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[UPDATE 20191112_223013 UTC: Per original author's request, I hereby note this is an edited excerpt and not an exact quote from the blog post linked below. --martyb]
Submitted via IRC for Bytram
Three of the Hundred Falsehoods CS Students Believe
Jan Schauma recently posted a list of one hundred Falsehoods CS Students (Still) Believe Upon Graduating. There is much good fun here, especially for a prof who tries to help CS students get ready for the world, and a fair amount of truth, too. I will limit my brief comments to three items that have been on my mind recently even before reading this list.
18. 'Email' and 'Gmail' are synonymous.
CS grads are users, too, and their use of Gmail, and systems modeled after it, contributes to the truths of modern email: top posting all the time, with never a thought of trimming anything. Two-line messages sitting atop icebergs of text which will never be read again, only stored in the seemingly infinite space given us for free.
38. Employers care about which courses they took.
It's the time of year when students register for spring semester courses, so I've been meeting with a lot of students. (Twice as many as usual, covering for a colleague on sabbatical.) It's interesting to encounter students on both ends of the continuum between not caring at all what courses they take and caring a bit too much. The former are so incurious I wonder how they fell into the major at all. The latter are often more curious but sometimes are captive to the idea that they must, must, must take a specific course, even if it meets at a time they can't attend or is full by the time they register.
90. Two people with a CS degree will have a very similar background and shared experience/knowledge.
This falsehood operates in a similar space to #38, but at the global level I reached at the end of my previous paragraph. Even students who take most of the same courses together will usually end their four years in the program with very different knowledge and experiences.
The complete list is available at www.netmeister.org.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Immerman on Tuesday November 12 2019, @02:20PM (13 children)
You're talking about technical details - there's absolutely no reason those should be taught in Computer Science programs. There's far too many, and most of them are irrelevant to any particular career paths.
As the old saying goes: Computer Scientists don't work with hardware. Similarly, Computer Scientists don't write code.
Of course, Computer Scientists also mostly don't have jobs. There just isn't that much work for Computer Scientists. Mostly you want Software Engineers, Network Engineers, IT technicians, etc.etc.etc. Computer Science provides a decent foundation for becoming those, especially if a student decides to specialize in one of those directions, but it does NOT encompass them. If you want to be able to hire cheap employees right out of school and have them be useful, then you need to provide training for the specific skills you need. That's the trade off - either you pay market price for an experienced professional - or you provide the necessary training yourself. Or just bumble along in the face of a steady stream of incompetent fuck-ups, that's an option too I guess.
TL,DR: Undergraduate degrees are NOT supposed to make you a competent employee - that's what trade schools and on-the-job training are for. They're designed to lay the foundation for you to eventually *become* much more competent than you would be able to without that foundation, or to go on to a graduate school where you will acquire much more specialized skills that will generally be applicable to a career in a much narrower field.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by ikanreed on Tuesday November 12 2019, @02:32PM (5 children)
I agree with your final sentiment. We've broken the concept of a 4 year degree over the knee of the service economy.
All of the following are completely fucked up
The original understanding of a bachelorreate was that you were a person who genuinely understood something and had developed a well-rounded general intellectual skillset, not highschool++. The way we expect every programmer to have a 4 year degree in computer science is entirely expecting every musician to have a 4 year degree in music.
(Score: 4, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 12 2019, @04:08PM (4 children)
I miss the days when baccalaureates were conferred only on those who could spell “baccalaureate.”
(Score: 3, Insightful) by captain normal on Tuesday November 12 2019, @05:10PM (3 children)
I miss the days when undergrads were required to have some knowledge of Latin.
https://www.theclassroom.com/baccalaureate-degree-4603623.html [theclassroom.com]
When life isn't going right, go left.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Tuesday November 12 2019, @06:47PM (2 children)
As someone with entirely too much latin and not enough real language study in his background: why?
(Score: 3, Funny) by barbara hudson on Tuesday November 12 2019, @08:24PM (1 child)
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 14 2019, @06:05PM
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(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday November 12 2019, @04:42PM (4 children)
I'd agree that every CS student should be forced to take a little assembly; it's useful for understanding the underlying reasons behind a lot of logic that nobody really explains elsewhere.* Apparently my university agreed, because it was a required course.
*registers vs RAM (why certain operations are faster, register width), endianness, computational costs of branching...writing a program that you can't debug was also interesting :)
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 3, Informative) by Immerman on Tuesday November 12 2019, @04:57PM (3 children)
That much I'll tentatively agree on - assembly is (really close to) where the hardware meets the software, and the insights are likely useful to any application of CS knowledge.
I'd add in cache performance as another thing that should be spotlighted in such a "bare metal" assembly segment (I'm not sure assembly is worth a dedicated course) - I've encountered many people that don't understand that traversing large data sets sequentially is almost guaranteed to be several times faster that any other pattern, simply because it's pretty much the only pattern that cache prefetching can effectively anticipate - and using cache effectively gives you the capacity of RAM with most of the speed of registers. (The really scary thing? I've encountered such ignorance at professional supercomputing conferences...)
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday November 12 2019, @11:00PM (2 children)
The one I took was a split course between x86 assembly and Java threading, yeah.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday November 13 2019, @02:07AM (1 child)
Ever tried your hand at 68000 assembler? Not much call for it anymore, but *so* much nicer to program in. On of the difference that springs to mind was a "function call" instruction that did all the stack manipulation, etc. needed for a normal clean function call with a single instruction, while you needed a half-dozen instructions in x86.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Wednesday November 13 2019, @05:38PM
Oh, I totally believe that other assembly languages are nicer than x86. The platform didn't win out for technical reasons, but because it was cheaper and pushed by a bigger company (Intel).
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Wednesday November 13 2019, @01:09AM (1 child)
Many of the best professionals learned the trade for fun in their spare time. The degree formalizes that knowledge and puts it into a scientific context. I think people who try to study Computer Science purely to get at the revenue stream and don't have a passion for it will often have a bad time in the workplace if they even make it through the degree. I'm sure there are exceptions, though.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Immerman on Wednesday November 13 2019, @01:58AM
>The degree formalizes that knowledge and puts it into a scientific context.
I have to disagree. Yeah, there's some formalization, but where a degree really shines is granting breadth of knowledge. There's plenty of good self-taught programmers out there, but I doubt all that many of them are familiar with big-O notation, graph theory, boolean algebra, etc, etc, etc. (to mention some examples from the first class that springs to mind) All things that are very useful to have in your mental toolbox, but that you probably aren't going to learn organically under your own initiative - they're just not obviously relevant to much until you already know what they are.
Degrees excel at exposing you to lots of relevant background knowledge, while self-guided learning excels at developing practical knowledge. I'd venture a guess that most really excellent professionals have both.