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I don't know how good or bad my courses are, but really, just how shitty are most CS degrees? In the 4 years (and counting) that I've spent studying CS, my assi

I don't know how good or bad my courses are, but really, just how shitty are most CS degrees? In the 4 years (and counting) that I've spent studying CS, my assignments have included writing: - a kernel driver in Linux - Writing and analyzing graph metaheuristic algorithms (and the test case generators in Python) - nontrivial data structures in C, C++, and assembly - Writing graphics and matrix math functions in Assembly - Simple OS schedulers in Java - Recursive functions in Haskell - software contracts in academic verification languages - 95% of all reports in LaTex And this is basically for the equivalent of an undergraduate's degree. I'm not saying all degrees should have this level of variety, but are people really coming out of Uni without at least having written a linked list in a low-level language?

Dylanlacey 16y ago
My degree was pretty hardcore as well. Did it prepare me for work? Yes, but only in the abstract, and that's because I was lucky enough to have a natural talent that uni enhanced through practice (That of rapidly picking new stuff up). Not once did I use an MVC beyond a crappy Java implementation. We didn't do maintenance practice, or log file spelunking, or customer interaction. I learned how to create multi-user, networked, stateless applications editing one source. I created a compiler and language, learned assembly, studied algorythms and z-schemas. I switched between languages every day and solved some annoyingly abstract and difficult problems. Number of bugs I solved in other people's code outside of an exam? 0. Number of incredibly obscure projects I took from start to finish? 0. CS Degrees only teach people to be potentially good programmers IF those people are able to learn how to fix shit by themselves. Otherwise you're teaching greek to a deaf person. Sure, they know what they're asked, but they can't talk back.

Dylanlacey 16y ago

My degree was pretty hardcore as well. Did it prepare me for work? Yes, but only in the abstract, and that's because I was lucky enough to have a natural talent that uni enhanced through practice (That of rapidly picking new stuff up). Not once did I use an MVC beyond a crappy Java implementation. We didn't do maintenance practice, or log file spelunking, or customer interaction. I learned how to create multi-user, networked, stateless applications editing one source. I created a compiler and language, learned assembly, studied algorythms and z-schemas. I switched between languages every day and solved some annoyingly abstract and difficult problems. Number of bugs I solved in other people's code outside of an exam? 0. Number of incredibly obscure projects I took from start to finish? 0. CS Degrees only teach people to be potentially good programmers IF those people are able to learn how to fix shit by themselves. Otherwise you're teaching greek to a deaf person. Sure, they know what they're asked, but they can't talk back.