7 ms·

The worst class I had in college was Software Engineering. It was the university's attempt to prepare us for the work force, and it was taught by an adjunct who

by learc83 11y ago

The worst class I had in college was Software Engineering. It was the university's attempt to prepare us for the work force, and it was taught by an adjunct who had plenty of industry experience, but it was already a 10 years out of date. Industry processes are mostly fads that change with wind. CS fundamentals however, are much more stable. 20 years from now knowledge of automta, graph theory, and complexity analysis will still have immense value--a scrum master certification won't.

brixon 11y ago
If college education is too specific to one company then you are locking yourself into that company and you will lose any leverage over salary or even leaving.
bduerst 11y ago
I guess it depends on the purpose of the education. If you're already getting the CS fundamentals, maybe it doesn't hurt to get up to speed on some of the industry fads at the moment, since most of the students could be looking for an industry job in two-three years.
- learc83 11y ago
  Everything is a tradeoff if you spend time on industry fads, you're spending less time on CS fundamentals. Industry fads aren't useful outside of industry, so learning them should be paid for by industry. As the article argues, 20 years ago they were. Now employers are trying to push the cost of vocational training onto workers and the public.
- sanderjd 11y ago
  Well, the whole point of the article is that those students looking for industry jobs in two-three years should just be hired and trained in the fads of the moment, instead of wasting higher-ed time teaching trivial and likely irrelevant-by-then knowledge.
genericuser 11y ago
My software engineering class spent most of the semester going over design patterns which are in fact quite useful to learn in school. And then maybe 1/4 of the class on going over the various development methodologies. I agree that a class devoted entirely to methodology would be complete over kill. However I think there is room for getting some exposure to it in school. Ideally before taking higher level classes, where having knowledge of a existing ways to structure your group work will be beneficial.
- learc83 11y ago
  The problem is design patterns are subjective, they are craft, not science or engineering. There hasn't been enough work serious research done on "Software Engineering" to call Engineering with a straight face. You can't point a whole stack of serious research to say the design pattern A is objectively better in situation X because Y and Z. What you can say is that design pattern A is currently in vogue so you should probably use it, while design pattern B has fallen out of favor in industry, so you should avoid it. That is something that belongs in a vocational training program or an internship/apprenticeship not in a university Computer Science education.
  - kevin_thibedeau 11y ago
    Design patterns are models, something very much within the wheelhouse of engineering. Engineering doesn't always deal with absolute facts as in science. When an underlying system is too complex to fully describe, simplified modeling can be appropriate.
    - learc83 11y ago
      Models are used to get a better of understanding of a complex system, or to test a complex system when you can't test the real thing. A design pattern could be used to this way but they aren't. They are used as a design methodology that you are encouraged to follow. They also aren't based on any formal theory. They are based only on the experience of the people who create them. They are almost the definition of a craft (as opposed to engineering). In an actual Engineering discipline you would need evidence to prove that your model fits reality as opposed to just trusting the experience of a few guys who wrote a book.
samirmenon 11y ago
You could take that one step further. CS has, in it's modern incarnation, only been around for ~90 years. CS, as it is taught at the undergraduate level, has changed dramatically in recent years, and will continue into the future. Math, on the other hand, has been around for thousands of years, is relatively stable, and unlikely to become obsolete in the way a scrum certification, or even a machine learning algorithm, will. Of course, 'CS fundamentals' usually end up at a very close intersection with math. I'm just suggesting that mathematics has an even deeper level of the 'stability' you referenced.
- learc83 11y ago
  >Of course, 'CS fundamentals' usually end up at a very close intersection with math. I'm just suggesting that mathematics has an even deeper level of the 'stability' you referenced. I agree with you completely. The parts of CS that are stable are the parts that are based on rigorous mathematical foundations. I think that teaching things like Object Oriented Programming strays too far from a rigorous foundation--away from math and even engineering into craft (which belongs in vocational training). When I look back, the classes that I learned the most from were, Discrete Math, Automata, Design and Analysis of Algorithms, and Programming Language Concepts (which went into the academic side of programming language research more than what was currently in use in industry).
  - sanderjd 11y ago
    I mostly agree, but for me, the line gets blurry around the applied areas that have a lot of depth: computer architecture, operating systems, networking protocols, compilers, and databases. In all of those, I learned a lot about theory, practice, and engineering trade-offs, all of which was worthwhile. I didn't study it myself, but I would imagine distributed systems is (or should be) a similarly rich subject. I also learned a ton from studying the history of computing, which I wish would be more of a focus for those entering the industry.
    - learc83 11y ago
      Good point. Many of the area's you mentioned do have a lot of formal underpinnings, and there are large bodies of research to look to for guidance. Computer architecture is big E Engineering, done by Computer Engineers for example. The networks class I took was also one of the most math heavy, and most of the book was supported by proofs. In addition, we spent the first half of databases working with only relational algebra. If you look through a textbook on any of the subjects you mentioned, and compare it to say a book on design patterns, the distinction between math/engineering and craft is pretty clear. >I also learned a ton from studying the history of computing, which I wish would be more of a focus for those entering the industry. We went over the history in depth in my program--from Turing to Konrad Zuse to Backus. I also found it immensely useful.
manyxcxi 11y ago
I also had a Software Engineering class (actually two them) that were focused on how to build software in real life. This was in '03 and we covered things like waterfall methodology, requirements gathering, functional specs, etc. If taught the exact same way today it would be woefully out of date but the time we spent on requirements gathering (where the teacher or TA) pretended to be a product owner and purposely gave really crappy answers and we had to extract useful information but by bit was one of the best pieces of prep I ever received. All in all, it was boring and tedious but it certainly wasn't the worst class I ever had in regards to preparing me for a career in technology. I use those lessons to some degree all the time, I rarely directly use all the work I had to do to create my own OS...
- learc83 11y ago
  > I use those lessons to some degree all the time, I rarely directly use all the work I had to do to create my own OS... I think you probably would have learned those lessons after a few months on the job. You probably wouldn't have picked up the knowledge to build your own OS on the job, however. >All in all, it was boring and tedious but it certainly wasn't the worst class I ever had in regards to preparing me for a career in technology. Did you learn about billing clients, and effectively advertising your services in your CS degree? What about equity versus salary tradeoffs? At least 50% of working in technology is soft skills, why doesn't a CS degree spend 50% of the time teaching you those? The answer is that a CS degree isn't supposed to be vocational training. Vocational training, including learning to talk to clients, should be done on the job, during an internship/apprenticeship, or in a specialized vocational training program. By including it in a college degree, employers have successfully pushed employee training costs onto workers and society (as the article argues).
mathattack 11y ago
The article isn't complaining about CS majors not getting jobs, it's about soft liberal arts majors not getting jobs. When companies hired people for 30 year careers, they could afford to invest a tremendous amount in training. When they hire people for 2-3 years, they have less time to amortize the costs. And it's up to the employee to convince the companies that they can learn quickly, and on their own if need be. Any CS major with decent grades and a positive attitude can learn anything in most any job. (Certainly CS, consulting, finance, marketing, even some kinds of sales) I can't say the same for liberal arts majors. There are great ones out there, but also a lot of folks who goofed off for 4 years and didn't learn anything.
kartickvad 11y ago
I think it's a fallacy to assume that anything not based in CS fundamentals is a fad or has only short-term value. In college, I didn't learn version control, continuous integration (continuously submitting your work in small changelists or patches), unit testing, making sure you're building the right product before building it, delivering the simplest possible code and design that meets the requirements, code quality, working in teams, untangling dependencies and making as much progress as possible today without waiting for all your dependencies to be resolved, and so on. I expect that all these skills will be very much relevant 20 years from now. So, don't confuse long-term value with "grounded in CS fundamentals". Programming isn't a hard science like physics.
- learc83 11y ago
  >I think it's a fallacy to assume that anything not based in CS fundamentals is a fad or has only short-term value. I didn't say that. I said most industry processes are fads. I also didn't say that nothing that isn't grounded in CS fundamentals has long term value. There are plenty of other skills that have long term value. Office politics, salary negotiation, self-promotion are much more valuable than knowing how to run a few git commands. But non of those things should be taught in a Computer Science program. They are fundamentally vocational skills. Just like version control, unit testing, and continuous integration are vocational skills. Sure they're useful but they should be taught in an internship/apprenticeship or on the job. >In college, I didn't learn version control... I learned to use subversion, and other than the fact that they are are both version control systems, what I learned didn't really carry over to distributed version control like Git. In a CS program you should be learning things like how to implement a version control system, not how to use Git. I would have been pissed paying thousands of dollars per semester for a professor to walk me through a Git tutorial. I don't have a problem if a professor wants you to use github to submit your assignments or something like that. And sure some of the vocational skills you listed are going to be useful for years to come. But these skills should be ancillary. They should be just a happy side effect--like learning teamwork during a group project.
  - kartickvad 11y ago
    I'm a practician, not a theorist or an academic. I couldn't care less whether something is based in CS theory. I care whether something will be useful to me over the course of my career. If it is, I'd like my education to train me for that. In fact, some of the academic stuff like compilers and automata have been useless in real life. That's a failing of academia from my point of view.
bigger_cheese 11y ago
Oh god yes I went through the same pain. Our university decided that every Engineering student had to take two CS courses during the first year. This applied regardless of whether you were studying Civil Engineering, Electrical, Mechanical etc. This was alongside all the other first year courses we were required to take such as Chemistry, Physics, Calculus, Linear Algebra, Statics, Dynamics and all that. First Semester we took Intro to Programming and Algorithms (CS1100 or something like that). We learnt everything from Binary notation, logic gates through to floating points, I went from not knowing any programming language to having a fair idea about how topics like recursion worked our last project was to write some code to walk a tree using recursion. I also learnt how to use Unix and recieved my lifelong love of Emacs (which we used in our tutorials) from this course. Second Semester we had to take Software Engineering (CS 1110 I think). It covered waterfall model, version control, specifications, unit tests and more estoteric stuff like loop invariants and formal correctness. Our major project was to write an essay about the Arriane V rocket explosion. I really enjoyed CS 1100 class but CS 1110 effectively succeeded in boring me to tears. It was somehow supposed to give us a taste of real world software design. All it really did was encourage myself and many others not to take CS electives in later years. My major was Materials Engineering I took mostly physics electives in the last year of my degree, which is kind of ironic now because I work pretty heavily with programs - my day job involves writing computer simulations. I learned most of the skills I need on the job (including the C programming language, databases/SQL etc.) I probably would have benefited from more formal training but my experience of university CS was so miserable I actively avoided it.

by learc83 11y ago

brixon 11y ago

If college education is too specific to one company then you are locking yourself into that company and you will lose any leverage over salary or even leaving.

bduerst 11y ago

I guess it depends on the purpose of the education. If you're already getting the CS fundamentals, maybe it doesn't hurt to get up to speed on some of the industry fads at the moment, since most of the students could be looking for an industry job in two-three years.

learc83 11y ago
Everything is a tradeoff if you spend time on industry fads, you're spending less time on CS fundamentals. Industry fads aren't useful outside of industry, so learning them should be paid for by industry. As the article argues, 20 years ago they were. Now employers are trying to push the cost of vocational training onto workers and the public.
sanderjd 11y ago
Well, the whole point of the article is that those students looking for industry jobs in two-three years should just be hired and trained in the fads of the moment, instead of wasting higher-ed time teaching trivial and likely irrelevant-by-then knowledge.

genericuser 11y ago

My software engineering class spent most of the semester going over design patterns which are in fact quite useful to learn in school. And then maybe 1/4 of the class on going over the various development methodologies. I agree that a class devoted entirely to methodology would be complete over kill. However I think there is room for getting some exposure to it in school. Ideally before taking higher level classes, where having knowledge of a existing ways to structure your group work will be beneficial.

learc83 11y ago
The problem is design patterns are subjective, they are craft, not science or engineering. There hasn't been enough work serious research done on "Software Engineering" to call Engineering with a straight face. You can't point a whole stack of serious research to say the design pattern A is objectively better in situation X because Y and Z. What you can say is that design pattern A is currently in vogue so you should probably use it, while design pattern B has fallen out of favor in industry, so you should avoid it. That is something that belongs in a vocational training program or an internship/apprenticeship not in a university Computer Science education.
- kevin_thibedeau 11y ago
  Design patterns are models, something very much within the wheelhouse of engineering. Engineering doesn't always deal with absolute facts as in science. When an underlying system is too complex to fully describe, simplified modeling can be appropriate.
  - learc83 11y ago
    Models are used to get a better of understanding of a complex system, or to test a complex system when you can't test the real thing. A design pattern could be used to this way but they aren't. They are used as a design methodology that you are encouraged to follow. They also aren't based on any formal theory. They are based only on the experience of the people who create them. They are almost the definition of a craft (as opposed to engineering). In an actual Engineering discipline you would need evidence to prove that your model fits reality as opposed to just trusting the experience of a few guys who wrote a book.

samirmenon 11y ago

You could take that one step further. CS has, in it's modern incarnation, only been around for ~90 years. CS, as it is taught at the undergraduate level, has changed dramatically in recent years, and will continue into the future. Math, on the other hand, has been around for thousands of years, is relatively stable, and unlikely to become obsolete in the way a scrum certification, or even a machine learning algorithm, will. Of course, 'CS fundamentals' usually end up at a very close intersection with math. I'm just suggesting that mathematics has an even deeper level of the 'stability' you referenced.

learc83 11y ago
>Of course, 'CS fundamentals' usually end up at a very close intersection with math. I'm just suggesting that mathematics has an even deeper level of the 'stability' you referenced. I agree with you completely. The parts of CS that are stable are the parts that are based on rigorous mathematical foundations. I think that teaching things like Object Oriented Programming strays too far from a rigorous foundation--away from math and even engineering into craft (which belongs in vocational training). When I look back, the classes that I learned the most from were, Discrete Math, Automata, Design and Analysis of Algorithms, and Programming Language Concepts (which went into the academic side of programming language research more than what was currently in use in industry).
- sanderjd 11y ago
  I mostly agree, but for me, the line gets blurry around the applied areas that have a lot of depth: computer architecture, operating systems, networking protocols, compilers, and databases. In all of those, I learned a lot about theory, practice, and engineering trade-offs, all of which was worthwhile. I didn't study it myself, but I would imagine distributed systems is (or should be) a similarly rich subject. I also learned a ton from studying the history of computing, which I wish would be more of a focus for those entering the industry.
  - learc83 11y ago
    Good point. Many of the area's you mentioned do have a lot of formal underpinnings, and there are large bodies of research to look to for guidance. Computer architecture is big E Engineering, done by Computer Engineers for example. The networks class I took was also one of the most math heavy, and most of the book was supported by proofs. In addition, we spent the first half of databases working with only relational algebra. If you look through a textbook on any of the subjects you mentioned, and compare it to say a book on design patterns, the distinction between math/engineering and craft is pretty clear. >I also learned a ton from studying the history of computing, which I wish would be more of a focus for those entering the industry. We went over the history in depth in my program--from Turing to Konrad Zuse to Backus. I also found it immensely useful.

manyxcxi 11y ago

I also had a Software Engineering class (actually two them) that were focused on how to build software in real life. This was in '03 and we covered things like waterfall methodology, requirements gathering, functional specs, etc. If taught the exact same way today it would be woefully out of date but the time we spent on requirements gathering (where the teacher or TA) pretended to be a product owner and purposely gave really crappy answers and we had to extract useful information but by bit was one of the best pieces of prep I ever received. All in all, it was boring and tedious but it certainly wasn't the worst class I ever had in regards to preparing me for a career in technology. I use those lessons to some degree all the time, I rarely directly use all the work I had to do to create my own OS...

learc83 11y ago
> I use those lessons to some degree all the time, I rarely directly use all the work I had to do to create my own OS... I think you probably would have learned those lessons after a few months on the job. You probably wouldn't have picked up the knowledge to build your own OS on the job, however. >All in all, it was boring and tedious but it certainly wasn't the worst class I ever had in regards to preparing me for a career in technology. Did you learn about billing clients, and effectively advertising your services in your CS degree? What about equity versus salary tradeoffs? At least 50% of working in technology is soft skills, why doesn't a CS degree spend 50% of the time teaching you those? The answer is that a CS degree isn't supposed to be vocational training. Vocational training, including learning to talk to clients, should be done on the job, during an internship/apprenticeship, or in a specialized vocational training program. By including it in a college degree, employers have successfully pushed employee training costs onto workers and society (as the article argues).

mathattack 11y ago

The article isn't complaining about CS majors not getting jobs, it's about soft liberal arts majors not getting jobs. When companies hired people for 30 year careers, they could afford to invest a tremendous amount in training. When they hire people for 2-3 years, they have less time to amortize the costs. And it's up to the employee to convince the companies that they can learn quickly, and on their own if need be. Any CS major with decent grades and a positive attitude can learn anything in most any job. (Certainly CS, consulting, finance, marketing, even some kinds of sales) I can't say the same for liberal arts majors. There are great ones out there, but also a lot of folks who goofed off for 4 years and didn't learn anything.

kartickvad 11y ago

I think it's a fallacy to assume that anything not based in CS fundamentals is a fad or has only short-term value. In college, I didn't learn version control, continuous integration (continuously submitting your work in small changelists or patches), unit testing, making sure you're building the right product before building it, delivering the simplest possible code and design that meets the requirements, code quality, working in teams, untangling dependencies and making as much progress as possible today without waiting for all your dependencies to be resolved, and so on. I expect that all these skills will be very much relevant 20 years from now. So, don't confuse long-term value with "grounded in CS fundamentals". Programming isn't a hard science like physics.

learc83 11y ago
>I think it's a fallacy to assume that anything not based in CS fundamentals is a fad or has only short-term value. I didn't say that. I said most industry processes are fads. I also didn't say that nothing that isn't grounded in CS fundamentals has long term value. There are plenty of other skills that have long term value. Office politics, salary negotiation, self-promotion are much more valuable than knowing how to run a few git commands. But non of those things should be taught in a Computer Science program. They are fundamentally vocational skills. Just like version control, unit testing, and continuous integration are vocational skills. Sure they're useful but they should be taught in an internship/apprenticeship or on the job. >In college, I didn't learn version control... I learned to use subversion, and other than the fact that they are are both version control systems, what I learned didn't really carry over to distributed version control like Git. In a CS program you should be learning things like how to implement a version control system, not how to use Git. I would have been pissed paying thousands of dollars per semester for a professor to walk me through a Git tutorial. I don't have a problem if a professor wants you to use github to submit your assignments or something like that. And sure some of the vocational skills you listed are going to be useful for years to come. But these skills should be ancillary. They should be just a happy side effect--like learning teamwork during a group project.
- kartickvad 11y ago
  I'm a practician, not a theorist or an academic. I couldn't care less whether something is based in CS theory. I care whether something will be useful to me over the course of my career. If it is, I'd like my education to train me for that. In fact, some of the academic stuff like compilers and automata have been useless in real life. That's a failing of academia from my point of view.

bigger_cheese 11y ago

Oh god yes I went through the same pain. Our university decided that every Engineering student had to take two CS courses during the first year. This applied regardless of whether you were studying Civil Engineering, Electrical, Mechanical etc. This was alongside all the other first year courses we were required to take such as Chemistry, Physics, Calculus, Linear Algebra, Statics, Dynamics and all that. First Semester we took Intro to Programming and Algorithms (CS1100 or something like that). We learnt everything from Binary notation, logic gates through to floating points, I went from not knowing any programming language to having a fair idea about how topics like recursion worked our last project was to write some code to walk a tree using recursion. I also learnt how to use Unix and recieved my lifelong love of Emacs (which we used in our tutorials) from this course. Second Semester we had to take Software Engineering (CS 1110 I think). It covered waterfall model, version control, specifications, unit tests and more estoteric stuff like loop invariants and formal correctness. Our major project was to write an essay about the Arriane V rocket explosion. I really enjoyed CS 1100 class but CS 1110 effectively succeeded in boring me to tears. It was somehow supposed to give us a taste of real world software design. All it really did was encourage myself and many others not to take CS electives in later years. My major was Materials Engineering I took mostly physics electives in the last year of my degree, which is kind of ironic now because I work pretty heavily with programs - my day job involves writing computer simulations. I learned most of the skills I need on the job (including the C programming language, databases/SQL etc.) I probably would have benefited from more formal training but my experience of university CS was so miserable I actively avoided it.