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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday November 12 2019, @12:07PM   Printer-friendly
from the insights-into-education dept.

[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.


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by ikanreed on Tuesday November 12 2019, @02:24PM (6 children)

    by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday November 12 2019, @02:24PM (#919385) Journal

    Ah yes, the "steal wholesale and don't bother to integrate at all" strategy of development. Have you ever actually worked in a corporate shop? The percentage of open source code that's "enterprise ready" to link into existing APIs is close to zero.

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  • (Score: 2) by DutchUncle on Tuesday November 12 2019, @04:08PM (2 children)

    by DutchUncle (5370) on Tuesday November 12 2019, @04:08PM (#919434)

    But try to convince an EE hardware manager that it's worth buying a tested certified stack instead of just copying one off github for free.

    • (Score: 2) by ikanreed on Tuesday November 12 2019, @04:12PM

      by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday November 12 2019, @04:12PM (#919435) Journal

      I have done that before. Hell, I've pitched going from systems I know how to use and are currently working to ones that are more stable but less familiar to me and I struggle with quite recently(ask me what I'm putting off today). Maybe the reality you've experienced is so radically different from mine that we just see completely different kinds of behaviors.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 12 2019, @06:56PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 12 2019, @06:56PM (#919503)

      I think an EE manager would recognize the value of the certified stack, and deprecate the github one. Many EE's still have an engineering mentality, while CS people don't mind winging it and dealing with the aftermath when it breaks.

  • (Score: 3, Funny) by tangomargarine on Tuesday November 12 2019, @04:35PM (2 children)

    by tangomargarine (667) on Tuesday November 12 2019, @04:35PM (#919444)

    Have you ever actually worked in a corporate shop?

    You're asking the "no jobs exist for CS grads" guy whether he's worked a CS job before? Really??

    --
    "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
    • (Score: 4, Funny) by aristarchus on Tuesday November 12 2019, @07:08PM (1 child)

      by aristarchus (2645) on Tuesday November 12 2019, @07:08PM (#919510) Journal

      I was wondering what happened to the "no jobs exist for CS grads" guy! Hasn't been around for a while, and I was worried he had the misfortune of finding a job in CS. Thank goodness that appears not to be the case.

      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday November 13 2019, @03:34AM

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday November 13 2019, @03:34AM (#919697) Journal
        Indeed, we are safe for another posting cycle.