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> You just told me that CS graduates can still be completely incompetent, but then you expressed surprise that apparently degrees don't matter that much any mor
by zanny 14y ago
> You just told me that CS graduates can still be completely incompetent, but then you expressed surprise that apparently degrees don't matter that much any more. =)
In his defense, and as a recent grad with my CS degree this last year, the curriculum doesn't really sell itself at all for professional software development. Knowing algorithms / language theory / OS theory / theory in general doesn't mean you can throw together a Django app or use git. I had to learn those outside the classroom, because class projects were about convex hull and Monte Hall, not making useful software.
In 9 months since graduating I've gone from my favorite language being C, my experience being in Java and a smidgen of Swing (and still an incomplete knoweldge of the Java thread model, how to write for the JVM, and some others) I did know some CUDA / pthreads / openMP but from an elective on parallel systems, I had a touch of Python 2.7, and almost no sysadmin experience, to now my preferred language is Python3, I know and use qt for FOSS work, I learned html / javascript / C# / regular expressions / SQL / proper networking / the kde libs / pyside / simpy / numpy, I switched full time to Arch and learned Unix ground up, I learned about assembly, unicode, byte order marks, etc.
I never touched on any of that in school. Given, my school was a mediocre liberal arts place I went to just for the near-free scholarship, but I get the impression from other schools I encountered during ASM contests that the curriculum was similar.
- VikingCoder 14y ago> the curriculum doesn't really sell itself at all for professional software development Oh, I completely agree. It's a Liberal Art, essentially. As opposed to a Trade School. I'm a huge fan of a liberal arts education, and I think the background of a Computer Science degree is fantastic, but I can't lie to myself that it's necessary. I think the future is more mentorship, and once someone is a bit established in their career, that they will take continuing Liberal Arts education to improve themselves.
- Radim 14y agoyou probably mean "Monte Carlo". those liberal arts places... :-)
- clebio 14y agoI assumed I just didn't know what the 'Monte Hall' approach was! :)
- zanny 14y agoNo, I did mean Monte Hall - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem It was a class project my freshman year. I already knew the probabilistic parts to it from junior statics in high school, so I was bored out of my mind.