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I worked at a company where they from the start were building all their internal tools like their own Jira-like system, their own Slack and so on. When you star

I worked at a company where they from the start were building all their internal tools like their own Jira-like system, their own Slack and so on. When you started working, for the first three to six months you were only working on those tools and also learning the internal culture. Then when the company had idle time or if you wanted you could continue working on them. I am thinking that universities have missed huge opportunity to build their own m365. If they started 20 years ago, by now they would have mature system tailored for their own organisation. But you needed people with vision and able to get others on their side. Something like this would be perfect for CS students, to have a taste of the corporate real world before even starting their professional life. Unfortunately these days I don't see much value in universities when it comes to CS. It may be useful for networking as you get a chance to meet like minded people and spend time with them, but other than that you can learn everything online mostly for free these days. Something like 20 years ago universities had advantage that they had resources you wouldn't otherwise get, but now that advantage is gone. Many people just see it as a fun time outside of parents' home and don't take it seriously.

johnmaguire 6y ago
Shibboleh, a popular but overly-complex SAML implementation (Single Sign-On), used by most universities, was created this way.
- acka 6y ago
  Minor nit, it's called Shibboleth (as in Shibboleth Single Sign-on architecture).
  - johnmaguire 6y ago
    Whoops, sorry about the typo.
ipython 6y ago
The universities did build such systems. See Andrew at CMU or Athena at MIT. They built a ton of infrastructure, from distributed file systems (afs) to chat systems (zephyr), word processors (ez), multimedia email (messages) and so on. Some developments from those projects live on today, such as Kerberos. But most of those innovations had crappy user interfaces and never made it outside the university. Commercial companies took their ideas and built products mere mortals could use. Now there is no reason not to use the commercial products that are more stable, more secure, and have more applicability outside the university. Plus you have to serve students who aren’t there for CS with the same network.
- varispeed 6y ago
  Isn't the fact that these product were not of commercial quality an indication that maybe the courses were not that great? How people can learn building something that is useful, easy to operate and adding value if at a place where they supposed to learn it, they are not taking it seriously or don't have enough skill to teach it? I hope this doesn't look like an attack, I am genuinely interested.
  - ipython 6y ago
    Like most things, I believe the issue comes down to incentives. If you are a university student studying CS, what’s your incentive? To get the best grade possible in your course, most likely. What is your shortest path to a great grade? Is it adding user friendly features? Or demonstrating mastery of applying theoretical principles in software, for example by implementing a novel distributed consensus algorithm? Plus your course lasts at most a semester, to perhaps several years if you are lucky to work on the same project the entire time you’re paying to attend university. The incentive for commercial companies on the other hand is entirely opposite. Their incentive is to build a product that appeals to the widest population faster than their competitors. They optimize for user friendliness and eschew the untested in favor of hacky solutions that work now. From the developers perspective, they are now paid to work so they have more of an incentive to do things that may not be as attractive to them personally such as fixing bugs. Also, there is a difference between university and apprenticeship. Traditionally university focused on teaching the soft skills, the “liberal arts”, providing a broad base of knowledge from history to widen the mind of those who attend. It’s not meant to be a job training center. Unfortunately these days it seems that most employers are uninterested in mentoring and apprenticeships, looking for the public to subsidize job training for them. Universities in my opinion are poorly set up for this, but alas this is what most expect.
  - zhdc1 6y ago
    University programs manned primarily by 18-21 year olds are supposed to compete against for-profit companies with highly experienced and specialized engineering talent?

johnmaguire 6y ago

Shibboleh, a popular but overly-complex SAML implementation (Single Sign-On), used by most universities, was created this way.

acka 6y ago
Minor nit, it's called Shibboleth (as in Shibboleth Single Sign-on architecture).
- johnmaguire 6y ago
  Whoops, sorry about the typo.

ipython 6y ago

The universities did build such systems. See Andrew at CMU or Athena at MIT. They built a ton of infrastructure, from distributed file systems (afs) to chat systems (zephyr), word processors (ez), multimedia email (messages) and so on. Some developments from those projects live on today, such as Kerberos. But most of those innovations had crappy user interfaces and never made it outside the university. Commercial companies took their ideas and built products mere mortals could use. Now there is no reason not to use the commercial products that are more stable, more secure, and have more applicability outside the university. Plus you have to serve students who aren’t there for CS with the same network.

varispeed 6y ago
Isn't the fact that these product were not of commercial quality an indication that maybe the courses were not that great? How people can learn building something that is useful, easy to operate and adding value if at a place where they supposed to learn it, they are not taking it seriously or don't have enough skill to teach it? I hope this doesn't look like an attack, I am genuinely interested.
- ipython 6y ago
  Like most things, I believe the issue comes down to incentives. If you are a university student studying CS, what’s your incentive? To get the best grade possible in your course, most likely. What is your shortest path to a great grade? Is it adding user friendly features? Or demonstrating mastery of applying theoretical principles in software, for example by implementing a novel distributed consensus algorithm? Plus your course lasts at most a semester, to perhaps several years if you are lucky to work on the same project the entire time you’re paying to attend university. The incentive for commercial companies on the other hand is entirely opposite. Their incentive is to build a product that appeals to the widest population faster than their competitors. They optimize for user friendliness and eschew the untested in favor of hacky solutions that work now. From the developers perspective, they are now paid to work so they have more of an incentive to do things that may not be as attractive to them personally such as fixing bugs. Also, there is a difference between university and apprenticeship. Traditionally university focused on teaching the soft skills, the “liberal arts”, providing a broad base of knowledge from history to widen the mind of those who attend. It’s not meant to be a job training center. Unfortunately these days it seems that most employers are uninterested in mentoring and apprenticeships, looking for the public to subsidize job training for them. Universities in my opinion are poorly set up for this, but alas this is what most expect.
- zhdc1 6y ago
  University programs manned primarily by 18-21 year olds are supposed to compete against for-profit companies with highly experienced and specialized engineering talent?