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Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that a batcholers in computer science doesn't actually mean anything from the UK, you can learn the course material in six months of study- and employers know this.

so when employers are looking for applicants, they look for CV buzzwords and then test the person applying.

Pass the test? great. you're in.

a degree for software/systems engineering really only helps later in life when you're going for a leadership or management role.

the UK is also guilty of denying education about how computers work for a couple decades, opting only to teach microsoft office with a few CCNA college courses which inevitably get cancelled. So computer science students are really learning how computers work when they first go to university- and that's just mental.

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Woah there - let's not write off the CS department of every UK institution, shall we? This is definitely a case of 'YMMV'.

ok, but even if you did full time hands on study of computing then you're still starting from a 0-basis foundation of knowledge on entering since there is no formal education before that.

and a little like hub networking we can only operate at the rate of the slowest peer. We can't "negotiate up" the curriculum.

so it's a waste of time and resources for many people. - like another poster said though there is a lot of mathematics involved so it's not like I'm saying it's useless, just that it's certainly not necessary and that we should be (and are) putting computers into the hands of children rather than teaching people -only once they arrive at university- about how computers function.

"there is no formal education before that."

I don't know about the rest of the UK but Computing Science is on the curriculum at schools in Scotland - I studied computing at school in the early 80s and had projects doing 6502 assembler on an Apple (NB and I did not go to a fancy school).

Here is a SQA Advanced Higher paper - looks pretty good to me:

http://www.sqa.org.uk/files_ccc/ComputingScienceSQPAH.pdf

"there is, now"

for the last 10 years there hasn't been. (even at college level)

the closest that comes near is the BTEC National Diploma in IT systems support (which I took) which teaches you the OSI model and how to crimp cables. (and also that Worms are "bad" and viruses are also "bad" and hackers are "bad" etcetc)

it's definitely not computer science but it's a somewhat close approximation for the low skilled workers that will someday become level 1/2 support.

if that's your intro into university then it's still a very low base to take you forward.

I went to university over a decade ago to do CS, and before that I did an A level computing, and an A level discrete maths module which taught basic algorithms like path finding, shortest tour, bin packing etc. That's a pretty good foundation for CS.

In the 90s, when they introduced the Advanced Higher they changed the Higher Grade to remove a lot of the deeper computer science components. Having been in one of the last years to sit it I then ended up studying a lot of the same information in my first year at university anyway. Unfortunately having a good school curriculum didn't automatically make the degree level education better.

Exactly you don't get to start A Physics or Chemistry Degree without doing it at GCSE and A Level.

I think the issue is employers are looking for web/mobile/whatever developers with heavy emphasis on building quality code and the latest trends.

CS at university does not teach that.

"CS at university does not teach that."

Personally, I don't think that CS courses should be even trying teach that kind of stuff. CS courses should be about fundamentals not craft or process.

[NB Craft and process are obviously more important that fundamentals for at least 95% of development roles - which is why I hate CS courses being regarded as "learn to develop" courses].

There should be far more focus on software apprenticeships, which is why I welcome the flurry of development bootcamps that have been springing up over the last couple of years. The best of them know that they're only really getting people to a minimum level, and work hard to place their graduates with companies that are able to commit to spending a year or two continuing to train them, rather than just throwing people with 12 weeks development experience in at the deep end.

Apprenticeships <> Bootcamps

And for a "professional" Job its debatable if using such a low status term is a good idea - in the UK Apprenticeships are seen as blue collar low status jobs at best.

Ask most people in the UK about Apprentices and they will think of the lusers on that ghastly TV Show.

Oh And I say this having followed the vocational track into IT

I see bootcamps as one of the few viable options to get a previously inexperienced person into a position where they're able to take on a software apprenticeship. I may be grossly simplifying things, but it feels to me like a trade such as plumbing or gas fitting can be picked up on the job.

Software development requires a pretty extensive grounding in the basics just to know what you're looking at when someone shows you new techniques - to stretch my already tenuous metaphor even further, most people at least know how to remove a spanner from a toolbox and which end to hold it. I'm not sure the same can be said of opening a terminal.

As for the discrimination against apprenticeships as being a lesser thing than the default route of school -> college -> university, that's a wider issue that needs addressing, and I don't think its going to be helped by inventing some new name for the same thing, especially in the software industry. I also took the vocational route in, and I don't think its ever put me at a disadvantage (if anything it means I have three years more professional experience than my peers). Most of the software developers I know studied unrelated subjects at university anyway.

The name for the associate professional step between Apprentice and Degree level engineers is Technician and has been for the last 50+ years.

...and that's why I think it's a good thing that some universities have separate CS and software engineering diplomas/tracks..

unfortunate word choice, I think, since process is sort of the point of the whole affair. Not in the sense you meant it there, of course, but in the more general sense of formalizing "how to", from developing adequate descriptions of what - data structures and so forth - to finding the best ways of getting from point a to point b (or finding out that there isn't one and looking for a good-enough good-enough). It's almost a shame that computer and electronic computer are nearly synonymous now; it leads to the idea that CS is somehow a science about these electronic computing machines rather than about computing itself. While it's true that advances in CS have implications for the machines and the way we use them, that's almost incidental to the task of finding the best ways to describe, express and carry out a process. And if it turns out that a (seemingly) ridiculous amount of time is spent at the beginning demonstrating that adding in a place system is usually better than counting, and multiplying is better than adding the same number a whole bunch of times, well, if all you've gotten from that is that typing "*" saves you a few keystrokes, then you've missed the point.

Mine did, then again Portuguese universities aren't pure CS, rather "Informatics Engineering" and teach a bit of everything.

"you can learn the course material in six months of study"

I don't know what courses are like these days - but that absolutely wasn't the case in the 1980s when I got a CS degree. However, the course I did was fairly heavy on the maths/formal side of things rather than focusing on the craft of programming.

I'm an undergraduate at Leiden university in the Netherlands. I can confirm that this is still the case, at least here. I would say it's around a 30/70 split between practical/formal teachings.

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