7 ms·

Spoken exactly like what I'd expect from a teaching field that is doing everything possible to obsolete itself. Look, let me sum up the problem with CS educati

Spoken exactly like what I'd expect from a teaching field that is doing everything possible to obsolete itself. Look, let me sum up the problem with CS education in a nutshell: today, when I think about hiring someone, I basically don't care about their CS education. This is increasingly what I hear from my colleagues as well. Degree in CS means more or less nothing. Notice that that's not the case in Chemistry (since the author is fond of comparing fields). What does that tell us? That whether you like it or not, you are doing a poor job teaching them, or that we have very different definitions of CS. Which is fine, after all, there are degrees in accounting and degrees in math that are separate, maybe we need to move to that model. If your program graduates students that have never used version control, never committed to a single open source project, or have a difficult time picking up new languages/technologies, then maybe you're teaching them "something", but that something isn't what the world cares about. So unless they go and become teachers of this thing you call CS as well, its time to change what you're teaching. (BTW, I rarely find that these recent grads have done NP reductions or any of that kind of thing that would at least justify not teaching them all that "useless" industry stuff)

rlayton 12y ago
I think the degree-inflation problem is the key here. There is no reason why a person needs a degree to be able to program. That wasn't the original purpose of such degrees. In a nutshell, academic certifications assess whether you know things, while industry certifications assess whether you can do things. For a business, there is a strong focus on doing, rather than knowing. Who cares about whether certain classes of problems are computable? Just write a program that does it for our problem set. And there is nothing wrong with this. At the same time though, if you want to make advances that bring about the next generation of programming/technology/etc, you would need to have an understanding of how these things work. Unfortunately, this line has been blurred significantly -- universities have become big business, caring more about selling degrees then teaching fundamentals. At the same time, businesses have been using degrees as a criteria for hiring, and then complaining that people with said degrees can't do what they expect them to. I hate to describe a problem without providing a solution, but I don't really have a solution for this.
- marcus_holmes 12y ago
  The solution is apprenticeships. University is academic, not vocational. Universities were never intended to teach specific job skills, they were/are supposed to teach how to think, or the broad sweep of the entire subject. Apprenticeships were the vocational education, and they were done in the workplace. Apparently they still do coding apprenticeships in Germany and they work really well. Employers need to stop expecting new hires, and especially new graduates, to be able to hit the ground running at full speed, and train more.
psychometry 12y ago
The comparison to chemistry is certainly odd. I think most fresh-faced chemistry graduates would be able to work in a chemistry lab...as a lab assistant. After all, chances are they had a student position doing just that. They wouldn't be able to do anything else since the other positions require post-graduate study. That's an entirely different problem than the one faced by IT managers.
vacri 12y ago
The author is not teaching degrees, she's teaching a high school class. There's a clarification at the top of the article (in italics, directly after the heading), appropriate commentary peppered throughout the article body, and half a dozen comments here on HN to that effect. I'm astounded that so many people are pinging the author for not being on the ball, yet missing all the massive signposts saying "This is a high-school environment, not university".
- benihana 12y ago
  I think that disclaimer was added after the fact. I don't remember it being there when I read this story the first time. Either way, I didn't see it at all when I read the article. I'm willing to admit that I'm just not on the ball, but the fact that a bunch of people missed it is rather telling, isn't it?
  - vacri 12y ago
    In one of the final paragraphs, she repeats 'teaching children' a couple of times, and the language in the rest of the article is high-school-related. It's not just the disclaimer. For example, how many people do post-graduate study in Education, then teach at University? Apart from the people teaching Education itself, it's a vanishingly small number. the fact that a bunch of people missed it is rather telling, isn't it Not particularly, given that the author's criticism is that folks in our industry give her short shrift and ignore what she has to say. It actually plays directly into her criticism that a bunch of us just tilted at her windmill without bothering to understand what it is that she actually does first.
zarify 12y ago
You realise that the post was about high school, right? It's all very well getting on the high horse about degrees in CS, but that isn't the case in point.
- tolmasky 12y ago
  Yeah saw after the fact that that was mentioned, my point stands for college degrees though (which I have indeed heard similar opinions on). In this case... I guess I just find the premise that a bunch of industry people are telling her what to teach some high schoolers a little hard to believe/overblown (but I guess I'm not from the UK so maybe its common there to do that?). But yeah, sure, teach them whatever you want in high school, I agree.
  - zarify 12y ago
    I really wouldn't go so far as saying teach whatever you want (I teach CS in high school), but in Australia as well I get industry PD sessions where we get fed totally unrealistic expectations for the level most teenagers are operating at.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
MarcScott 12y ago
Once again I'll reiterate that the teacher in question is in a school for 11 - 18 year old students, although I'd have thought this was clear from the article. Her complaint is the way in which "IT professionals" complain about high school education, not degree level education. In the context of the original article, this comment is therefore a little unrealistic. >If your program graduates students that have never used version control, never committed to a single open source project, or have a difficult time picking up new languages/technologies, then maybe you're teaching them "something", but that something isn't what the world cares about. I teach CS to the 11-14 age range for 1 hour a week, and 2.5 hours a week to 14+ students. Good luck teaching core CS theory, multiple languages and version control in that amount of time.
redthrowaway 12y ago
What you seem to want is a Software Engineering degree. They exist. Hire people with those degrees if that's what you're looking for. My CS degree was about 50/50 CS and programming. I felt is was a good balance, but there was still tons I needed to learn on the job. I'd never done web dev outside of that one weekend I checked out codecademy. I'd never set up a web server or pulled a repo from github or any of the other things you'd want me to be able to do in industry, because they weren't a part of my education. I did write a tcp/ip server from scratch, make Roombas write things, and the like, because those were part of my education, but none of that has come in handy in my current job. There's a real divide between what education is and what industry leaders think it should be. It has never been and likely will never be about churning out job-ready young adults with all the skills industry wants. That's vocational school, not university. Don't confuse the two.

rlayton 12y ago

I think the degree-inflation problem is the key here. There is no reason why a person needs a degree to be able to program. That wasn't the original purpose of such degrees. In a nutshell, academic certifications assess whether you know things, while industry certifications assess whether you can do things. For a business, there is a strong focus on doing, rather than knowing. Who cares about whether certain classes of problems are computable? Just write a program that does it for our problem set. And there is nothing wrong with this. At the same time though, if you want to make advances that bring about the next generation of programming/technology/etc, you would need to have an understanding of how these things work. Unfortunately, this line has been blurred significantly -- universities have become big business, caring more about selling degrees then teaching fundamentals. At the same time, businesses have been using degrees as a criteria for hiring, and then complaining that people with said degrees can't do what they expect them to. I hate to describe a problem without providing a solution, but I don't really have a solution for this.

marcus_holmes 12y ago
The solution is apprenticeships. University is academic, not vocational. Universities were never intended to teach specific job skills, they were/are supposed to teach how to think, or the broad sweep of the entire subject. Apprenticeships were the vocational education, and they were done in the workplace. Apparently they still do coding apprenticeships in Germany and they work really well. Employers need to stop expecting new hires, and especially new graduates, to be able to hit the ground running at full speed, and train more.

psychometry 12y ago

The comparison to chemistry is certainly odd. I think most fresh-faced chemistry graduates would be able to work in a chemistry lab...as a lab assistant. After all, chances are they had a student position doing just that. They wouldn't be able to do anything else since the other positions require post-graduate study. That's an entirely different problem than the one faced by IT managers.

vacri 12y ago

The author is not teaching degrees, she's teaching a high school class. There's a clarification at the top of the article (in italics, directly after the heading), appropriate commentary peppered throughout the article body, and half a dozen comments here on HN to that effect. I'm astounded that so many people are pinging the author for not being on the ball, yet missing all the massive signposts saying "This is a high-school environment, not university".

benihana 12y ago
I think that disclaimer was added after the fact. I don't remember it being there when I read this story the first time. Either way, I didn't see it at all when I read the article. I'm willing to admit that I'm just not on the ball, but the fact that a bunch of people missed it is rather telling, isn't it?
- vacri 12y ago
  In one of the final paragraphs, she repeats 'teaching children' a couple of times, and the language in the rest of the article is high-school-related. It's not just the disclaimer. For example, how many people do post-graduate study in Education, then teach at University? Apart from the people teaching Education itself, it's a vanishingly small number. the fact that a bunch of people missed it is rather telling, isn't it Not particularly, given that the author's criticism is that folks in our industry give her short shrift and ignore what she has to say. It actually plays directly into her criticism that a bunch of us just tilted at her windmill without bothering to understand what it is that she actually does first.

zarify 12y ago

You realise that the post was about high school, right? It's all very well getting on the high horse about degrees in CS, but that isn't the case in point.

tolmasky 12y ago
Yeah saw after the fact that that was mentioned, my point stands for college degrees though (which I have indeed heard similar opinions on). In this case... I guess I just find the premise that a bunch of industry people are telling her what to teach some high schoolers a little hard to believe/overblown (but I guess I'm not from the UK so maybe its common there to do that?). But yeah, sure, teach them whatever you want in high school, I agree.
- zarify 12y ago
  I really wouldn't go so far as saying teach whatever you want (I teach CS in high school), but in Australia as well I get industry PD sessions where we get fed totally unrealistic expectations for the level most teenagers are operating at.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

MarcScott 12y ago

Once again I'll reiterate that the teacher in question is in a school for 11 - 18 year old students, although I'd have thought this was clear from the article. Her complaint is the way in which "IT professionals" complain about high school education, not degree level education. In the context of the original article, this comment is therefore a little unrealistic. >If your program graduates students that have never used version control, never committed to a single open source project, or have a difficult time picking up new languages/technologies, then maybe you're teaching them "something", but that something isn't what the world cares about. I teach CS to the 11-14 age range for 1 hour a week, and 2.5 hours a week to 14+ students. Good luck teaching core CS theory, multiple languages and version control in that amount of time.

redthrowaway 12y ago

What you seem to want is a Software Engineering degree. They exist. Hire people with those degrees if that's what you're looking for. My CS degree was about 50/50 CS and programming. I felt is was a good balance, but there was still tons I needed to learn on the job. I'd never done web dev outside of that one weekend I checked out codecademy. I'd never set up a web server or pulled a repo from github or any of the other things you'd want me to be able to do in industry, because they weren't a part of my education. I did write a tcp/ip server from scratch, make Roombas write things, and the like, because those were part of my education, but none of that has come in handy in my current job. There's a real divide between what education is and what industry leaders think it should be. It has never been and likely will never be about churning out job-ready young adults with all the skills industry wants. That's vocational school, not university. Don't confuse the two.