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Comment by zachruss92 | Hacker News Reader

In the school I attended (not Ivy League, but the respected leader regionally for SE) students graduated without knowing how to use Git in the command line; only git in the context of Eclipse. Building a Flask app would have been a pipe dream. I think what Harvard is doing is truly great teaching students real world applications, workflows, and best practices right from the intro class!

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I also prefer command line to GUI for many tools. However I've worked with some truly great programmers who always try to find a GUI application for editor, git, svn, debuggers, etc. Was my command line way the best practice? I doubt that since they still get the job done with good pace. My guess is that personal tastes define work flow. For me, it's easier to type, but for them GUI has been strongly integrated to their muscle memory.

I've seen a few schools now incorporating Git into their curriculum and had the chance to speak with a few professors doing so. It came down to local companies complaining that new CS grads didn't have the prerequisite skill sets to work for them, namely Git but also web application development, testing skills, etc.

It's an interesting nexus of "should a degree give you job skills", and it seems to have won out. Personally I predict the tens of thousands of CS majors getting pumped out every year will inevitably saturate the market at some point.

Graduating from introductory courses like Harvard's CS50 certainly don't qualify you for anything but the most junior positions, which graduates are surely finding out each year. They need to either put in major effort on their own or take more courses, to get an interesting position. And looking at current growth I wouldn't worry about saturation.

> A report on Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) from the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce forecasts 51 percent of STEM occupations will be computer occupations by 2018.

http://logos.cs.uic.edu/recruit/csstatistics.htm

That is why in certain countries there are CS degrees, and technical schools.

Universities should prepare for knowing how to learn, not to fulfil bullet points in job adverts.

That is what technical schools are for.

I personally think there's more than enough time in 4 years to both teach "theory"/computer science and practical skills.

A lot of classes and colleges just move too slow.

When I was in University I had never even heard of Git or Subversion, but that was because the didn't exist.

> Personally I predict the tens of thousands of CS majors getting pumped out every year will inevitably saturate the market at some point.

This is just my personal view, but I think the curriculum of CS will change vastly over the next few decades, but SE jobs will continue to grow. The market will most likely adjust to cut out the more "entry level" programmer jobs and replace it with more advanced AI/Deep Learning positions. Case in point, there are (virtually) no Flash jobs, but self-driving car engineers are now a job (and a nanodegree on Udacity). I think you can automate jobs, but you can't automate the people creating automation (at least to a degree).

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