationships as well as any other group.
Most good programmers I know are pretty decent people, and there are decent people out there who want to partner with them.
The grubby antisocial Nerd is a meme propagated by people who think that reality TV is awesome and real, and that PopCulture runs the world. It makes them feel superior.
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The grubby antisocial Nerd is a meme propagated by people who think that reality TV is awesome and real, and that PopCulture runs the world. It makes them feel superior.
My second wife loves Big Bang Theory. I can't stand the show. We were waiting to go into an escape room and she talked about the episode where they solved it in minutes. Nothing in that show is based on reality I said. Then I proceeded to skip nearly the entire puzzle in the first five minutes. Luckily, they stopped us from opening the final safe (ending the game) and we did it the correct way. Which was fun.
BBT is about as full of stereotypes as it is possible to have, even racial ones. It's one joke repeated over and over. The real world of Geekdom (we differentiate between nerds and geeks) is that outside of a different mindset, we geeks are remarkably like so-called normal people. I'm a biker, I used to drag race cars and bikes, and motocross, played in a band and played Ice Hockey until my body told me to knock it off. Plenty of co-workers play sports.
Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman used to go to str
Part of IT / CS really needs to be an trade (Score:4, Informative)
Part of IT / CS really needs to be an trade.
It can very school to school with CS but at some for programmers they turn out theroy loaded people who may not even know how turn on the workstation.
Other times you have big skills gaps.
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Agreed with this.
I have met coders who are so narrowly focused that they have practically zero knowledge outside that niche domain.
For example a 3D programming domain expert will be lost when talking about even the basic common sense network stuff - like packet latency, etc in the network code. Forget about discussing actual routers / switch hardware..
You don't need to be an expert in everything, but it is good to have some basic knowledge about things that may be related to your particular niche.
The Heartless March of Selection (Score:4, Insightful)
The harmonious state of nature is a pleasant fiction. When populations become excessive, they either die out, or other populations die out. But somebody dies out. That's how the balance is maintained - by the heartless deprecation of "something".
We have a surplus of technical people. Educational institutions can keep pumping out more of them, but the world will cull the positions. The people paying the price are the people caught in the crossfire, often carrying student debt into their next career.
Despite what the industries would have you believe, we do not have unfilled positions because of a lack of applicants. We have unfilled positions because of a lack of appropriate and "baked in" applicants. Companies want to hire people who are equipped already - many do not want to pay the cost of training.
I have no solution. I'm one of those idiots who only describe the problem.
Obama speech is now different (Score:3, Insightful)
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This solves the H1B problem. We have a bunch of now qualified people, that will need to complete for the lowest paying tech jobs. We'll still be told we aren't qualified because we don't speak Telugu and that they *need* an H1B slave.
Kind of funny how leftists are all "tear down the wall" and "no human is illegal" when some brown person comes to "steal" some redneck farmer's job, but are all "H1B needs to be stopped immediately, and those people booted, for their own good of course!" when a different-shade-of-brown person from India comes to "steal" *their* job.
Now just waiting for some frothing leftist to insist that they are fighting for H1Bs to get bigger wages, not to get booted - as if taking their only competitive advantage over
cs teaches the wrong thing (Score:3)
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Certainly the three things I try to teach newcomers are not directly related to programming.
1) Identifying the real task, not what you think it is. The real task is, "get a satisfied client".
2) Documentation. Almost everyone hates it, but it is critical.
3) You can almost always be wrong, and if you take shortcuts based on assumptions you're going to get burned and it'll be embarrassing.
Like most, I learned those things several years into my career.
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This. These days, producing good, relevant requirements is harder than producing the code to implement those requirements. But companies still seem to think of the product team as an afterthought.
The article misses several points (Score:4, Insightful)
The purpose of college is to train the mind. Diligently studying a difficult subject trains the mind better than slouching through easy classes.
There has been a myth floating around that the way to get rich is to learn programming.
Talent is real. It takes a special kind of mind to be good at creating complex software, and not everybody can do it well.
We are being overwhelmed by mediocre CS grads who have no talent or passion for the subject.
The article also mentions the political and social problems of the way some technology has been implemented. This is NOT the fault of programmers, it's the fault of managers, bosses and investors. Somewhere along the line, the purpose of business was redefined to be "increasing shareholder value". If you follow this rule, nothing else matters, not employees, customers, the environment, social stability, nothing. The need for reform is in business school
This just in: (Score:3)
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Ego / put you in your place (Score:4, Insightful)
Computers are quite complex, and to take on higher end roles, and make this technology work as it does takes skilled intelligent individuals working as a team.
The problem they're having is that as these kind of roles require highly skilled people, the office manager is upset that treating the IT guy as some lowly servant that just needs to 'get it done' and 'make it work' and the only reason the officer manager doesn't do it, is because they're too important to be bothered with it.
The concern they're having, is technology specialist requirements to be good at the job now, are filled with people who realize it, and not only can do the IT things, they could also easily do the office managers job if they chose to. So that power dynamic has shifted, and people don't like it, since technology is used everywhere and they're encountering this a lot. There's a range of IQ's like to be a lawyer is around the 110-130 range for people to be decent as their job. Network engineers, senior analysts etc that are decent in their job, also have to be in that range.
Instead now, they can't lord their position over these people, since if they had chosen that field to study, say law, they could have as well.
TL;DR People are being forced to encounter people more capable than they are, when traditionally they thought they could treat these people as a lower social status, and it upsets them, when instead everyone should be focusing, IT and other roles a like, on how our different experiences and knowledge help compliment each other to get things done.
Sounds like the CS version ... (Score:2)
... of Peak Digital. Which wouldn't be too surprising give the overall situation with IT and the digital space.
CS hater, hates... (Score:2)
"I have a strong memory of processing the paperwork to drop my computer-science major in college, in favor of philosophy."
They don't sound like they're trying to solve anything. Just complaining, whining, and claiming the sky will fall. Maybe that's all they can do with their philosophy degree?
Why should a Computer Science college focus on deeply integrating history (other than computer related) or journalism? If you want to study those topics, great! Go to those colleges and take electives. In fact jo
Supply and Dumpmand (Score:1)
Do you want to do computers.... (Score:1)
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Jesus never claimed to be THE Son-O-God. Those words have been taken out of context from the Hebrew via Greek. Jesus was a good Jewish boy, claiming to be effectively God would have been blasphemous (he'd have been stoned if he did) and anathema to his understanding of Judism. The walk on water and turning water into wine are stories about Jesus, not something that Jesus claimed. To call oneself a Son-O-God meant you were of God, not God him/herself. Many Jewish kings were called sons of God. Even some ange
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