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>If you can tell me that it is your job to accept payment yet not create useful people, in my opinion, you're committing some form of fraud. This is a huge dis
by na85 12y ago
>If you can tell me that it is your job to accept payment yet not create useful people, in my opinion, you're committing some form of fraud.
This is a huge distortion of the point the author is making.
The author is not saying "schools should be paid to churn out students that are not useful."
The author is saying "schools should be paid to churn out students *already equipped with the skills they will need to learn once they get to the work force."
Anyone, and this includes you, that expects a fresh CS graduate to "hit the ground running" with no adjustment period and to be fluent in whatever language/toolset you decide is important is deluded.
The point of a CS education is not to master every library, every IDE, and every language. The point of a CS education is to master the fundamentals so that even if you learned Java in school, you can spend a weekend learning the syntax of Swift because really that's all that's different. You already know object-oriented design (or whatever).
The problem is that employers expect new employees to start being profitable on day 1, when that is absurd. There's always a learning period, even for a seasoned veteran. Whether that learning period is 3 weeks or 3 months, there's always a learning period and I wish employers would get this through their seemingly think skulls.
- bicknergseng 12y agoI'm not sure that is a big distortion of what she's saying. It seems to me like she's suggesting that keeping up with modern computer science isn't necessary to teach computer science. With her all caps "WRONG"s, she seems equally incontrovertible. While I don't think teaching iOS8 beta dev is necessary in a modern cs curriculum (which I don't think many people are suggesting), not approaching the massive shift in the industry towards mobile is equally absurd. It's not about mastering every library or IDE or language (which again, the parent comment didn't suggest), but there is certainly no reason that CS fundamentals cannot be taught with a nod towards modern computer science. Yes, employer expectations are often absurd, but so too is the expectation that teaching Java without ever building an Android app does everything sufficient to "equip students with skills." If a curriculum is going to spend a month on linked lists that's fine, but do something real with them instead of implementing stdlib over and over in a vacuum. Use some popular libraries as teaching tools to demonstrate good and bad code, ways things have been done in real life, etc. Don't pigeonhole on jquery widgets, but build a webapp in rails or node or go or c or jsp or whatever. Hell, build it in Haskell and teach some killer fp at the same time. But don't just spend 4 years teaching students how to implement x to do arbitrary y with no practical examples or connection to real life.