3 ms·

That would be a waste of time to teach. It takes maybe a few hours to learn almost everything there is to know about branching or merge conflicts. You should le

That would be a waste of time to teach. It takes maybe a few hours to learn almost everything there is to know about branching or merge conflicts. You should learn the hard things in school, not the minutiae or trivia you would learn in your first month of any job. When I was in school I'm glad I went out of my way to take all the math-heavy and theoretical classes I could, and no classes like "modern web design" or "software engineering project". Learning basic programming is trivial and something I literally get paid to do (so long as I learn at a decent rate) while all the knowledge I have about math and theory is a lot harder to learn outside of an academic setting and is a force multiplier on most things I do for work.

stale2002 8y ago
> That would be a waste of time to teach. It takes maybe a few hours to learn almost everything there is to know You are thinking about this wrong. If it is so easy and quick to teach people how to use git, then why aren't colleges doing it!?!? Learning how to use common software engineer tools is a low effort, high reward situation. All they have to do is spend a day on it, and they have now made their students significantly more valuable. Educational institutions that do not even bother to spend such a small amount of time, in order to make their students much more valuable, are making a huge mistake.
- IdiocyInAction 8y ago
  > If it is so easy and quick to teach people how to use git, then why aren't colleges doing it!??! Some of them actually do.
- tdfx 8y ago
  > Educational institutions that do not even bother to spend such a small amount of time I can confirm that there are theory-focused professors at a particular state university that don't understand version control or have any experience with it. It's not that they don't see any value in it, they just don't have any experience with it to pass on to students.
  - JamesBarney 8y ago
    Or any software engineering experience for that matter. One professor was blown away when I showed him you could change change the query parameters of his custom submittance application to see other student's submitted work.
JamesBarney 8y ago
What are you doing professionally that your math heavy and theoretical classes are a force multiplier and what classes were they?
- opportune 8y ago
  Data science (although I do a lot less of that now, I still work exclusively with data). And taking lots of general AI/math classes outside of just ML also generally taught me better problem solving strategies. You would be surprised how often planning, constraint satisfaction, optimization, graph theory etc. come up in every day life. And the upper level algorithms classes I think also improved my problem solving creativity. Compilers and (intro level) theory of computation were pretty useful too.

stale2002 8y ago

> That would be a waste of time to teach. It takes maybe a few hours to learn almost everything there is to know You are thinking about this wrong. If it is so easy and quick to teach people how to use git, then why aren't colleges doing it!?!? Learning how to use common software engineer tools is a low effort, high reward situation. All they have to do is spend a day on it, and they have now made their students significantly more valuable. Educational institutions that do not even bother to spend such a small amount of time, in order to make their students much more valuable, are making a huge mistake.

IdiocyInAction 8y ago
> If it is so easy and quick to teach people how to use git, then why aren't colleges doing it!??! Some of them actually do.
tdfx 8y ago
> Educational institutions that do not even bother to spend such a small amount of time I can confirm that there are theory-focused professors at a particular state university that don't understand version control or have any experience with it. It's not that they don't see any value in it, they just don't have any experience with it to pass on to students.
- JamesBarney 8y ago
  Or any software engineering experience for that matter. One professor was blown away when I showed him you could change change the query parameters of his custom submittance application to see other student's submitted work.

JamesBarney 8y ago

What are you doing professionally that your math heavy and theoretical classes are a force multiplier and what classes were they?

opportune 8y ago
Data science (although I do a lot less of that now, I still work exclusively with data). And taking lots of general AI/math classes outside of just ML also generally taught me better problem solving strategies. You would be surprised how often planning, constraint satisfaction, optimization, graph theory etc. come up in every day life. And the upper level algorithms classes I think also improved my problem solving creativity. Compilers and (intro level) theory of computation were pretty useful too.