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I attended a community college and learned Java, C#, PHP, HTML, CSS, Javascript... the classes were more or less an introduction to full stack web development.

I attended a community college and learned Java, C#, PHP, HTML, CSS, Javascript... the classes were more or less an introduction to full stack web development. I remember when I transferred to a four-year school for my Bachelor's the other students in the CS program (we were all Juniors) struggled to put together a year-end project requiring a GUI- like a text input and some buttons, simple HTML/CSS, or Swing (popular at the time). They didn't even know where to start with GUI development. Is this kind of thing still not being taught?

swrj 5y ago
I can only speak for my own experience (large, top 25 state school in the US) - this sort of thing is still not taught. There was maybe one or two optional courses that taught software engineering related material, the rest of it was just a lot of computer science theory. Definitely struggled the first couple of months at my first job out of college due to this.
Izkata 5y ago
My college, none of that was in the Computer Science (CS) curriculum - it was all part Information Technology and Management (ITM). CS was focused mostly on the broad underlying structure of computing, things like how software interacts with hardware (this was gutted a year or two before me), algorithms, programming paradigms (functional/etc), the theory behind databases (3rd normal form sound familiar?), and so on. The idea was to give you a really good foundation such that you could self-learn much much easier after college, but also unfortunately that you had to do some of that selfglearning right away because it didn't prep you for getting things done. I only took one or two ITM courses out of curiosity, so I'm less confident in describing it in broad strokes, but the impression I got is that it was for teaching specific skills while not "wasting" time on better understanding how they work. Very get-things-done oriented. The web development one, for example, used a lot of jquery, but never touched on what was going on under the hood. I can see it working as preparation for being able to do a job, but it left you kind of stuck if you hit a roadblock and didn't know where to look for answers. If I had to stereotype them, a CS student would spend time writing an algorithm for something instead of finding an existing library, while an ITM student would look for a library and if they can't find one say they can't do it. But the ITM student wouldn't get lost implementing and end-to-end project as long as they could use tech they already know, whereas the CS student has never done such a thing before.

swrj 5y ago

I can only speak for my own experience (large, top 25 state school in the US) - this sort of thing is still not taught. There was maybe one or two optional courses that taught software engineering related material, the rest of it was just a lot of computer science theory. Definitely struggled the first couple of months at my first job out of college due to this.

Izkata 5y ago

My college, none of that was in the Computer Science (CS) curriculum - it was all part Information Technology and Management (ITM). CS was focused mostly on the broad underlying structure of computing, things like how software interacts with hardware (this was gutted a year or two before me), algorithms, programming paradigms (functional/etc), the theory behind databases (3rd normal form sound familiar?), and so on. The idea was to give you a really good foundation such that you could self-learn much much easier after college, but also unfortunately that you had to do some of that selfglearning right away because it didn't prep you for getting things done. I only took one or two ITM courses out of curiosity, so I'm less confident in describing it in broad strokes, but the impression I got is that it was for teaching specific skills while not "wasting" time on better understanding how they work. Very get-things-done oriented. The web development one, for example, used a lot of jquery, but never touched on what was going on under the hood. I can see it working as preparation for being able to do a job, but it left you kind of stuck if you hit a roadblock and didn't know where to look for answers. If I had to stereotype them, a CS student would spend time writing an algorithm for something instead of finding an existing library, while an ITM student would look for a library and if they can't find one say they can't do it. But the ITM student wouldn't get lost implementing and end-to-end project as long as they could use tech they already know, whereas the CS student has never done such a thing before.