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I graduated a top 50 school, that gave us an “engineering” degree but had no such similar course. There were no more than 20 students, out of 300ish, who unders

• starpilot 7y ago
  I have those skills, no one in my data science team does. The people with better communication skills, who can gain buy-in from colleagues and raise disagreements without making anyone angry, are doing far better than me despite their lower level of technical competence.
  • zhdc1 7y ago
    This doesn't mean they aren't important though. In academia (not CS), but we use a lot of what's covered in the op MIT guide. I don't know if this gives an edge at all, and it's certainly 100x less important than soft skills, but there has to be some advantage to knowing how to pull a git repository or how to extract text matches from the command line without having to download or use an external application.
• foobarian 7y ago
  I think what's happening is that motivated individuals learn these things by doing, sometimes starting at an early age. Teaching these topics explicitly will probably not automatically turn students into 10x hackers; however it might help some. I know I cry a little on the inside any time I have to explain grep to an engineer that has been around for more than a year.
• jldugger 7y ago
  > these skills are strongly underrated by universities and students alike. Universities believe their focus should be on timeless principles, and expect that students will supplement their instruction as needed. For example, teaching students the Bourne Again shell isn't useful on Windows, and declining in importance in macOS. Same logic applies to editors, but even more wildly varied. Rather than build 20 courses, one for every IDE, and then revisit the pedagogy every year as software changes, they basically lean heavily on 'you're smart enough to figure this out on your own.' Some of this is obviously motivated post-hoc reasoning but still makes a modicum of sense -- anyone with 5 years exp could probably teach undergrads bash and git (with maybe 40 hours of prep), so university instructors with PhDs should be focusing on knowledge gained from research findings that wouldn't find their way into industry via other means.
  • jacques_chester 7y ago
    I don't think it's really coming from any sort of high priesthood dedicated to the noble, timeless principles. It's just boring human stuff. Professors aren't typically trained educators, many of them at best tolerate their teaching duties. They muddled through, why doesn't everyone else? In sports there's a truism that "good athletes make bad coaches". Brilliant former PhD students often make bad teachers. Whatever the timeless principles might be, they're useless without some craft.
  • gen220 7y ago
    In general, I agree with you; I’m not suggesting that the whole degree be built around these tools, just that they should be taught, preferably early on, alongside the traditional intro to CS course. But it’s not just about the tools, there are some seriously timeless concepts and skills under the surface: regexp, environment variables, users and user groups, documentation comprehension, piping, filesystems, streams, processes, to name a handful. These apply to any Operating System or programming environment, and give some concrete foundation to the theories you learn elsewhere. Plus, some of these tools really do merit a “timeless” label at this point. VIM, git, bash (and bash-inspired shells), and most of GNU utilities have been around for a very long time and have not been conclusively supplanted by more powerful tools.
  • 7y ago
• ladberg 7y ago
  Interesting that you think it's inversely correlated with GPA. At my school, I feel like the people who are experts with the terminal and *nix stuff are the ones who have high GPAs because they are at the top of all the CS classes.
  • cuttlebit 7y ago
    I think it’s a bimodal distribution. The people with a lot of practical skill are also often busy with their own projects or working part time.