3 ms·

And most college courses also don’t teach that.

peanutcrisis 4y ago
Can you substantiate this? It's incredibly hard to believe that the majority of universities offering a programme in computer science would not have a class on operating systems or information security, or anything more abstract or concrete about those topics.
- turdprincess 4y ago
  At least at my school, the CS degree was open ended. You take a handful of required corses (intro to programming, algorithms, operating systems) but aside from that, it was up to you to pick the classes which interested you. If you were interested in security, or databases or mobile app development, you could take those classes, but they weren't required. The things I learned in college which were actually applicable to a software engineering job was: * A basic ability to program * Maybe some low level concepts about operating systems. But this is a big maybe, because my operating systems class was pretty early on and was long forgotten 3 years later when I went to apply for a real job. I learned nothing about version control, the typical client-server model, html/css/javascript, REST, servers, databases, doing a pull request, teamwork, etc. I think those classes may have been available, but I never took them and graduated just fine. I am not convinced this 4 year CS degree was any more useful than a bootcamp, which teaches you the actual useful things you need to be a junior dev. I think the difference between CS and a bootcamp is more of intent and followthrough. People often pick bootcamps because of promises of easy money, versus someone who does a 4 year CS degree is possibly more committed and won't give up as easily. But in terms of their actual preparation, I doubt one is better than the other.
  - nicoburns 4y ago
    The other difference is that one takes 4 years and the other 3 months. That’s 16 times longer, so if you spent only 5 hours a week working on or thinking about programming, then that would be an equivalent amount of time. Which is not mention that sometimes things take a while to sink in.
JCharante 4y ago
Most college courses don't but most curriculums have some sort of security class. When we were learning assembly we used gdb to exploit faults in a C program (and we didn't get the source code so we had to read the assembly). There was also one for finding exploits exposed for a website that has a DB in the backend. Nothing prevents bootcamps from having those classes though.
- scarface74 4y ago
  And none of that has anything to do with > can be fine in a feature factory workplace. But having an engineer on your team who has no idea about infosec is an active danger. “I make a sql query from this string builder” / “we save the passwords in this database table” / “the AWS credential is here in the javascript code in the repository” / etc.
- josephg 4y ago
  > Nothing prevents bootcamps from having those classes though. Time. They don't have time for things like that. If they took the time to teach low level programming, data structures and algorithms, security, operating systems, networking and so on, they'd need to teach students for 3 years instead of 3 months. And then you may as well get a degree. The sales pitch for bootcamps is that they can teach you enough to get started in a career in CS in 12 weeks. Then you can get a job and learn the rest while working. This breaks down when you don't learn things that you'll need. And it breaks down around areas you'll probably never pick up on the job, like (for me) learning how page fault handlers work in the kernel by implementing my own. Or how you can use gdb to reverse engineer C programs. There's only so much you can learn in 12 weeks. And there's only so much your job will take the time to teach you.

Can you substantiate this? It's incredibly hard to believe that the majority of universities offering a programme in computer science would not have a class on operating systems or information security, or anything more abstract or concrete about those topics.

turdprincess 4y ago
At least at my school, the CS degree was open ended. You take a handful of required corses (intro to programming, algorithms, operating systems) but aside from that, it was up to you to pick the classes which interested you. If you were interested in security, or databases or mobile app development, you could take those classes, but they weren't required. The things I learned in college which were actually applicable to a software engineering job was: * A basic ability to program * Maybe some low level concepts about operating systems. But this is a big maybe, because my operating systems class was pretty early on and was long forgotten 3 years later when I went to apply for a real job. I learned nothing about version control, the typical client-server model, html/css/javascript, REST, servers, databases, doing a pull request, teamwork, etc. I think those classes may have been available, but I never took them and graduated just fine. I am not convinced this 4 year CS degree was any more useful than a bootcamp, which teaches you the actual useful things you need to be a junior dev. I think the difference between CS and a bootcamp is more of intent and followthrough. People often pick bootcamps because of promises of easy money, versus someone who does a 4 year CS degree is possibly more committed and won't give up as easily. But in terms of their actual preparation, I doubt one is better than the other.
- nicoburns 4y ago
  The other difference is that one takes 4 years and the other 3 months. That’s 16 times longer, so if you spent only 5 hours a week working on or thinking about programming, then that would be an equivalent amount of time. Which is not mention that sometimes things take a while to sink in.

JCharante 4y ago

Most college courses don't but most curriculums have some sort of security class. When we were learning assembly we used gdb to exploit faults in a C program (and we didn't get the source code so we had to read the assembly). There was also one for finding exploits exposed for a website that has a DB in the backend. Nothing prevents bootcamps from having those classes though.

scarface74 4y ago
And none of that has anything to do with > can be fine in a feature factory workplace. But having an engineer on your team who has no idea about infosec is an active danger. “I make a sql query from this string builder” / “we save the passwords in this database table” / “the AWS credential is here in the javascript code in the repository” / etc.
josephg 4y ago
> Nothing prevents bootcamps from having those classes though. Time. They don't have time for things like that. If they took the time to teach low level programming, data structures and algorithms, security, operating systems, networking and so on, they'd need to teach students for 3 years instead of 3 months. And then you may as well get a degree. The sales pitch for bootcamps is that they can teach you enough to get started in a career in CS in 12 weeks. Then you can get a job and learn the rest while working. This breaks down when you don't learn things that you'll need. And it breaks down around areas you'll probably never pick up on the job, like (for me) learning how page fault handlers work in the kernel by implementing my own. Or how you can use gdb to reverse engineer C programs. There's only so much you can learn in 12 weeks. And there's only so much your job will take the time to teach you.