4 ms·
It was not long ago that Computer Science degrees itself faced a similar challenge, against more well-rounded liberal arts programs, championed and prided by th
by jhchen 10y ago
It was not long ago that Computer Science degrees itself faced a similar challenge, against more well-rounded liberal arts programs, championed and prided by the Ivy Leagues. Today MIT and Stanford are ahead by the strength of their more “practical” engineering degrees. The data from Triplebyte supports the same narrative, just in greater granularity: businesses value practical skills.
There is value in being balanced and diversity, but this applies to teams, not necessarily individuals. Not everyone on your engineering team needs to be an architect. After your globally distributed, fault tolerant, realtime, highly available system is designed, somebody’s got to build it. And most startups or software teams have no business even trying to design such a system in the first place.
In the US, my generation was told we all needed four year degrees. We don’t. Some jobs and some roles certainly but the entire population of future adults?
There is an engineering shortage in the US because everyone was too busy getting four year degrees in more well rounded fields. Meanwhile Apple needs tens of thousands of engineers that could have been trained by two year vocational programs that the US was apparently above for our children, and thus cannot meet their business needs.
And yet this data from Triplebyte is incredibly encouraging because while we screwed up the educational policy, it may not be so difficult to fix.
- WaBlueKey 10y agoI really appreciated your response. I too came from the four year degree generation. After years in my field (technical communications), I decided to pursue my earlier dream of becoming a software engineer. I think the shift in times and ever increasing business needs for engineers are propelling this change, but there is also an overall need to become more versatile. I am fortunate enough to have found Holberton School, which has a two-year software engineering program that emphasizes project-based and peer-learning methods. I appreciate the balance of theory and practical work that I have to complete but most importantly, the flexibility with which I can learn. The evolution of tech will continue to span out and eventually, these shortages will be felt outside the US.
- azth 10y ago> it may not be so difficult to fix. Would you want graduates of such programs working on the software that goes into your operating system, your car, or other such systems? I doubt you'll find people graduating from these programs working at places like SpaceX or the JPL (unless they're doing some CRUD/web dev work), or even at Apple designing compilers or iphone processors. Just as an anecdote, my current company hired a couple of graduates of these programs, and they didn't fair well.
- xigency 10y agoNo, probably not coming from a web development bootcamp, but with an associate's degree and a software engineering background, I could totally see someone working at any of these named places (for engineering work).
- serge2k 10y agoIf people won't do the 4 year engineering degree why would they do a 2 year vocational program instead?