6 ms·

There's a massive gap between taught at CMU and taught at most universities. And even if it is taught, it's usually outdated or focused on very literal stuff li

There's a massive gap between taught at CMU and taught at most universities. And even if it is taught, it's usually outdated or focused on very literal stuff like how to write web applications. I'd have killed for a class that actually focuses on implementation, on teamwork, on building complicated systems.

sasaf5 3y ago
+1 for teamwork... I wished there was an established field of study for teamwork in software. If you are impressed with 10x devs, imagine 10x teams!
- habnds 3y ago
  I don't believe this personally, but I bet that many people with MBA's would tell you that this was what their MBA was about.
  - cqqxo4zV46cp 3y ago
    Yeah. A fair bit of this is just “people working in teams” stuff, that people that buy into ‘developer exceptionalism’ will tell you is sacred software developer knowledge. It isn’t. Software engineering isn’t just about teamwork, and not all software development-related teamwork skill is generalisable to other industries, but it’s far from uncommon for there to be some trendy blog post laying out the sorts of things that, yes, an MBA program will teach someone. Which is fine, if not for the fact that these same people will scoff at “clueless MBAs”.
  - eastbound 3y ago
    In software engineering schools in France, both in my personal experience and other Bac+5 people I’ve hired, the entire Bac+4 year was dedicated to group projects. When you have 8 group projects in parallel at any time, it does teach team work, management, quality control, all the good stuff. After the first failed project, everyone agrees that they need a boss without assigned duties. Then in 5th year, we’d have one or two class-wide projects (20-30 people). This, along with joining event-organizing charities on the campus, where you’d work 3-5hrs a week to build a hundred-thousand-to-a-million dollars event (NGOs on campus, or concerts, or a sports meeting, to each their preferences, but it was the culture). And it wasn’t always a good time together, it’s not flowers all the way down. I’m only surprised some school might consider engineering without group effort. On the other hand, I deeply deeply regret spending this much time in charities and not enough dating, as I have never been recognized for charity service, and family was important to me.
ricw 3y ago
That was a dedicated software engineering course I took at university. Teams of 5. Had to put the soft eng theory into practice. And if’s not CMU.
- calvinmorrison 3y ago
  Do they funnel soon to be grads into stressful zoom calls where product managers handwave an entire legacy stack still somehow running on coldfusion and want a rebrand with 'AI' starting Jan 1??
  - ekidd 3y ago
    No, but our professor assigned teams at random, gave us a buggy spec, and then changed the spec with one week to go during finals week. (This last part appears to have planned; they did it every year.) This was a surprisingly effective course, if sadistic.
    - calvinmorrison 3y ago
      It certainly trains the programmer to not box themselves in with assumptions. What's one more for loop?
    - ungamedplayer 3y ago
      Talk about preparing graduates for the real world!
- bcrosby95 3y ago
  I had something like this too - it was required for my CS degree. Our class split up into teams of 5. But the whole class of 30 was working on a single project. It was a semester-long project and each team also had to integrate with eachother to build the final solution.
heelix 3y ago
I've wished that students would be required to hand their semester long project to the person next to them each week.
- fsckboy 3y ago
  that would be a cool semester long project assignment: everybody has to plan/architect their own software project, and then work on implementing them, but you don't work on your own project, that you just manage.
- steveBK123 3y ago
  Almost every CS course I took went the other way and had strict cheating policies that essentially made any group work verboten. There was 1 group project in 1 course I took in 4 years. My spouse on the other hand took an explicitly IT program and they had group projects, engaging with real world users, building real solutions, etc.
  - sdiupIGPWEfh 3y ago
    > strict cheating policies that essentially made any group work verboten If I had to guess, some polytechnic school or another? With some classes even forbidding discussing work with other students, where each assignment required a signed (digitally or otherwise) affidavit listing everyone you consulted, acknowledging that if you actually listed anyone, you were admitting to violating the academic honesty policies and if you didn't list anyone yet had spoken with others you were of course also violating the academic honesty policies. Where only consulting the professors or TAs was allowed, the TAs were never around, and the professors refused to help because if they gave you any hints, it would apparently give away the answer, which would be unfair to the other students.
    - virgilp 3y ago
      I taught a course "in a previous life" and while I wasn't anything close to as strict as you say here, I can tell you the flip side: students would copy, modify superficially (some, less superficially) and then claim "it's my work, we just talked, that's why the similarities!" (with some even having the nerve to say, "it's not copied, look, plagiarism detection software says similarity is less than x%!) Perhaps I was wrong but I really wanted the students who took the course to put in the work themselves. Just choose a different course/course set, you _knew_ this one was going to be hard! So yeah, the guideline was that we'll be eventual judges of what was "too similar" and if you're concerned, just don't discuss implementation details with anyone. I realize it prevents honest colaboration, and that's bad too... but sometimes it's a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" kind of situation.
dncivuxu7 3y ago
[dead]
jeffreygoesto 3y ago
And then there was "Twenty dirty tricks to train software engineers" which I found even more suitable as preparation for working in the industry.
skeeter2020 3y ago
This just isn't realistic in an general CS undergrad though. Students don't have the time or foundations to build a realistic complicated system, and the institutions don't have skills or currency to teach them how. You complain about content being out of date, but the foundations of quality software are not by and large technical nor go out of style. The implementations sure do. What you're asking for is where vocational (2 year) programs really shine, and one of the few places where I've seen bootcamp graduates have an advantage. Unfortunately both then lack some really valuable underpinnings, example: relational algebra. It seems that once again there is no silver bullet for replacing time and experience.

sasaf5 3y ago

+1 for teamwork... I wished there was an established field of study for teamwork in software. If you are impressed with 10x devs, imagine 10x teams!

habnds 3y ago
I don't believe this personally, but I bet that many people with MBA's would tell you that this was what their MBA was about.
- cqqxo4zV46cp 3y ago
  Yeah. A fair bit of this is just “people working in teams” stuff, that people that buy into ‘developer exceptionalism’ will tell you is sacred software developer knowledge. It isn’t. Software engineering isn’t just about teamwork, and not all software development-related teamwork skill is generalisable to other industries, but it’s far from uncommon for there to be some trendy blog post laying out the sorts of things that, yes, an MBA program will teach someone. Which is fine, if not for the fact that these same people will scoff at “clueless MBAs”.
- eastbound 3y ago
  In software engineering schools in France, both in my personal experience and other Bac+5 people I’ve hired, the entire Bac+4 year was dedicated to group projects. When you have 8 group projects in parallel at any time, it does teach team work, management, quality control, all the good stuff. After the first failed project, everyone agrees that they need a boss without assigned duties. Then in 5th year, we’d have one or two class-wide projects (20-30 people). This, along with joining event-organizing charities on the campus, where you’d work 3-5hrs a week to build a hundred-thousand-to-a-million dollars event (NGOs on campus, or concerts, or a sports meeting, to each their preferences, but it was the culture). And it wasn’t always a good time together, it’s not flowers all the way down. I’m only surprised some school might consider engineering without group effort. On the other hand, I deeply deeply regret spending this much time in charities and not enough dating, as I have never been recognized for charity service, and family was important to me.

ricw 3y ago

That was a dedicated software engineering course I took at university. Teams of 5. Had to put the soft eng theory into practice. And if’s not CMU.

calvinmorrison 3y ago
Do they funnel soon to be grads into stressful zoom calls where product managers handwave an entire legacy stack still somehow running on coldfusion and want a rebrand with 'AI' starting Jan 1??
- ekidd 3y ago
  No, but our professor assigned teams at random, gave us a buggy spec, and then changed the spec with one week to go during finals week. (This last part appears to have planned; they did it every year.) This was a surprisingly effective course, if sadistic.
  - calvinmorrison 3y ago
    It certainly trains the programmer to not box themselves in with assumptions. What's one more for loop?
  - ungamedplayer 3y ago
    Talk about preparing graduates for the real world!
bcrosby95 3y ago
I had something like this too - it was required for my CS degree. Our class split up into teams of 5. But the whole class of 30 was working on a single project. It was a semester-long project and each team also had to integrate with eachother to build the final solution.

heelix 3y ago

I've wished that students would be required to hand their semester long project to the person next to them each week.

fsckboy 3y ago
that would be a cool semester long project assignment: everybody has to plan/architect their own software project, and then work on implementing them, but you don't work on your own project, that you just manage.
steveBK123 3y ago
Almost every CS course I took went the other way and had strict cheating policies that essentially made any group work verboten. There was 1 group project in 1 course I took in 4 years. My spouse on the other hand took an explicitly IT program and they had group projects, engaging with real world users, building real solutions, etc.
- sdiupIGPWEfh 3y ago
  > strict cheating policies that essentially made any group work verboten If I had to guess, some polytechnic school or another? With some classes even forbidding discussing work with other students, where each assignment required a signed (digitally or otherwise) affidavit listing everyone you consulted, acknowledging that if you actually listed anyone, you were admitting to violating the academic honesty policies and if you didn't list anyone yet had spoken with others you were of course also violating the academic honesty policies. Where only consulting the professors or TAs was allowed, the TAs were never around, and the professors refused to help because if they gave you any hints, it would apparently give away the answer, which would be unfair to the other students.
  - virgilp 3y ago
    I taught a course "in a previous life" and while I wasn't anything close to as strict as you say here, I can tell you the flip side: students would copy, modify superficially (some, less superficially) and then claim "it's my work, we just talked, that's why the similarities!" (with some even having the nerve to say, "it's not copied, look, plagiarism detection software says similarity is less than x%!) Perhaps I was wrong but I really wanted the students who took the course to put in the work themselves. Just choose a different course/course set, you _knew_ this one was going to be hard! So yeah, the guideline was that we'll be eventual judges of what was "too similar" and if you're concerned, just don't discuss implementation details with anyone. I realize it prevents honest colaboration, and that's bad too... but sometimes it's a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" kind of situation.

dncivuxu7 3y ago

[dead]

jeffreygoesto 3y ago

And then there was "Twenty dirty tricks to train software engineers" which I found even more suitable as preparation for working in the industry.

skeeter2020 3y ago

This just isn't realistic in an general CS undergrad though. Students don't have the time or foundations to build a realistic complicated system, and the institutions don't have skills or currency to teach them how. You complain about content being out of date, but the foundations of quality software are not by and large technical nor go out of style. The implementations sure do. What you're asking for is where vocational (2 year) programs really shine, and one of the few places where I've seen bootcamp graduates have an advantage. Unfortunately both then lack some really valuable underpinnings, example: relational algebra. It seems that once again there is no silver bullet for replacing time and experience.