5 ms·

To be honest, we probably see an alternative to academia grow and disrupt it before we see academia reform itself – the academic institution is so old and has s

To be honest, we probably see an alternative to academia grow and disrupt it before we see academia reform itself – the academic institution is so old and has so much legacy at this point, that it is close to impossible. I am curious on how these new structures would look.

legerdemain 4y ago
Lambda School and other JavaScript web developer bootcamps have been very successfully disrupting the "traditional CS degree" as the only route to software engineering. Perhaps the thing to disrupt stale academia will be a wave of bootcamp PhD's coming out of Lambda University. In the short term, there may be a side effect of deflating the FAANG-style compensation, job stability, and perks of "tenured faculty." It seems obvious that there is an enormous benefit of a more mobile, agile, and adaptable academic workforce of folks who only contract to teach for a semester or two before dipping back into industry careers or trying out another institution (or maybe even working at multiple institutions at once to broaden their teaching and research skills!).
- watwut 4y ago
  The "traditional CS degree" was never the only route to software engineering. That claim is just not true, a self learning developers, the ones who went to entirely different field or the ones who dropped out were and are ridiculously common. By "different field" I mean both people who studied physics/math similar fields and psychology/sociology further away fields. And even now, people who came from bootcamps are rare compared to the above.
flanked-evergl 4y ago
hot take from someone in Europe: I have no degree and work as a software engineer. New masters graduates I have worked with still need a lot of guidance to do basic things: making pull requests, writing unit tests, structuring code, setting up CI and CD pipelines, network communication, IaC, cloud, microservices, parallelism and state management. Most of what they do know is of limited value. They don't seem to really grasp the fundamentals of computers very well, they maybe grasp some math, but nothing more than what they could have learnt in maybe 3 months or less, and the math is pretty useless if they don't have a feeling for how to apply it to something like a stateless microservice. I think in our industry having these people go directly to work internships would be much more valuable for them and society than what is currently happening. While I do think free education is good in principle, I am not very happy that my tax money is propping up this broken system.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  On the other side, I've seen plenty of people embark on something that amounts to "given a solution to the generalized halting problem, I could build a system to do X, therefore I have a path to do X" and then proceed to do years of hack after hack to bandage over one corner case at a time, building the computer equivalent of a spaghetti bridge. I'm not saying everyone needs a PhD in computer science to program, but there's a lot of pain incurred by people who could avoid it with a basic understanding of the fundamentals of CS.
  - flanked-evergl 4y ago
    > I'm not saying everyone needs a PhD in computer science to program, but there's a lot of pain incurred by people who could avoid it with a basic understanding of the fundamentals of CS. I agree, but I don't think a PhD in computer science reliably instills this in anyone, or at least not on scales that you operate on in industry.
- madsbuch 4y ago
  I think it is a bit too narrow to see academia as purely industry preparation. There are a number of educational tasks academia also carries out, furthermore, there is the entire reasearch area. On the contrary, My masters in computer science from Denmark has really helped me professionally. But I had exposure to engineering aside my studies throughout all the years.
  - flanked-evergl 4y ago
    > I think it is a bit too narrow to see academia as purely industry preparation. I agree, but to me that is somewhat the main problem. The most important thing that my tax money should be funding is industry preparation, but if you conflate that with other functions, everything gets muddled. Most of our education resources (>95%) should be exlusively for industry preparation. If we do it well, then remaining 5% will become higher.
    - madsbuch 4y ago
dsq 4y ago
Similar to how the churches became less relevant over time, wothout disappearing. Of course, many still have religious sentiment, but it's not comparable to the complete dominance religion used to have in all aspects of life.

legerdemain 4y ago

Lambda School and other JavaScript web developer bootcamps have been very successfully disrupting the "traditional CS degree" as the only route to software engineering. Perhaps the thing to disrupt stale academia will be a wave of bootcamp PhD's coming out of Lambda University. In the short term, there may be a side effect of deflating the FAANG-style compensation, job stability, and perks of "tenured faculty." It seems obvious that there is an enormous benefit of a more mobile, agile, and adaptable academic workforce of folks who only contract to teach for a semester or two before dipping back into industry careers or trying out another institution (or maybe even working at multiple institutions at once to broaden their teaching and research skills!).

watwut 4y ago
The "traditional CS degree" was never the only route to software engineering. That claim is just not true, a self learning developers, the ones who went to entirely different field or the ones who dropped out were and are ridiculously common. By "different field" I mean both people who studied physics/math similar fields and psychology/sociology further away fields. And even now, people who came from bootcamps are rare compared to the above.

flanked-evergl 4y ago

hot take from someone in Europe: I have no degree and work as a software engineer. New masters graduates I have worked with still need a lot of guidance to do basic things: making pull requests, writing unit tests, structuring code, setting up CI and CD pipelines, network communication, IaC, cloud, microservices, parallelism and state management. Most of what they do know is of limited value. They don't seem to really grasp the fundamentals of computers very well, they maybe grasp some math, but nothing more than what they could have learnt in maybe 3 months or less, and the math is pretty useless if they don't have a feeling for how to apply it to something like a stateless microservice. I think in our industry having these people go directly to work internships would be much more valuable for them and society than what is currently happening. While I do think free education is good in principle, I am not very happy that my tax money is propping up this broken system.

sokoloff 4y ago
On the other side, I've seen plenty of people embark on something that amounts to "given a solution to the generalized halting problem, I could build a system to do X, therefore I have a path to do X" and then proceed to do years of hack after hack to bandage over one corner case at a time, building the computer equivalent of a spaghetti bridge. I'm not saying everyone needs a PhD in computer science to program, but there's a lot of pain incurred by people who could avoid it with a basic understanding of the fundamentals of CS.
- flanked-evergl 4y ago
  > I'm not saying everyone needs a PhD in computer science to program, but there's a lot of pain incurred by people who could avoid it with a basic understanding of the fundamentals of CS. I agree, but I don't think a PhD in computer science reliably instills this in anyone, or at least not on scales that you operate on in industry.
madsbuch 4y ago
I think it is a bit too narrow to see academia as purely industry preparation. There are a number of educational tasks academia also carries out, furthermore, there is the entire reasearch area. On the contrary, My masters in computer science from Denmark has really helped me professionally. But I had exposure to engineering aside my studies throughout all the years.
- flanked-evergl 4y ago
  > I think it is a bit too narrow to see academia as purely industry preparation. I agree, but to me that is somewhat the main problem. The most important thing that my tax money should be funding is industry preparation, but if you conflate that with other functions, everything gets muddled. Most of our education resources (>95%) should be exlusively for industry preparation. If we do it well, then remaining 5% will become higher.
  - madsbuch 4y ago

dsq 4y ago

Similar to how the churches became less relevant over time, wothout disappearing. Of course, many still have religious sentiment, but it's not comparable to the complete dominance religion used to have in all aspects of life.