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Honestly, this genre of venting about new grads has long been applied to new grads here in the West too. It's a long-standing complaint of the industry that aca

Honestly, this genre of venting about new grads has long been applied to new grads here in the West too. It's a long-standing complaint of the industry that academia isn't willing to serve as vocational training.

enkid 5y ago
I mean sure, but most of the time Comp Sci degrees have Freshman compiling code on day one. This is a pretty be qualitative difference if the above comment is true.
- lapetitejort 5y ago
  I took a freshmen level C/C++ class in community college as a requirement to get an Associates in Science. All we did was compile. We didn't learn any high level CS theory.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  My mother's friend's husband is a math professor at a university in Kansas. A major complaint of his is students coming in who aren't able to add fractions. So I don't see the big qualitative difference between complaints about bottom-end Chinese college students and complaints about bottom-end American college students, no. If it's of interest, I looked into gaokao test scores a while ago and the cutoff for being admitted to a Chinese university lies around the 40th percentile. The schools are officially divided into two tiers (obviously, there are finer distinctions you can make), and the cutoff for the higher tier is around the 80th percentile. So a large number of Chinese universities should have almost the entire student body within what you might think of as an IQ range from 96 to 112.
  - enkid 5y ago
    Your mother's friend's husband is a math professor who complains about the quality of Freshmen entering into a math course, therefore the quality of computer science students in the United States are on par with the one's in China. Do you see a problem with this logic?
AlgorithmicTime 5y ago
Well if Academia doesn't want to be vocational training, then we probably need to cut the number of people going to college back to the 5-10% range.
nicolas_t 5y ago
Having interviewed new grads from the west and new grads in China, I can guarantee you that a lot of the new grads in China had had exactly the education the OP described and were completely unable to do anything. It's not just venting, it's the reality. There are some great universities in China and there are definitely some who know their stuff but the average mid level university in China? Nope, completely useless. To be fair, this was in 2009 to 2014. I have left China since.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  > I can guarantee you that a lot of the new grads in China had had exactly the education the OP described and were completely unable to do anything. It's not just venting, it's the reality. Isn't it the foundational concept of fizzbuzz that a lot of applicants to programming jobs are "completely unable to do anything"?
  - burnished 5y ago
    FizzBuzz isn't a programming challenge for interviews anymore, that was like ten years ago. Now its more like a data structures and algorithms exam.
    - thaumasiotes 5y ago
      Did the observation that "hey, a lot of our applicants can't even do anything" become less true?
      - burnished 5y ago
        Hell if I know, if I'm going to be frank I responded more from stress and wishing FizzBuzz was still a common test than anything.
      - Apocryphon 5y ago
        If it's still true, then why do the tests get harder and harder?
simonh 5y ago
The Chinese attitude to academia is very different to that in the West. This distinction you draw between the academic and vocational goals of institutions just isn't really a thing over there in the same way.
marcus_holmes 5y ago
Which is crazy. No University can teach the kind of skills needed to be a good commercial developer. The best approach would be apprenticeships; learning the craft while doing the job. But the industry has always been ridiculously opposed to training its own staff - echoing your point that this is seen as something that the education system should do (why?). I've heard managers say crap like "but if we train them then they'll leave us when they finish the training and go somewhere else - we'll have paid for their training and get no benefit". This is a staff retention problem, not a training problem.
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  > Which is crazy. No University can teach the kind of skills needed to be a good commercial developer. You sorta can. https://missing.csail.mit.edu/ https://missing.csail.mit.edu/ I've also met grads that basically had a dedicated software engineering class where they learned: What's a package manager, build system, how to compile C++ code (linking and compilation), makefiles, agile, waterfall and source control and a few quality metrics to look out for.
  - marcus_holmes 5y ago
    The tech skills, maybe. But does the course cover stuff like "How to deal with a project manager who has no clue what they're doing", or "How to manage expectations in a customer who is way overenthusiastic about their new idea for a feature", or even "How to deal with Aspy Dave who thinks he's a rockstar 10x coder but actually churns out buggy crap that the rest of the team have to fix". The non-tech skills of how commercial software development actually works in an actual organisation are really important, and the only way of learning them is on the job.
  - hakfoo 5y ago
    I almost feel like this is a place for a corporate onboarding/training process. I'm mentoring a new developer at my firm. He's fresh out of college. His code works on a basic level. The things he's stubbed his toes on: * Naming conventions. We have probably more rules about this than some, but things like branch and commit names matter because we tie them into our issue tracking process. * Strictly reading specifications. We had a couple days rework because he used a different suggested name for something, and it ended up propagating into dozens of class names. * Knowing when and what can be cleaned up. This I can forgive, as it normally waits towards the end of the project and he isn't quite there yet, but when we paired to work on it, there was a lot of leftover baggage. * Bulletproofing/exhaustive coverage. I suspect there's a lot of university projects where "what if the remote server hands us HTTP 418" is answered by "the test service doesn't". * Multiplayer and advanced Git. "The main branch is going to update without you, and eventually there's going to be merge conflicts" and you'll need to merge/rebase was a problem for him, as was dealing with a feature branch with multiple task sub-branches (keeping too many of them open at once is a huge risk for weird merge conflicts and hideous histories when they're finally resolved).
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
I have been told, anecdotally, that German college curricula are very "vocation-based," with students being quite well-versed in the needs of the workplace upon graduation. I've been fairly impressed with the Germans that I've worked with, but that may be sample bias.

enkid 5y ago

I mean sure, but most of the time Comp Sci degrees have Freshman compiling code on day one. This is a pretty be qualitative difference if the above comment is true.

lapetitejort 5y ago
I took a freshmen level C/C++ class in community college as a requirement to get an Associates in Science. All we did was compile. We didn't learn any high level CS theory.
thaumasiotes 5y ago
My mother's friend's husband is a math professor at a university in Kansas. A major complaint of his is students coming in who aren't able to add fractions. So I don't see the big qualitative difference between complaints about bottom-end Chinese college students and complaints about bottom-end American college students, no. If it's of interest, I looked into gaokao test scores a while ago and the cutoff for being admitted to a Chinese university lies around the 40th percentile. The schools are officially divided into two tiers (obviously, there are finer distinctions you can make), and the cutoff for the higher tier is around the 80th percentile. So a large number of Chinese universities should have almost the entire student body within what you might think of as an IQ range from 96 to 112.
- enkid 5y ago
  Your mother's friend's husband is a math professor who complains about the quality of Freshmen entering into a math course, therefore the quality of computer science students in the United States are on par with the one's in China. Do you see a problem with this logic?

AlgorithmicTime 5y ago

Well if Academia doesn't want to be vocational training, then we probably need to cut the number of people going to college back to the 5-10% range.

nicolas_t 5y ago

Having interviewed new grads from the west and new grads in China, I can guarantee you that a lot of the new grads in China had had exactly the education the OP described and were completely unable to do anything. It's not just venting, it's the reality. There are some great universities in China and there are definitely some who know their stuff but the average mid level university in China? Nope, completely useless. To be fair, this was in 2009 to 2014. I have left China since.

thaumasiotes 5y ago
> I can guarantee you that a lot of the new grads in China had had exactly the education the OP described and were completely unable to do anything. It's not just venting, it's the reality. Isn't it the foundational concept of fizzbuzz that a lot of applicants to programming jobs are "completely unable to do anything"?
- burnished 5y ago
  FizzBuzz isn't a programming challenge for interviews anymore, that was like ten years ago. Now its more like a data structures and algorithms exam.
  - thaumasiotes 5y ago
    Did the observation that "hey, a lot of our applicants can't even do anything" become less true?
    - burnished 5y ago
      Hell if I know, if I'm going to be frank I responded more from stress and wishing FizzBuzz was still a common test than anything.
    - Apocryphon 5y ago
      If it's still true, then why do the tests get harder and harder?

simonh 5y ago

The Chinese attitude to academia is very different to that in the West. This distinction you draw between the academic and vocational goals of institutions just isn't really a thing over there in the same way.

marcus_holmes 5y ago

Which is crazy. No University can teach the kind of skills needed to be a good commercial developer. The best approach would be apprenticeships; learning the craft while doing the job. But the industry has always been ridiculously opposed to training its own staff - echoing your point that this is seen as something that the education system should do (why?). I've heard managers say crap like "but if we train them then they'll leave us when they finish the training and go somewhere else - we'll have paid for their training and get no benefit". This is a staff retention problem, not a training problem.

908B64B197 5y ago
> Which is crazy. No University can teach the kind of skills needed to be a good commercial developer. You sorta can. https://missing.csail.mit.edu/ https://missing.csail.mit.edu/ I've also met grads that basically had a dedicated software engineering class where they learned: What's a package manager, build system, how to compile C++ code (linking and compilation), makefiles, agile, waterfall and source control and a few quality metrics to look out for.
- marcus_holmes 5y ago
  The tech skills, maybe. But does the course cover stuff like "How to deal with a project manager who has no clue what they're doing", or "How to manage expectations in a customer who is way overenthusiastic about their new idea for a feature", or even "How to deal with Aspy Dave who thinks he's a rockstar 10x coder but actually churns out buggy crap that the rest of the team have to fix". The non-tech skills of how commercial software development actually works in an actual organisation are really important, and the only way of learning them is on the job.
- hakfoo 5y ago
  I almost feel like this is a place for a corporate onboarding/training process. I'm mentoring a new developer at my firm. He's fresh out of college. His code works on a basic level. The things he's stubbed his toes on: * Naming conventions. We have probably more rules about this than some, but things like branch and commit names matter because we tie them into our issue tracking process. * Strictly reading specifications. We had a couple days rework because he used a different suggested name for something, and it ended up propagating into dozens of class names. * Knowing when and what can be cleaned up. This I can forgive, as it normally waits towards the end of the project and he isn't quite there yet, but when we paired to work on it, there was a lot of leftover baggage. * Bulletproofing/exhaustive coverage. I suspect there's a lot of university projects where "what if the remote server hands us HTTP 418" is answered by "the test service doesn't". * Multiplayer and advanced Git. "The main branch is going to update without you, and eventually there's going to be merge conflicts" and you'll need to merge/rebase was a problem for him, as was dealing with a feature branch with multiple task sub-branches (keeping too many of them open at once is a huge risk for weird merge conflicts and hideous histories when they're finally resolved).

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago

I have been told, anecdotally, that German college curricula are very "vocation-based," with students being quite well-versed in the needs of the workplace upon graduation. I've been fairly impressed with the Germans that I've worked with, but that may be sample bias.