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Which universities don't teach the bare minimum? I assume the article was about the US. The US has the very best CS universities in the world, do they not teach

Which universities don't teach the bare minimum? I assume the article was about the US. The US has the very best CS universities in the world, do they not teach these basics? Or are we talking about smaller lower-tier American universities? I think there's also a difference in which programs you look at. There are, for example Computer Engineering programs and also Computer Science programs, which are not the same. In Germany, there are universities (Universität) and "universities of applied sciences" (Fachhochschule), which differ in the balance of theory and practice. My big picture point is that the complaint is really general and isn't specific to machine learning (ML is more of a click magnet here). The same could be said about other parts of CS and about the general computer-handling skills of CS graduates.

vkou 6y ago
> Which universities don't teach the bare minimum? My university did not teach source control, or the basics of good programming practices. There were plenty of practical courses, with plenty of programming assignments among them, but the only thing that you were evaluated on was whether or not the resulting code worked.
- bonoboTP 6y ago
  I don't consider teaching source control to be the job of a university.
  - MattGaiser 6y ago
    Why not? Mechanical engineering teaches CAD use. Chemical engineering teaches you lab skills.
    - PeterisP 6y ago
      Yes, and software engineering would teach proper source control practice, but the question of the parent poster probably is about whether university computer science studies should necessarily be about software engineering; just as physics studies mostly does not teach mechanical engineering nor CAD use. IMHO they should (or, more accurately, they should have both 'true and proper' computer science and software engineering - but the expectation is that the latter will be the thing most in demand), but there's no consensus about that, people have different opinions.
  - ekianjo 6y ago
    Most people these days never touch a computer until late teenage years. How do you expect them to learn source control if they hardly have an exposure to that in their private lives? At the end of the day you will end up with people who have excellent theoretical knowledge but no good practical skills.
- ganafagol 6y ago
  That's not the job of a university. A reasonably smart student picks up how to work git in a few evenings with some online tutorial and some open source project. Or just when doing their homework. In fact, a proper theoretical foundation makes this really easy. Graph theory and algebra will have taught them about DAGs and partial order, which is what git branches are. A crypto class will have taught them about hashes and signatures. Distributed systems class will have taught them about issues with synchronisation. With all that background it doesn't matter whether it's git or whatever system will be en vogue in 10 years. Imagine a student having learnt CVS 20 years ago at university. Completely useless knowledge today. But the same student with the above fundamentals will pick up git in no time. That's what universities are for.
  - vvanders 6y ago
    If you don't actively make the real-world connections to the theory then most students will just memorize the coursework and then forget it later. The number of times I have to walk through why linear memory access matters, how caches and branch predictors work is staggeringly high. In every single case they all knew the theory but never made the connection to how it applied to the task at hand.
    - ZephyrBlu 6y ago
      > If you don't actively make the real-world connections to the theory then most students will just memorize the coursework and then forget it later This almost feels like an instance of Goodhart's Law [1]: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure" [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
  - vkou 6y ago
    > That's not the job of a university. If the university expects to produce graduate students, who use computers to solve research problems, teaching them how to code well helps. > A reasonably smart student picks up how to work git in a few evenings with some online tutorial and some open source project. Or just when doing their homework. The same can be said for writing comprehensible English, yet you will lose marks on your essays for poor writing.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- vivekhaz 6y ago
  Let’s continue the anecdotal train: my Computer science major requires a class that does teach source control. Better yet, it’s a liberal arts school and I’ll graduate with a B.A., so instead of focusing on anecdotal evidence, why don’t we talk about what ought to be?

vkou 6y ago

> Which universities don't teach the bare minimum? My university did not teach source control, or the basics of good programming practices. There were plenty of practical courses, with plenty of programming assignments among them, but the only thing that you were evaluated on was whether or not the resulting code worked.

bonoboTP 6y ago
I don't consider teaching source control to be the job of a university.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  Why not? Mechanical engineering teaches CAD use. Chemical engineering teaches you lab skills.
  - PeterisP 6y ago
    Yes, and software engineering would teach proper source control practice, but the question of the parent poster probably is about whether university computer science studies should necessarily be about software engineering; just as physics studies mostly does not teach mechanical engineering nor CAD use. IMHO they should (or, more accurately, they should have both 'true and proper' computer science and software engineering - but the expectation is that the latter will be the thing most in demand), but there's no consensus about that, people have different opinions.
- ekianjo 6y ago
  Most people these days never touch a computer until late teenage years. How do you expect them to learn source control if they hardly have an exposure to that in their private lives? At the end of the day you will end up with people who have excellent theoretical knowledge but no good practical skills.
ganafagol 6y ago
That's not the job of a university. A reasonably smart student picks up how to work git in a few evenings with some online tutorial and some open source project. Or just when doing their homework. In fact, a proper theoretical foundation makes this really easy. Graph theory and algebra will have taught them about DAGs and partial order, which is what git branches are. A crypto class will have taught them about hashes and signatures. Distributed systems class will have taught them about issues with synchronisation. With all that background it doesn't matter whether it's git or whatever system will be en vogue in 10 years. Imagine a student having learnt CVS 20 years ago at university. Completely useless knowledge today. But the same student with the above fundamentals will pick up git in no time. That's what universities are for.
- vvanders 6y ago
  If you don't actively make the real-world connections to the theory then most students will just memorize the coursework and then forget it later. The number of times I have to walk through why linear memory access matters, how caches and branch predictors work is staggeringly high. In every single case they all knew the theory but never made the connection to how it applied to the task at hand.
  - ZephyrBlu 6y ago
    > If you don't actively make the real-world connections to the theory then most students will just memorize the coursework and then forget it later This almost feels like an instance of Goodhart's Law [1]: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure" [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
- vkou 6y ago
  > That's not the job of a university. If the university expects to produce graduate students, who use computers to solve research problems, teaching them how to code well helps. > A reasonably smart student picks up how to work git in a few evenings with some online tutorial and some open source project. Or just when doing their homework. The same can be said for writing comprehensible English, yet you will lose marks on your essays for poor writing.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
vivekhaz 6y ago
Let’s continue the anecdotal train: my Computer science major requires a class that does teach source control. Better yet, it’s a liberal arts school and I’ll graduate with a B.A., so instead of focusing on anecdotal evidence, why don’t we talk about what ought to be?