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> Thought experiment: so where's the degree for people who want practical and applicable skills and an in depth knowledge of actually building systems with the

> Thought experiment: so where's the degree for people who want practical and applicable skills and an in depth knowledge of actually building systems with the modern tools that are popular within the industry, as opposed to just being familiar with the theoretical aspects? Sounds like a software engineering degree to me.

KronisLV 5y ago
Hmm, in that case, i'd have to say that we have nothing of the sort here in Latvia. In the Riga Technical University that i got my Bachelor's and Master's in, i completed the following degrees: - Professional Master Degree in Computer Systems and Qualification of Programming Engineer - Bachelor Degree Of Engineering Science in Computer Control and Computer Science While the names might sound similar to what you're suggesting, the courses were still somewhat lacking in regards to the practical aspects that i mentioned above. Some of the lecturers did diverge from the officially approved contents and did teach us more, notably about CI/CD and DevOps concepts, as well as geospatial and temporal databases, and we did get some group projects where we implemented entire systems, taking on the roles of architects, developers, designers etc. and later talking about where we failed or what could have been improved, yet in my eyes that still isn't enough. The curriculum was too slow to move otherwise, at least in my opinion - i guess that their way out of that situation is having the "Professional" degree, which requires you to do case studies and spend months working in an actual company, which in my case was just continuing to work at the company that i was already working at during my Bachelor's, which sort of reminds me of the guild/apprenticeship systems that i mentioned previously. I might be wrong, but the balance between theory and practice ends up at an impasse often. Maybe degrees should just take longer to complete and cover things more thoroughly? Or do we as a society expect them not to be enough to make someone ready for working in the industry, and accept that as something normal?

KronisLV 5y ago

Hmm, in that case, i'd have to say that we have nothing of the sort here in Latvia. In the Riga Technical University that i got my Bachelor's and Master's in, i completed the following degrees: - Professional Master Degree in Computer Systems and Qualification of Programming Engineer - Bachelor Degree Of Engineering Science in Computer Control and Computer Science While the names might sound similar to what you're suggesting, the courses were still somewhat lacking in regards to the practical aspects that i mentioned above. Some of the lecturers did diverge from the officially approved contents and did teach us more, notably about CI/CD and DevOps concepts, as well as geospatial and temporal databases, and we did get some group projects where we implemented entire systems, taking on the roles of architects, developers, designers etc. and later talking about where we failed or what could have been improved, yet in my eyes that still isn't enough. The curriculum was too slow to move otherwise, at least in my opinion - i guess that their way out of that situation is having the "Professional" degree, which requires you to do case studies and spend months working in an actual company, which in my case was just continuing to work at the company that i was already working at during my Bachelor's, which sort of reminds me of the guild/apprenticeship systems that i mentioned previously. I might be wrong, but the balance between theory and practice ends up at an impasse often. Maybe degrees should just take longer to complete and cover things more thoroughly? Or do we as a society expect them not to be enough to make someone ready for working in the industry, and accept that as something normal?