Ask Slashdot: How Was the Quality of Your Academic Tech Education? 96
dryriver writes: In talking to people who are doing software development or other tech work, many told me that they found their tech education at university lacking in various ways. Some were taught outdated software, programming languages, methods, techniques or approaches. Others had problems with academia hostile to new ideas or creative problem solving. Some didn't get enough recognition for the coursework they did at university. Others couldn't get into top-tier universities when they were finishing high school aged 17 or 18 and got a second-rate tech education at a lower-quality academic institution as a result. So to the question: How was the quality of your tech education at university? Was the curriculum up to date? Were you taught the right things? Was academia open to new ideas and new ways of doing things? Did your education prepare you well for real life tech work in a non-academic environment?
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Bitch fest? What the hell kind of university did you go to? Can I enroll?
Re:Let the Bitch Fest Begin (Score:5, Insightful)
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To be brutally honest, the question could have been asked more objectively. Many of us who were born in the last century aren't as apt to redefine every word to mean something for which there was already a term. When I think of tech, I think of everything from tractors to lasers. The BeauHD type does not understand the rest of the world, so technology becomes equated with software and the very adjacent industries in silicon valley like phone development. There's more to the tech world than Apple and Google, guys!
Please report to the carousel. It is the time of renewal.
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Perfect. I learned how to learn, and got a lot of OJT. Degree was useless but I learned an awful lot.
Mine was top notch (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course I learned outdated skills on outdated hardware. That's normal in all schools. Hell, I learned to make metal parts on a shaper when I took machining evening classes at my community college too. Who does that in the 21st century eh? So it's not limited to universities or computers either.
What made my university's education top-notch is the essential bit of information they drilled into us over 5 years: when we get our diplomas, we'll just have been jumpstarted. They'll only have taught us enough to learn the rest over our working career, and don't we think we'll be hotshots out of university - just young, totally inexperience engineers with possibilities.
So many unis fail to convey this to their students... At least mine did, so I knew what I had to do when I went to my first job interview, and my knowing my place and the extent of my knowledge - or lack thereof - came across well with my to-be first employer.
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Same here, outdated or weirdo programming languages no-one but an academic has even heard of, toy problems, the usual complaints, but then a real education in good programming practice, algorithms and data structures, how to manage a software development effort, usability, etc. You end up with people with all the theoretical knowledge you need but usually terrible problem-solving skills. Luckily it's easier to teach, or identify view interviews, people with problem-solving/thinking skills than it is to re
Good point. Georgia Tech is tough (Score:3)
> when we get our diplomas, we'll just have been jumpstarted. They'll only have taught us enough to learn the rest over our working career, and don't we think we'll be hotshots out of university - just young, totally inexperience engineers with possibilities.
That's an excellent point. At one job I held for several years, we hired a lot of recent graduates. Most, of not all, seemed surprised when they realized how much there is to know (and therefore the small percentage they learned in a couple years o
WGU (Score:2)
I have my BS in IT from WGU
Good
1. It was cheap, possible to pay for it with just a Pell Grant
2. Collected lots of Certs
3. Learned a lot of self discipline. A WGU degree feels like an exercise in Independent Study. I had guidance, I was given the material. I knew the standards I had to reach, but I had minimal contact with instructors. I attended a live webinar less than 5 times. I really learned how to learn
Bad
1. I missed the lectures. I don't think I learned some topics to the depth they deserve
I
God choice to switch (Score:2)
I think that once you have a post-grad degree from $brand_name_school, people don't care much where your earlier degrees are from. So a bachelors from WGU followed by a masters or PhD from a highly respected, though affordable, school is an excellent path.
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Of course I learned outdated skills on outdated hardware. That's normal in all schools.
Indeed and to a large extent it doesn't matter and can't. My uni did a mix. Some were obsolete some, were new and some were flat out strange. Thing is that was a while ago so nothing I learned that was cutting edge has remained so.
Actually the older skills are the less obsolete ones now. We covered C which is more or less unchanged since then. We had a course on a manual lathe. Also largely unchanged except for the preva
My education was superb (Score:1)
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Just my 2 cents
Well, you've met the minimum standard... (Score:2)
Oftentimes, academia is the culmination of the journey for an enterprising youthful individual entering the job market... other times, a talented scholar might only apply for certain openings because of his/her pedigree.
CSUS -- awesome (Score:1)
Mine was great (Score:5, Interesting)
disclaimer, I do work in academia now, so my testimony may be biased.
I studied in France at $LOCAL_UNIVERSITY and went to grad school at $OTHER_UNIVERSITY_WITH_THE_RIGHT_SPECIALTY. And it was all great. We did not learn the new technologies. But we learnt computing, and algorithms, and hardware systems, and software systems, and networking. Some of the classes were bad, but overall, they gave me the exact keys I needed to understand how computing happens.
We did not learn $FANCY_MODERN_FRAMEWORK. But who needs to learn that? We did learn all the concepts that were used in building it. So that when I ran into it, I could learn it quickly.
It turns out that all the courses I did want to take were not so useful in my life (software engineering, networking, databases) and that all the ones I did not want to take turned out to be critical in my career (operation research, linear algebra, computer architecture, parallel computing). So just let universities do what they think is right.
Point in case, I talked to a MS student last week. (I teach in the US now.) He was complaining that they did not learn reactJS or iOS programming in courses. But he did learn about vueJS and Android programming. What the hell?! They are built on similar principles. We should be teaching less technologies. Let me rephrase that, we should notbe teaching technologies. We should be teaching concepts, exemplified through a particular technological implementation.
I learnt android programming a few years ago, turns out it is not much different from good old MFC + Java Swing. Once you understand the abstract concepts, everything becomes implementation details and documentation.
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iOS is expensive to teach, simply because of the requirements to have a Mac for dev work.
I just finished a BAS (batch. of applied sciences, think 4 year tech degree like nursing or similar) and we were able to do Android development. Also covered AngularJS.
What I found disappointing was not having anything related to version control, unit testing, working with other people's code, and working with large pre-existing code bases.
There were also some serious BS assignments in a few different classes - like ha
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iOS is expensive to teach, simply because of the requirements to have a Mac for dev work.
If the piddling price difference is something that completely shuts out the possibilities of teaching iOS, then it's a rock bottom cheap University indeed, with a completely messed up value system. You spend more on books each semester.
Or are you suggesting developing on those 49 dollar spyware infected androids?
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You only need one Mac Mini and the students SSH into it.Or use remote desktop.
His complaint us mood anyway. The only big difference are the frameworks, if he can code in Kotlin or Java for Android he learns Swift swiftly.
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Let me rephrase that, we should notbe teaching technologies. We should be teaching concepts, exemplified through a particular technological implementation.
That's great, but most employers are not looking for people who know concepts. They're looking for people with concrete skills that can get work done. They want a Python developer with AWS and Django experience, not someone who studied O.O. languages and cloud computing for a semester or two.
Ok but (Score:2)
It was good until they ran out of rubber bands to put around the card decks.
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Mine was excellent (Score:2)
During the mid '90s to late '90s I went to a Montreal technical institute called Teccart. A college for training electronics technicians. I must have been among the last cohort of pure hardware techs that came out of there before it went bankrupt and re-invented itself as something quite different.
I received somewhat more than the usual college-level courses, I received a lot of maths and physics that you'd usually get at university. There was enough hands-on stuff to keep a young me in there all day and ev
Chalkboard vs breadboard (Score:2)
EE major. Wouldâ(TM)ve benefited from more practical examples and exercises to provide perspective to the theoretical concepts. Without that it was very dull sometimes. Sure we had instructional âoelabsâ building circuits by hand, but there wasnâ(TM)t much perspective on practical applications, i.e. what type of real world system uses the circuit. Our time in lab wouldâ(TM)ve been better spent learning how to select components and lay out PCBs rather than arranging wires on s br
I was the first year my uni offered an IT degree (Score:2)
Worthless (Score:3)
I did a Computer Science degree at the University of Manchester, which generally ranks pretty well globally (a quick search shows QS World [topuniversities.com] ranks it 27th but I'm not sure if their rankings are meanigful). The degree was utterly worthless. There was about eight hours of lectures per week for about 30 weeks per year, so there was very little content to the degree. You could cover the whole degree yourself in about three months of self-study. The degree covered a variety of subjects, but gave you only a basic overview of each subject, so you gained no in-depth knowledge and no useful skills. The programming modules taught the subject to a very basic level, so people who hadn't already learned to program were in no way equipped to work in industry. There was very little interaction with the teaching staff, and in most cases the lecturers simply read out the contents of their slides, while offering no additional insight or commentary. They whole course felt more like a factory production line than a useful educational experience.
Ultimately though, the degree did want it was intended to do: 1) extract as much money from you as possible, and 2) give you a piece of paper that lets you walk into a job at one of the big graduate recruiters. The time when universities existed to instill you with knowledge have long passed and now they just sell certificates. If I were recruiting for a programming job, I wouldn't consider a degree and would instead want to see demonstrations of people's work. If the application has nothing to demonstrate then they probably can't program or aren't interested in programming, so wouldn't make good programmers, regardless of any degree.
It does seem that employers are increasingly realising that degrees are worthless, so Google, Apple and others are now recruiting people without degrees [slashdot.org]. I consider this progress since universes only serve to waste years of your life and take your money, while offering you very little in the way of education.
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I did a Computer Science degree at the University of Manchester, which generally ranks pretty well globally (a quick search shows QS World [topuniversities.com] ranks it 27th but I'm not sure if their rankings are meanigful).
I've never heard of QS World and that website is terrible. I looked up where I went to school and it said it had degrees in several subjects I'm pretty sure they don't have and never mentioned CS or listed them in the CS category. This is despite the fact that its often considered the top or one of the top CS schools in the world. I think most folks would consider US News & World Report as the canonical listing of school rankings generally with other sources for perhaps subject specific rankings. Al
Re: Worthless (Score:2)
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Fellow Brit here - I did a BTEC National Diploma (roughly the same sort of level as A-levels) at my local tech college. It was all pretty unassuming, but taught absolutely tonnes of stuff - and since I was doing electronics, I got plenty of time with an actual soldering iron to make stuff. Some of the classes were pretty crappy, but overall, I came away knowing (and having actually done!) an enormous amount - some of which still comes in useful today (even though I work in IT).
University (UWE) was a distinc
Mixed is the word, on at least 4 dimensions (Score:2)
Highlights are easy to remember. There were a couple of really outstanding classes taught by great, or at least good, professors. However most of my best teachers were definitely not in the technical fields.
In computer science (at UT Austin) my compiler course from Dr Novak was an important influence on how I think about life in general, not just computers. "Where are the bottleneck resources?" That's often the key question My AI course was pretty good considering the time, and the professor was a nice guy,
Time + Gear + Community (Score:2)
Things were changing pretty fast when I was in school. It was towards the beginning of the personal computing revolution and there were new developments seemingly every day. The best that could be hoped for back then was to get the tools that you need to succeed, and in my case, it was time plus gear plus a community to fall back on for help and guidance and to bounce ideas off. Plus, my university was part of the original backbone of the internet (and the ur-internet), so I had access to usenet and that
Confidence (Score:2)
It's corny.
But I learned that I could be given a challenge, a problem, and I could solve it. I could complete the task.
My school pushed Java ( i like Java)
It was the math that was my ultimate test, everything else was gravy.
Sociology, Anthropology, Human sexuality, Biology, and Art History believe it or not were all incredibly enlightening.
Some Linux command line, SQL, computer architecture, English lit, Art history of all things ( so much fucking information)
Poetry and literature - words with the power to
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Yeah college was one of the best times. I don't understand how people bash it.
Bottom feeders whining about college again (Score:2)
lol, who the fuck calls it "tech education"?
Maybe there wouldn't be a stigma against the non-degreed if there weren't so many of them who seem to believe that learning a programming language or learning a corporation's products should put them in the same category as those who learned computer science at a reputable university.
So, so bad... (Score:5, Interesting)
I started slinging code for money at the age of 14. I was hired to teach other people to code when I was 15. By 16 I was submitting articles for publication in computer journals and doing television. I thought my life was truly going to start when I got to university...
"In this course we are going to teach you FORTRAN". We're not going to teach you FORTRAN because you're going to do interesting stuff with it (you can do interesting stuff with FORTRAN), we're just going to teach it to you, give you meaningless assignments and have them graded by surly TAs with no sense of humour.
I left after a year and joined a startup. The CEO when he was hiring me told me that if I ever wanted to take any courses towards my degree he would pay 100% for it as long as I passed with a C or better. I thought it was the deal of a lifetime, but after a month on the job I realized that the tech industry was so far ahead of academia that it would be pointless to take anything. That was 30 years ago...
Is it worth it now? If I were 20 years old I guess the question I would be asking myself is: "Hey Lazarus, if I gave you $100,000 and a 4 year head start would you be further ahead than someone who just graduated from Uni with $100k in debt?" Would you know more? Would not having the paper hinder your career? Would you have to take crappy jobs you didn't like as a result?
I don't know. Many companies are coming out and saying they no longer require or look at a person's education because they've found it makes no difference. Lots of comments on here are saying that the most important thing they learned in University was how to learn. Fair enough, but I feel like I learned that in high school. Someone I respect greatly told me one time that the greatest benefit to a university education was a network of your peers. You basically go there to meet the people you will end up working with, forming companies with, coaching kids soccer with, etc.
Also a fair point.
My opinion, for what little it's worth (apart from the perspective that comes from distance) is that I would still never go to uni for tech. I would go for Math. Or Physics. Or something else. Even if my lifelong dream was to code APIs in JS or something. You're a much more interesting person with a science or art degree who's also a kick-ass coder than someone who's mainlined tech all the way. IMHO...
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CS or Programming? (Score:2)
The question is low-resolution.
If you went to a CS program expecting a Programming degree or vice-versa, you might be unhappy. Do CS in undergrad if you can - there's always time to learn new languages later.
There are big differences among CS programs, though, which surprised me. My friend went to a well-regarded ("2nd tier") school in Boston for CS and he was doing foundational stuff in Junior Fall that I had second semester in Freshman year at an Ivy. He was never getting to the more interesting stuff
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Don't go into any program without thoroughly understanding it
If only that was so easy. As a high school grad, I knew that there was lots I didn't know. I knew I didn't have the knowledge to make an informed choice. Once enrolled, I asked other students for their opinions about the professors, and was mislead. They would tell me which professors to avoid because they were hard. What I eventually figured out is hard is good. You don't learn much in an easy class.
The professors to avoid are the unfair ones who get all subjective and judgmental. Every department
It was a bit behind the times but ok in general (Score:2)
mine sucked (Score:1)
Minsky talked of "three periods of CS education" (Score:5, Interesting)
I hear Marvin Minsky talked of "three periods of computer science education", each about a decade long, starting (about mid '60s?) when they figured out that programming might actually be a subject worthy of a digree. He caracterized roughly as follows:
First period: Colleges were confused about what to teach, and taught a lot of academic stuff that wasn't directly job related for most practitioners. (For instance: Compiler writing - as if they though most programmers would be writing their own compilers. A tower-of-babbel of specialized language, and so on.)
A four-year CS degree in the first period was actually a slight handicap when job hunting: Software as a product, let alone an industry of it, didn't exist yet. Work was in making computers do needful things as they became cheap enough to be thrown at them. Employers figured that if you'd gone all the way to the degree you'd take more training in what they REALLY needed because you had more to "unlearn" (i.e. shiny tools and expectations of programmer fun to put aside) before you buckled down and became productive on THEIR problems.
Second period: College CS departments became more clueful about what was needed and were graduating programmers who were more focussed on the real problems of employers. The four year degree became an asset.
Third period: Colleges became mired in the first few rounds (of many, to this day) of programming methodology fads. Again the four-year degree became a handicap.
I, as a leading-edge boomer (in a college town where I could attend lectures while still in elementary and high school) was a first-period student. The drill then was to drop out short of a degree. I went to all-but-distribution-requirements (mainly a language(!) and a couple humanities). By then I was a consulting programmer (through a firm!), good at it, and making decent bux. So I let my consulting practice expand to full-time and didn't do the last few courses for the sheepskin.
These days that would not work at ALL. We've been through several more "Minsky-style periods", including at least one where no amount of track record, walls of patent plaques, or connections with project administrators who would kill to get you onboard, would get you past the H.R. department's "degree" checkbox. (Any excuse to dump an experienced, skilled, and highly-paid native born in favor of two or three H1bs of marginal competence was seen by the C-suite as a win.)
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We've been through several more "Minsky-style periods", including at least one where no amount of track record, walls of patent plaques, or connections with project administrators who would kill to get you onboard, would get you past the H.R. department's "degree" checkbox. (Any excuse to dump an experienced, skilled, and highly-paid native born in favor of two or three H1bs of marginal competence was seen by the C-suite as a win.)
O the other hand if you had mysteriously managed to get past the nuts HR dep
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O the other hand if you had mysteriously managed to get past the nuts HR department is that a place you'd want to work? It sounds awful.
Unfortunately, I ended up as a ranking expert in something that only a few big companies did, and big companies means big bureaucracies. Oops!
But eventually I got tapped by an old colleague, first for some consulting, then to help found another startup, where I am today.
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There was no computer science department back then (Score:3)
I went to a liberal university where computer science was just being born in the Math department. The curriculum was more about theory, and to an extent programming. There was no hands on training at all.
They started with Pascal as your first programming language, then data structures, and from there it was whatever you wanted to take. The other classes were Operating Systems, 370 Assembler, Programming Languages (C, Lisp, Assembler, Fortran), Intro to Computer Graphics, Advanced Computer Graphics, and a couple of others I've forgotten.
The classes were actually pretty good, but you know what actually stood out? ONE professor, who was really passionate about computer science and graphics programming. At the time we programmed in Pascal on a PDP-11. He introduced me to Turbo Pascal and the rest is history, countless nights writing TSRs, manipulating the EGA card's ports to put 16 colored pixels on the screen, creating sprites and using assembler mov commands to move the sprite around the screen at incredible speeds, and so on. If it wasn't because of his passion for teaching and his smarts to know where we were headed, I wouldn't be where I am today.
It's not just about the education. It's about meeting others who are passionate about learning and countless nights hacking away until you get what you want. You haven't had a good education until you show up to the class and already know what the professor is talking about, and the only way to get there is by spending time learning things on your own.
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Teaching methodology is the problem. I don't have a solution either, I just want to complain that poor teaching methods are the reason I bailed on University and why many online tutorials are nigh on useless.
Toy problems to teach concepts are not sensible. If you are trying to teach multiple inheritance by deriving CAT classes from a PET class just stop. It's not even useful as a vehicle to explain the concept. I came from a highly procedural background of assembly. Looking back many of the concepts of OOP
what do you want to do? (Score:3)
If you go into college without knowing why you're there and what you're going to do with that training, you are not going to be very happy when you get out.
This is not about tech education. It's about education. Every department in every college has these challenges around what to emphasize:
concepts or execution?
agreed-upon cannon or emerging ideas?
core understanding or creative application?
professors as professional network creators or focused classroom educators?
education as job training or personal growth?
These are almost never strictly binary. It doesn't matter if you're a dance major or a physics major, your department has philosophies that lean in particular directions.
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If you go into college without knowing why you're there and what you're going to do with that training, you are not going to be very happy when you get out.
I disagree. I believe that many students start in one major (or even start undecided), switch to a very different major, and succeed. I taught at a major university for ten years, and I have seen this happen at least a few times.
I really enjoyed reading your other "challenges around what to emphasize."
Theory School = Still Relevant (Score:2)
I started college 6 years behind my peers due to a stint in the US Navy: All my classmates were 6 years younger than me, and their minds were SHARP! But those 6 years gave me the maturity needed to see the long view, set ambitious goals, then tough it out.
I went to a "Theory School" (UC San Diego) and majored in Computer Engineering (all of CS + 1/3 EE). I also worked my way through school, which meant I was on the 5-year plan so I could actually have time to both work and study.
My industry job was to wor
I learned how to train those above me (Score:2)
My "tech" college years were a long time ago. I'd already been professional employed for several years and was at the level of Programmer Analyst, which will indicate to some of you how long ago that was. My boss at the time convinced me that I'd never get anywhere in my career if I didn't have a degree. So I enrolled in the computer tech program at the local college. It rapidly became clear that I was well beyond the instructors in both conceptual knowledge and practical experience. The end result was that
Community college and then state university (Score:1)
What tech education? (Score:2)
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It's not supposed to be about the practical implementation but rather the theory that lead to it. Unfortunately I imagine most people's experience with CS will be like my own where the theory is being explained first by regurgitating the musings of the great navel gazers, then slowly, painfully, through silly toy problems that don't give an appreciation of what that navel gazing actually managed to achieve. For instance, if someone spends more than half a lesson talking about the OSI model, it's time to lea
University of Pisa, Italy (Score:2)
Computer Science course. A few interesting and high quality exams (let's say 10) interspersed with a number of useless and/or low quality ones.
But that was still worth the hassle, between 1987 and 1992.
BS EE from University of California Santa Barbara (Score:2)
Yes but... (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes I work in software development and integration, my school/college education was poor but the difference was that I didn't expect the school to tech me everything. I spent hours outside school learning stuf I knew I'd never be taught at school. I taught myself to program in Z80 assembler at the age of 13 because it was fun, then I learned C when I got to 15, all this back int he mid 80s where you were the ultimate nerd if you even owned a micro computer at home. I used the school to learn how to learn, not to learn tech. I talked a lot with the teachers in the tech depts. The teachers taught me how to focus my attention and how to find the right pace, I'd like to think I'd bring them the latest info on the tech scene at the time to help them keep up as they didn't always have time to catch up with the tech news, especially as it was hard to come by 'cos we only had basic BBS and magazines.
You can't expect schools. colleges or even work to teach you everything, you have to go home and do you own homework and learn about stuff on your own and not many people will do that. My daughter does it too, only a few people in her classes bother to learn on their own and it's those kids that enjoy education and get something out of it. That's life, put more in and you get more out.
My Degree from UCLA Served Me Very Well (Score:2)
I received a BA in mathematics from UCLA in 1964, before many readers here were born. At that time, only three universities in the U.S. offered computer science degrees; and UCLA was NOT one of them. I loaded up on numerical analysis classes along with some astronomy, accounting, and physics. I learned programming by becoming a member of the UCLA Computer Club, where existing members taught me FORTRAN II.
As a programmer at UCLA, I used what I learned whle supporting a professor of geophysics in his resea
College CS Educations (Score:2)
The quality of CS education varies wildly from institution to institution and from professor to professor and year to year. I think it's pretty hard to generalize. Some schools or professors try to stay up to date, and are teaching C++17 (or at least modern C++) and some are still stuck in the mid 90s. Or worse - UC Santa Cruz has students doing data structures in C. UC Berkeley hasn't updated its textbook in decades and the homework assignments for their intro class are massive amounts of boring busy work.
Saw some benefit (Score:1)
Mine was very good (Score:2)
I studied Chemistry in Utrecht, the Netherlands in the early 1990s. Most of the books and teachers were excellent and I can still apply the knowledge I gained at University. We learnt to think like scientists, which is a skill you can use anywhere, look things up in books that were written in English, German and French (doable for most Dutch chemists) and sometimes Russian (which meant that we had the knowledge on paper but it still wasn’t accessible to us), build and use complicated experimental setu
What the whiners don't get... (Score:2)
Looking back, I think I could answer yes to all of these questions. Languages were out of date, stuff was generally not applicable to everyday programming, ...
But after having years of experience, I realize that the language itself really didn't matter. The concepts haven't changed, whether you're using design patterns or OOP or whatever, it really doesn't matter if you learn these things on java or .net or [insert any other language you want to in here]... What matters is that you learn the concepts.
And th
Lucky to be at Carnegie-Mellon in the 1970's (Score:1)
I was fortunate to attend Carnegie-Mellon from 1975 to 1979. While most undergraduates at other schools were programming on punch cards, we were online time-sharing on DEC PDP-10's running TOPS-20. The computation center also had an IBM 360 running TSS/360 and a Univac 1108. At the time CMU did not award undergraduate CS degrees but had (and still has) one of the top graduate programs in the country. There were a dozen or so students in my class seriously into programming, mostly math or EE majors. Many wer
They teach theory (Score:2)
Uni makes you a better computer scientist (Score:3)
Uni's purpose isn't to churn out programmers. Sure, it does that, but programming languages and approaches are something technical, teaching someone to be a programming technician. Going to uni to learn programming is like studying for a doctor's degree in order to be a good nurse. Sure, you'll learn some relevant things, but it's far from the point.
From my point of view, the good thing about uni is that it teaches foundations like math and algorithms. That's the kind of things you need to enable computers to do new things. It also open you up to understand the complexity of what can be done with computers, from computer graphics to computer vision, neural networks, encryption, ...
You end up with a decent view of computing, and you end up a shitty programmer. But that's fine, because becoming a good programmer is much easier than getting a deep understanding of what can be done and how.
Very good: We learned how to learn (Score:2)
I attended NTH (now called NTNU) in Trondheim, Norway and got my MSEE back in 1981. At that time I and all the other engineering graduates knew that we had just scratched the surface of all that was left to discover/learn, and that was fine, it meant that we could have interesting careers.
Our internal joke was that we thought that the business graduates (from NHH & BI) all came out with the opposite mindset, i.e. they all knew that they knew it all.
Terje
It varies from professor to professor. (Score:2)
We all know this. The one professor who does Java for teaching OOP. I don't like Java but he says that's not the point. I get him but I still find his lectures meh. Just as I do the language. The other one is a late late 68er who looks a bit like a failed Rockstar and teaches graph theory. Nice. Like the subject, really like the man. Good slides, good lectures.
I love our math Prof. He is my age - I'm late with my college which is no problem at all since this is Germany and college is free (Yes, I do like t
I had a very good tech education (Score:2)
I received a bachelor's in electrical engineering and then a master's in electronic engineering at two Canadian universities and my education served me very well. Worked for a year at a software startup, then three years at a place that reverse-engineered ICs. I then owned my own software company for 19 years, sold out 18 months ago and now work as an embedded software developer and love my job.
Computer Systems Engr, UMASS/Amherst, 1976 (Score:2)
Beyond obsolete (Score:1)
The quality is up to you. (Score:2)
I was in a small computer science program in my college.
Some of us who graduated became very successful. Others are shifting from job to job trying to live off their next paycheck.
Oddly enough there is a weak correlation between Grades and Success.
The difference is the level of effort people put into their studies.
The problem is a lot of students go to college for the piece of paper, they often get good grade, they study for the test and play the mechanics of academia, they are in it because that is what t
Funny story (Score:2)
It was lacking (Score:1)
I graduated in 1998 (Score:2)
I started off in Comp Sci but switched because it was mostly too removed from things people actually do. Examples of this include "Discrete Structures for Comp Sci." This was an entire semester of algebraically proving algorithms correct for sets of numbers most often infinity (they always work). Another important area of study was Search/Sort algorithms and their n^2, N*log2(N) etc. No one even back then was sitting around deciding to use a shaker sort over a heap.
Now I get that everything will be somewhat
Define "Tech Education"? (Score:2)
What does that even mean?
Is "Tech" a subject? Is "Tech" a class? Who gets a degree in "Tech"?
How can we have a meaningful discussion on something so described? Nobody who works in technology would ever describe their education as a "Tech Education". The field is nuanced and complex, not some kind of slang term one throws around.
Like many, Poor (Score:2)
In the technical college I attended, the MCSE program was a bit of a mess.
My instructor was a lot more savvy than most.
He did tell me, in order to pass the various tests, I had to parrot back the correct "wrong" answers to get the marks, but would need the Right answers once I made it into the field, as those would be what would actually work. That, and to pass the practical tests he set up for us that also clearly proved his point.
This, of course, made for twice the work throughout the whole thing.
It has b
I wish someone had told me (Score:2)
1969 (Score:1)
What I see of coops and interns (Score:2)
Their understanding of anything like version control, static analysis, architecture, unit testing, or pretty much anything practical is
Re: (Score:2)
I agree that most coops and interns are pretty poor developers. However, I lucked out in the last few months. I was tasked with mentoring a student who'd just finished first-year CS and this kid was one of the smartest people I've ever met. She came in knowing very little about anything, but holy smokes she picked things up fast. Used Google to do her own research (!) when necessary, and ended up producing useful and decently-written software. Needless to say, my employer's having her come back on her
They teach coding and some theiry, not engineering (Score:2)
Employers need engineers. But very consistently, college graduates that they hire don't know ANYTHING about the process of writing quality software. They don't learn about:
- Version management
- Release management
- Deployment
- Build automation
- Quality control
- Resilient software architecture
We have to teach them these things on the job. It's really a sad state of affairs.
Re: (Score:2)
As good as (Score:2)
I think the more realistic answer to that question is always "as much as the energy I put into my studies". Which goes to say that people who complain should maybe complain about themselves and people who are pleased maybe should be more complacent.
But hey, I'm an academic, so nothing I say is valuable if you don't think it's valuable. That how pedagogy works: you can't teach someone who doesn't want to learn.
Academic vs Trade school (Score:1)
Were you taught the right things? YES. Analytical methods, black box testing, analog and digital signal processing, statistics...
Was academia open to new ideas and new ways of doing things? Yes.
Did your education prepare you well for real life tech work in a non-academic environment? Undergraduate: No. Graduate School: Yes.
I think it was good (Score:1)