3 ms·

Maybe this is the source of the recurrent discussions here, and elsewhere, about how formal CS education doesn't matter (something I wholeheartedly disagree).

by CrLf 11y ago

Maybe this is the source of the recurrent discussions here, and elsewhere, about how formal CS education doesn't matter (something I wholeheartedly disagree). Universities have always been under fire to provide courses "better suited" for market needs and it seems to me that they've been slowly caving in during the last decade or so. This, of course, probably varies a lot between country and even between universities in the same country. The fact is: university courses that degenerate into professional training courses end up providing little value. Timeless CS principles are abandoned for marketable high-level skills that are obsolete even before students finish their studies, and that help nothing when the market itself changes (or needs to change). I see Europe's Bologna process as a perfect example of this. It was supposed to make higher education comparable between EU countries but instead now provides an excuse for shorter and shallower courses, comparable only because they don't go any further than the lowest common denominator. What you say is really evident in some circles: a magical view of computing platforms and a complete ignorance of hardware details critical for software performance. There is a blind faith on compilers/interpreters to somehow extract maximum performance from the hardware in the face of wastefulness. As anecdotal evidence, I've more than once had to convince people that allocating new objects by the millions (in the JVM) has a real CPU performance cost. The usual response is that the application isn't limited by memory and the time required by the garbage collector is negligible, thinking nothing about cache locality and how memory access is now a major bottleneck for modern CPUs.

sweden 11y ago
I don't agree with your perspective of Europe's Bologna. Universities don't need an European agreement to create shorter and shallower courses, in fact, Bologna doesn't impose any kind of restrictions on the kind of courses the universities have. And Bologna helps a lot with your education, by making higher education comparable between EU countries, you can easily apply for student exchange programs and study subjects that aren't approached by your home university. I studied in one of the best engineering university of Portugal and I studied for one semester in Sweden and although both universities were under the Bologna agreement, I could notice differences in both systems. The only thing that Bologna imposes in universities is how many hours of effort is 1 course credit (ECTS). Course content, organization and etc, is up to each university.
- CrLf 11y ago
  Before the Bologna process, engineering and CS degrees in Portugal used to be 5 year courses, minimum. After the Bologna process, curricula were modified so that courses could have a 3 year minimum. This, by itself, isn't a bad thing. However, the market perception is that these 3 year courses give the same level of qualification as the previous 5 year courses. It doesn't help that the name of the degree has been made the same on purpose ("licenciatura"). "They just removed useless stuff," they say. This feeds back into students as "no need to go any further." Once they have reached the degree that the market recognizes (the "licenciatura") there isn't much incentive to continue for another 2 years to get a masters degree (btw, in the previous system a masters degree was 7 years). Universities have to handle this somehow, and they do it by actually "removing useless stuff" from the 3 year curriculum thus reinforcing market perception and actually putting themselves on course to become training schools instead of universities. These arguments are pretty specific to the portuguese case, and elsewhere things are bound to have been different but with the same general outcome. The general argument is this: solving the comparability problem between EU countries went too far and breached the universities' ability to resist outside influence (mainly political). PS: The ECTS system is deeply flawed exactly because it is based on "hours of effort." Not only bacause that's a subjective measure on its own, but mainly because "effort" does not directly correlate to actual learning. A course may have very work-intensive assignments for very little knowledge.
tracker1 11y ago
I don't know that I agree... people can learn in many different ways, and don't always need to deal with different aspects. If all I want to do is build bird houses, do I need to learn everything a structural engineer has to learn to build sky scrapers? That said, had a similar issue with logic in a simulation software where each virtual unit was its' own OO based object, with it's own threads for events... could only run about 4 simultaneous simulations on a server, and it still would bottleneck (GC was horrible). change it to a single event-loop that signaled each unit, and most of the concurrency issues went away. Streamlined the message passing (more functional approach) and memory usage dropped a lot... couldn't convince the manager to switch away from an SQL backend, which was the final bottleneck (normalized data structures), as it was then fast enough. Had another instance where a configuration table from a database was loaded into memory (for performance), but then was kept in memory as a DataTable, with text based queries for each access for each key, that happened over a thousand times in a single web request (logins were taking too long)... Changed it to a HashTable, and lo and behold, concurrency was no longer a problem... similar issues with not understanding how static variables worked in a multithreaded application... OO ftw again (sarcasm).
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- CrLf 11y ago
  "If all I want to do is build bird houses, do I need to learn everything a structural engineer has to learn to build sky scrapers?" Of course not. People should have the choice on how and what they want to learn. I just disagree when choice is turned into equivalence (i.e. formal education providing no value over self-learning / disguising knowledge to build bird houses as knowledge to build skyscrapers). In some cases (some people) it may not actually matter, but in the general case, looks like it does.
  - tracker1 11y ago
    I will say that it depends on the person... I've taken from learning how to do simple scripts in the 80's/90's and actually done reading on lower-level CS, and although I don't write C/C++ day to day, I do understand the concepts. And while I don't have to think about such things.. understanding memory constraints and how caching and process swaps work in the CPU has come in useful even for higher level language projects. But isn't that why we're supposed to have "Junior" and "Senior" level positions? I think that what software development really needs is a loosely structured guild system where you gain rank not by attrition or seniority but by reputation, where you gain/lose reputation based on who you back for seniority and how well they do. It seems that beyond CS education, it's a constant learning process. You cannot make a career only with what you learn getting a degree in CS.

by CrLf 11y ago

sweden 11y ago

I don't agree with your perspective of Europe's Bologna. Universities don't need an European agreement to create shorter and shallower courses, in fact, Bologna doesn't impose any kind of restrictions on the kind of courses the universities have. And Bologna helps a lot with your education, by making higher education comparable between EU countries, you can easily apply for student exchange programs and study subjects that aren't approached by your home university. I studied in one of the best engineering university of Portugal and I studied for one semester in Sweden and although both universities were under the Bologna agreement, I could notice differences in both systems. The only thing that Bologna imposes in universities is how many hours of effort is 1 course credit (ECTS). Course content, organization and etc, is up to each university.

CrLf 11y ago
Before the Bologna process, engineering and CS degrees in Portugal used to be 5 year courses, minimum. After the Bologna process, curricula were modified so that courses could have a 3 year minimum. This, by itself, isn't a bad thing. However, the market perception is that these 3 year courses give the same level of qualification as the previous 5 year courses. It doesn't help that the name of the degree has been made the same on purpose ("licenciatura"). "They just removed useless stuff," they say. This feeds back into students as "no need to go any further." Once they have reached the degree that the market recognizes (the "licenciatura") there isn't much incentive to continue for another 2 years to get a masters degree (btw, in the previous system a masters degree was 7 years). Universities have to handle this somehow, and they do it by actually "removing useless stuff" from the 3 year curriculum thus reinforcing market perception and actually putting themselves on course to become training schools instead of universities. These arguments are pretty specific to the portuguese case, and elsewhere things are bound to have been different but with the same general outcome. The general argument is this: solving the comparability problem between EU countries went too far and breached the universities' ability to resist outside influence (mainly political). PS: The ECTS system is deeply flawed exactly because it is based on "hours of effort." Not only bacause that's a subjective measure on its own, but mainly because "effort" does not directly correlate to actual learning. A course may have very work-intensive assignments for very little knowledge.

tracker1 11y ago

I don't know that I agree... people can learn in many different ways, and don't always need to deal with different aspects. If all I want to do is build bird houses, do I need to learn everything a structural engineer has to learn to build sky scrapers? That said, had a similar issue with logic in a simulation software where each virtual unit was its' own OO based object, with it's own threads for events... could only run about 4 simultaneous simulations on a server, and it still would bottleneck (GC was horrible). change it to a single event-loop that signaled each unit, and most of the concurrency issues went away. Streamlined the message passing (more functional approach) and memory usage dropped a lot... couldn't convince the manager to switch away from an SQL backend, which was the final bottleneck (normalized data structures), as it was then fast enough. Had another instance where a configuration table from a database was loaded into memory (for performance), but then was kept in memory as a DataTable, with text based queries for each access for each key, that happened over a thousand times in a single web request (logins were taking too long)... Changed it to a HashTable, and lo and behold, concurrency was no longer a problem... similar issues with not understanding how static variables worked in a multithreaded application... OO ftw again (sarcasm).

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
CrLf 11y ago
"If all I want to do is build bird houses, do I need to learn everything a structural engineer has to learn to build sky scrapers?" Of course not. People should have the choice on how and what they want to learn. I just disagree when choice is turned into equivalence (i.e. formal education providing no value over self-learning / disguising knowledge to build bird houses as knowledge to build skyscrapers). In some cases (some people) it may not actually matter, but in the general case, looks like it does.
- tracker1 11y ago
  I will say that it depends on the person... I've taken from learning how to do simple scripts in the 80's/90's and actually done reading on lower-level CS, and although I don't write C/C++ day to day, I do understand the concepts. And while I don't have to think about such things.. understanding memory constraints and how caching and process swaps work in the CPU has come in useful even for higher level language projects. But isn't that why we're supposed to have "Junior" and "Senior" level positions? I think that what software development really needs is a loosely structured guild system where you gain rank not by attrition or seniority but by reputation, where you gain/lose reputation based on who you back for seniority and how well they do. It seems that beyond CS education, it's a constant learning process. You cannot make a career only with what you learn getting a degree in CS.