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It's not an AI issue. It's that in 4 years of a CS degree, CS students never touch a single kubectl command or barely build one functional web application in on

• j45 1y ago
  A gap between graduate skills and industry requirements did exist before AI. The pandemic likely also caused further changes in industry and their requirements.
• Hammershaft 1y ago
  What you're advocating for are applied vocational studies, not computer science.
  • scarface_74 1y ago
    Whey he’s advocating for is that people don’t want to get in tens of thousands of debt without expecting to get a job because they need money to survive and pay off said debt
  • alephnerd 1y ago
    There is a middle ground between both. If teaching fundamentals, then force students to utilize these fundamentals to build into applied or industry usecases. For example - leveraging the K8s thread - force students in their OS class to understand HOW to apply data structures to manage scalability problems AND forcing students to understand Linux kernel internals like cgroups. Most universities don't offer course to connect these fundamentals together - not even my Ivy League alma mater based on my own survey of curricula. Everyone is incentivized to understand the bare minimum, overindex on Leetcode, and skim over harder fundamental courses. On top of that, ime at my alma mater, most CS faculty was essentially applied math nerds who could see beauty in a well formatted inductive proof but would glaze out when pushed on implementing Paxos using best practices around kernel or system performance. And vice versa for the system nerds. In a world where AI/ML can increasingly automate away boiler plate work and even conduct limited reasoning, understanding how fundamentals and (shudder) first principles are connected into become a product or solution is what matters. And thus, this becomes a critical thinking problem, which just cannot be learnt without experimentation and getting into the weeds.
    • deleted 1y ago
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  • happytoexplain 1y ago
    Can you tell that to the entire world?
• happytoexplain 1y ago
  Why not both? But seriously, it's both. Also, CS? That's not a degree for building apps, right? If it is, there's definitely a failure to make that clear.
• king-geedorah 1y ago
  This has not been the case the last 10 years in most of the top 50 programs. Capstone projects and senior seminar classes often touched upon more "serious" topics. I've seen classes focusing on projects related to distributed/cloud computing, complex web apps, or then often hot-topic of the year technologies (game AI, computer vision, machine learning)
• ecb_penguin 1y ago
  > It's the failure of CS programs that is causing job market issues for college graduates. Definitely not. These failures have existed for decades. But it ultimately doesn't matter. You have the capacity to learn or you don't. CS programs are a waste of time, sure, but they have nothing to do with the job market. I'd go so far as to say your comment is a perfect example of the problem. "kubectl" doesn't mean jack shit to being a good engineer. It's a technology we will use for a few years and then move onto something else. Absolutely nobody is cutting junior positions because they don't know "kubectl" The problem is developers are now DevOps, QA, PMs, Customer Support, and everything else.
  • teaearlgraycold 1y ago
    > The problem is developers are now DevOps, QA, PMs, Customer Support, and everything else. As long as the hour expectations are reasonable I actually like this. This teaches you so many more skills than being pigeon-holed into software engineering. Granted, I like the idea of one day founding a business so I may need to be able to do all of these rolls some day.
  • scarface_74 1y ago
    Well being a good engineer doesn’t mean “Jack shit” if you’re homeless and hungry because no one will hire you to exchange money for labor to support your addictions to food and shelter. If I have to explain everything in detail and check behind your work as a junior dev snd wait for you to get up to speed, I might as well just use ChatGPT. If I do need a perdón, why would I hire a junior engineer when I can just recruit an underpaid mid level developer more whose already proven himself and gotten up to speed especially if I can hire someone cheaply living in MiddleOfNowhere Nebraska who is willing to work for less than I made over a decade ago?
  • brokencode 1y ago
    CS programs teach fundamentals, though not necessarily the most popular tools in the industry. Those skills help regardless of whatever specific tools you end up using. I don’t think it’s a waste of time.
  • thunky 1y ago
• catmanjan 1y ago
  Universities are research oriented, kubernetes is a practical skills which you'd expect to learn at a trade school no different to learning fluid dynamics vs plumbing
  • happytoexplain 1y ago
    I have never met a single human being in person who did not believe that a crucial part of acquiring practical skills in software (not "trades") for young people is to go to university. Maybe people shouldn't theoretically expect this, but there is theory, and then there is reality. We need to make them match, in whichever direction.
    • catmanjan 1y ago
      Yes I'm sure people say that but that's because they don't think before they speak You wouldn't expect the same from a doctor, lawyer, engineer, the problem is that everyday people aren't aware that there is a difference between software development and computer science...
• PlunderBunny 1y ago
  Implicit in this is an assumption that the purpose of a higher education is to give graduates the skills demanded by the businesses. What if it (the purpose of a higher education) was something else? What if it had always been something else, and only in the last few decades did a certain segment of the population try to convince us that the only reason higher education existed was to churn out workers that could slot straight into entry-level jobs without businesses having to invest in any training first?
  • scarface_74 1y ago
    I can guarantee you that the only people who went to college to be “better citizens of the world” were those who were privileged enough to have parents who could afford to subsidize their living.
    • hluska 1y ago
      I went to university to become a better citizen of the world. My parents are as middle class as they come. Sorry but you’re wrong.
      • JustExAWS 1y ago
        And if you didn’t get a job right out of school would you have been homeless and hungry or could you just have moved back in with your parents? If you hadn’t gotten a job 5 years out of school that would have allowed you to support yourself would you be homeless or hungry? I told both of my sons that I wouldn’t pay for a degree that would be less likely to lead to a decent paying job. When my youngest graduated from high school, I was working for BigTeh but I made it abundantly clear that a colleges sole purpose was to be gainfully employed.
        • bccdee 1y ago
          > I made it abundantly clear that a colleges sole purpose was to be gainfully employed. That's not true at all, though. An education has loads to offer beyond a bump in your wages. Do you really think knowledge is worthless unless you can make money with it?
• deleted 1y ago
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• vessenes 1y ago
  Careful about your labels! I went to brown in the late 90s and considered a cs degree before moving to math. Even then among academic programs brown was considered a bit low brow in that it spent a fair amount of time on software and systems engineering: this was all part of the cs department, but it wasn’t science per se. Today most cs programs are in fact software engineering programs; well and good, but they give themselves the same name as the original meaning which was, while engaged in engineering, more theoretical. I can think of so many counter examples to what I just wrote I’m sort of excited for the comments, but tldr: in the late 90s, if you wanted engineering skills you hired MIT, Caltech, not Harvard. (Stanford alums didn’t move east and even then were not generally hirable for cash) I’ll note my current perspective is probably aligned with your complaint - we need more engineers and quality engineers than we do theoretical cs undergrads by at least two orders of magnitude. The best schools taught their engineers theory, and I think that goes with the history of the discipline - most of the greats were tinkerers at least, more usually engaged in real engineering work while working on theory. The other way: getting theorists to become great coders - seems less common. And in fact my era at brown produced a number of influential engineering folks like brian cantrill, so despite its non exalted status, it did the world some good!
• prng2021 1y ago
  Aside from a few exceptionally awful periods like 2009, when did fresh CS graduates struggle to find tech jobs? We all went through similar curriculums and picked up industry knowledge perfectly fine.
• light_hue_1 1y ago
  And thank goodness we don't teach kubectl and never will. Knowledge at the level of kubectl is worthless to the vast majority of grads. It's also extremely time-limited. In 5 years everything will have moved on. Web apps? What fraction of our grads build web apps? How much will the technology for doing so change in 5 years? 10 years? Universities are not vocational schools. We teach people to think. Then they learn what the details are on the job. This has always been the role of universities. If you want something else, go to a coding bootcamp.
  • scarface_74 1y ago
    You mean the job they can’t get because companies rather hire someone with experience for a little more money?
  • happytoexplain 1y ago
    This isn't viable. This isn't a normal vocational job - it's too abstract/overwhelming for everybody to learn all of it on the job to the needed degree. We need to stop tricking kids into this path. Either CS needs to teach practical skills (I understand things evolve fast, but you're exaggerating, and regardless, an education in the current thing is absolutely invaluable, and also prepares you for learning the next thing on your own), or we need to make it much more clear that another education path is better. Also, boot camps are worthless for this.
• sp527 1y ago
  And yet if you flip the paradigm entirely, you pretty much get coding bootcamps, which certainly don't have a great track record either. The answer is probably some more ideal balance between theory and practice, like Waterloo's CS program.