> CS programs have, in the main, not decided that the primary path to becoming a programmer should involve doing material actual programming.
Well, that's because CS programs are designed to teach CS, not to be a vocational school for programmers.
Well, that's because CS programs are designed to teach CS, not to be a vocational school for programmers.
I suspect the answer is that our culture is confused, we want people who are smart and well rounded to also be useful. And the ugly side of it is, we want clear class divisions. One would never refer to law school or medical school as "vocational".
They're also very expensive to attend, and the most immediate value they offer is to get people jobs
Sure you would. They are 100% vocational schools. Their cost, acceptance rates, time commitment, and difficulty level may be higher than other vocational schools, but that doesn't change what they are -- 100% focused on giving you the knowledge and skills to do a specific job.
It's almost like they rose from the death of many for-profit technical schools (DeVry, WestWood et al.) and took their ecological niche. But in contrast to bootcamps, these for-profit schools were too big, slow, and ineffective.
You don't have to have an engineering degree to get a co-op job. The student gets paid well over minimum wage (and learns on the job) and the employers get financial incentives from the gov't to hire students. Its win-win for both the student and the employer.
Co-op programs are optional, and take place in the summer or in a gap year. The affiliation of companies hosting co-ops is loose, and the schools charge large fees for participating in these programs (with the exception of Waterloo).
Speaking from personal experience, results may vary.
Note that my degree is from a well-reputed Canadian school that has a "software engineering specialization", and as far as I can tell (though I did not take it) that specialization is indistinguishable from the main CS curriculum, and is not valid vocational training.
Hell, they aren't even focused on teaching you to pass the bar, which is why most people pay for separate cram schools.
Arguably, "a school one must go to in order to practice a vocation" can be referred to as a "vocational school." I understand that vocational schools are often thought to be purely practical and not theoretical, but I think this definition does a disservice to the reality of entering certain vocations.
What? I suspect that it's typically, if not exclusively, those in the upper classes that want this. The ugly side of it is human nature is selfish.
Not to toot my own horn but I got a perfect score on the math part of the SAT with little prep, and I've tutored others on the same and only managed to eke out a little improvement. (In contrast, I've tutored math course work and had more success there.)
The math isn't very advanced, it's just a matter of doing it quickly and accurately.
The truth is more nuanced [1].
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/03/05/these...
Whether this is correlated to anything important in real life is an entirely separate question.
From a research-into-today's-hot-button-issues perspective, they are routinely slammed for being about cramming, but the effect of test preparation on test scores tends to be very close to zero when you look into it.
There's actual employment law that prohibits using IQ tests? I'd never heard that before
http://cdn8.openculture.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Test1...
The value and definition of "IQ" is widely disputed and generally seen as of limited relevance to the actual work and performance of that work (uncorrelated). Look it up and do some research if you're interested, this is just a quick showing of _why_ tests may be considered bad.
I'm not saying that IQ tests are useful measures of ability to do a job. I just wasn't aware there was actual law or precedent forbidding their use.
> If there is any sort of "test" given as a condition of employment, it must be relevant, standardized, non-biased, reviewed by specialists and approved, etc.
Wouldn't this disqualify a lot of whiteboard interviews too? Most startups don't have a standard question bank reviewed by experts or grade on a standard rubric.
1. http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault/2013/06/28/voting_right...
The real reason companies don't do it is because Fizz Buzz is a better test than IQ tests.
a) Whether you were able to get the work done. b) Whether you were smart enough to do the work well.
It's the combination that's important, not either single one. Employers want people who show up on time, actually care enough to try, and are smart enough to figure it out.
The college degree has a better than zero correlation to that. After you get the job it's mainly about performance and output, once you've been promoted a few times your college degree mostly doesn't matter.
On the other hand, I have known a number of people who used their self-identification as a nonconformist as an excuse for why they couldn't cut it someplace, whether it's school or a job or some interpersonal situation. It's a bad excuse because it gives the person an easy out for not reflecting on how they could have handled the situation better, or avoided getting into the situation in the first place. It also pushes all of the blame on other people, which is comforting but very rarely 100% true. We should all be our own worst critics, lest someone else beats us to it.
There’s another issue with using educational attainment as a proxy of intelligence: it doesn’t really help you distinguish among candidates who all have a bachelors degree. All you know is that they’re above some threshold, but not how far above. You can use the prestige of the school as a proxy for this, but it all seems like a hell of a lot of hassle when you can figure this all out in a half hour with an IQ test.
I believe the words "bored to tears" summarize the experience quite well.
While the majority of pupils get a standardized curriculum designed to keep their interest at a steady pace, pupils with a high learning capacity get no such thing. If they try to learn faster, it doesn't fit with the governance and management model within which the teacher must operate. Therefore, most teachers are at a loss when faced with these statistical outliers.
Also, other pupils may experience emotions of inadequacy and unfairness when a fellow pupil just blasts through the material in minutes that would take them all week. This may lead to the high capacity pupil being a target of some unfortunate group dynamics.
Since schools have no governance model for this, the high learning capacity pupil's school experience is essentially unmanaged. At a loss, society almost invariably resorts to platitudes like "No need to feel sorry for them, because they are so fortunate to be smart. We must focus on the pupils that struggle."
A few years down the line, the pupil's inner motivation may be completely replaced by depression, self-blaming or worse. Then the platitudes take a turn for the worse with blaming the pupil's willingness to work: "In fact, high IQ can reduce grit, since clever pattern matchers use their cleverness to avoid working hard on the toy problems of childhood."
Fortunately, my own school days are long since gone. Without blaming any person in the system, I can say: "Good riddance!" to this whole pitiful affair of how society treated me as a child.
Instead, I can draw attention to this problem by saying clearly that these are children that never asked for these gifts in the first place. Let's as a society realize that what we are doing to them is absolutely wrong and woefully irresponsible.
Fortunately, at least one western country has political attention on this right now. I will work hard and with "grit" to make sure that my experience and observations can help in creating new policies. In particular I wish to address how to practically leverage the pupils' own drive to learn without incurring social/peer stigma or ridiculous costs.
We are perfectly happy to identify athletic talent and enact systems so that the athletically talented are matched up with peers who share their gifts, but we mostly refuse to do this for intellectual talent.
I was fortunate enough to attend a program that handled this pretty well. Basically it was 120 kids from 11-18 who skipped high school and attended university together instead. It’s called the Early Entrance Program and it’s at Cal State Los Angeles:
http://www.calstatela.edu/academic/eep
The issue I face is that I am raising my children in Portland, Oregon, so this program will not be an option for them. Our personal approach is to home school instead. And I’ll probably investigate starting something like the Early Entrance Program at the state university in Portland here.
At least the graduate can show that he/she can commit to a multi-year long, sometimes boring, project successfully. A high IQ person could just leave your company after 6 months because "they're bored".
Also, agree that educational attainment gives you more information about a candidate, but in terms of assessing intelligence, it is a coarser measure than IQ. I’ve hired a few people in my day, and there is huge divergence in intelligence among college grads. For lots of jobs it is useful to be able to distinguish between not-stupid, bright, and ridiculously smart. Educational attainment doesn’t really help with that, but IQ tests would.
I think you're wrong about that,
http://abcnews.go.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/sto...
Another way to approach this is to ask yourself: if not as a proxy for intelligence, then why do some jobs require a college degree?
https://www.hiresuccess.com/blog/is-employment-testing-legal
>I think that supports my point
I didn't say it invalidated your point. I'm trying to draw your attention to a specific area in your statement that is wrong. You can simply say,
>Higher education is used as a proxy for intelligence by companies
That's enough. Nobody will argue with you about that.
You may disagree with some of its conclusions (I personally am skeptical of its conclusions about racial differences in IQ), but to call it pseudo science is, I think, unfair. FWIW, Steven Pinker, who is about as thoughtful and level headed as they come, agrees:
https://mobile.twitter.com/sapinker/status/84691284703672320...
And, anyway, the point I was making had nothing to do with racial IQ differences. It was referring to what the rest of The Bell Curve is about (discussion of racial IQ differences makes up only about 25% of the book): how the US society’s transition away from most people working in agriculture toward most people working at desks has created a class structure stratified by intelligence.
It’s actually a shame that the book discusses racial IQ differences at all, because everyone got hung up on that and totally missed what is, IMO, a much more important point. And I think it explains a lot about current politics in the US.
It's my understanding that the main data presented hasn't been overturned or disproved (In-fact quite the opposite)
I have known several people who went to medical or law school and every single one them went only because it is a per-requisite to becoming a doctor or lawyer. What is your explanation, that people attend these schools to expand their mind, and then entirely coincidentally, manage to end up in the corresponding career as though by accident?
Get real.
I often hear people talk as if education was something that happened to them, then it finished. (Like learning is something you just do in an institution.) I guess training is more like that, teaching knowledge and skills for some particular task/role/job.
Look, the reason that all the students go to university is to make money. Like 90%+ of undergrads go there to make money so whether it "technically" should be a monastery of cloistered academics pondering the universe (based on some high minded notion of what learning "ought" to be for) is besides the point. University costs a shit ton of money and people (the vast majority) pay it so they can have a decent life.
And the fact that universities are, on the whole, teaching skills that do not help their students accomplish this means either A) they are actively misleading their students B) university is a class indicator more than a place to learn (I can spend huge amounts of money so I'm probably not poor and black - which sucks for all sorts of reasons) or C) they don't understand that teaching academic CS, as opposed to programming, is not what industry demands (so they suck at what they're selling).
These are the people who, quite literally, are billing themselves as the "smartest guys in the room". If that's the case they can well stop sucking at their bloody job!
Which is it, "all" or "90%?" I went to a private liberal arts college so maybe that automatically puts me and my classmates in the 10% but I did not think the overwhelming majority of us were there to make money. The fact that lots of students still major in subjects that can be very worthwhile and valuable but lack obvious paths to financial success (e.g. most of Humanities and a lot of Social Sciences) indicates "making money" is not why they're there.
You think universities should basically be trade schools. They're not and they shouldn't be. Trade schools should be trade schools but the U.S. has a dearth of them and many that fit the description aren't good enough.
Meanwhile a university not knowing whether it wants to be a trade school or a research school has mixed incentives that results in an inconsistent quality of education. You get professors who don't know how to teach and teachers who don't know how to go in depth. By requiring both you've made your staffing requirements that much harder to fulfill if you don't want to trade off education quality.
On that note how have bootcamps been doing lately?
Ok come on man. I said 90%+. Don't quibble just to be a prick.
I also went to a good liberal arts college and had a similar experience. People studying subjects that probably wouldn't lead to financially lucrative careers were in the majority.
Would you mind reading https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html and abiding by the desired spirit when posting here?
"Financial success" doesn't necessarily mean optimizing the total number of dollars in your income; it can also mean being able to do work that you enjoy while having a decent standard of living. If a college degree had no impact on your employment opportunities, how many students would still go?
Trade schools should be trade schools but the U.S. has a dearth of them and many that fit the description aren't good enough.
Which is the point. It's not that universities shouldn't exist, it's that they shouldn't be trying to serve both roles.
First, if you walk out of a four year degree in computer science without a strong foundation in discrete mathematics, algorithms, data structures, and at least one of distributed systems theory, stochastic systems theory, control, statistics/machine learning, AI, data visualization, or design, you've stunted your horizons for growth as an engineer pretty badly. I use three of those every day at work. I wouldn't be able to read the research, do the math, or write the software to implement what I work on without a very strong education in fundamentals. The only CSE course I took in University that I haven't made active use of was an advanced matrix computation course. I mean, if you're just shitting out web services and REST APIs or converting COBOL to Java, fine, but that's something you can train a monkey (and in very short order, a computer) to do.
Secondly, we invest in Universities as a public good. You should come out of a four year program able to write well, critically analyze difficult material (not "Catcher in the Rye"), articulate complex ideas persuasively, and understand the world you live in and how to live in it substantially better than when you went in. You might be surprised to learn that with the benefit of hindsight, many people find the time they spent reading and learning to be incredibly useful later in life, as it provided a foundation for dealing with conflict and complexity. If that's wasted on you, then it's wasted on you, but understand that you have shot yourself in the foot in terms of your ability to mature as a human being. I personally think public University education should be substantially more rigorous and should fail people aggressively, and should also be free. I wish we separated the whole "whoo look at me I'm 18-22 let's party" thing from the thought of University. If that's where you are in life at 18, there's nothing wrong with that... go work as a code monkey or a barista and get it out of your system, and when you're ready to level up as a human being give University a try, go. That's more or less what worked for me, anyway.
What a great comment. I think that's also missed by schools where the focus is on memorization and/or trivia. It would be great if they focused on the areas you talked about, not necessarily directly, but at least that is the goal.
As far as "leveling up as a human being", books are free - go sit in a library. Hell, grab a kindle; most of the cool stuff that I learned about the human experience I learned from talking with others, staring at the sky, hiking in mountains, and reading free books that people on the internet recommend. None of this requires taking out the equivalent of a mortgage or listening to someone lecture on it. If you want a lecture, those are free online too!
I just get the sense that university is used as a filter to differentiate yourself from people who are "below you" - not as smart, not as hard working, not as "mature as a human being". But the main barrier to get into a university seems to be connections and money, neither of which I have a huge amount of respect for. Many of the wealthiest and well connected people in the world are huge assholes, and many of the poorest and least connected are incredibly wise and kind (and intelligent and hard working). It feels like a way to separate yourself from the unwashed hoi polloi and put a barrier to entry between yourself and other people who could do your job. In that sense university encourages laziness!
Overall, I just get this sense that university is this bullshit thing we all just agree to participate in because, for those who go they get a monetary benefit, even though everyone knows its just this bullshit thing. That monetary benefit comes from being a class filter, a networking tool for like minded rich people to find other like minded rich people, and probably a few other class effects I don't really understand. I thought when I was younger that as I got older that maybe I would get more jaded and just accept bullshit things. It would certainly make my life easier to do what other people do and not fight against the tide. But if anything I've become more altruistic and romantic, I want the world to be more honest and people to do the right thing.
I don't know. I've probably benefitted from it even though I wished people judged me based on other qualities that are more important.
Secondly, universities are not meant to prepare you for a better salary or job. They are meant to give you a particular set of skills and knowledge from a field of work. Finishing means that you usually get access to a certain community with the same specialty. This is useful if you want to keep up to date with your field or publish new findings.
Software companies that require computer scientists usually are just full of it and they forget that there are other universities that prepare people for software engineering or even just programming. You could argue that a course or bootcamp is enough. But we already know they ask for too much when you look at the requirements they have. They aim for the best and then take what they are given.
I think universities are too easy nowadays to let people in. During my father's time, there were around 10 slots for the arts university in my country each year. All of them ended being praised artists. Actually, national news are made when each one of them pass away.
Now, universities just take everyone, especially if they pay for a slot. This caused a shift into perspective. You are no longer hard-working or lucky to get into a university, you are now expected to get into one to prove you are not a complete moron.
This is the actual problem, and it is reflected in your arguments. I agree, you probably didn't need to go to university. Hell, I know that I didn't need to go through mine. However, we were both expected to, and for no good reason.
Regardless of what any individual may think a university is or isn't meant for, this is how they are used.
As a high school dropout, I was directly told by managers in more than one situation that all I needed was a Bachelor's and I would be eligible for better positions. There was zero discussion of skills, as it was already understood that my skill level in many areas was much higher than that of the degreed people I worked with (who also weren't using their educations for anything other than as a "door pass" to be considered for better jobs).
The system is broken.
First of all, no one is forced to go to university, so if people pay that much money, it's probably because they feel it's worth it, regardless of its supposed "cloistered academicism".
Secondly, maybe the main problem is that something that is needed (or at least very convenient) to have a decent life shouldn't cost a shit ton of money at all. As is the case in countries like Germany, etc. (if your parent post is from one of those, your reply doesn't even make sense).
Finally, I would rather hire a coder with a strong CS background that one from vocational school. The former may not know the language du jour and the framework fad of the day, but can pick them up easily because they know the fundamentals. The latter will likely adapt much slower.
It doesn't even have to be "real" research: I just expect more than classes which have you regurgitate what you learned to pass. And yet that's all you need to get a CS degree. It's a bit like learning to write by filling in blanks.
I think that's what school is, no?
I'm not trying to be glib, I think this is just a reality of how education works in pretty much all subjects (typical US academia, YMMV etc.) Can you name a major that doesn't work this way?
I have a BS in Mathematics from a mediocre school (University of Arizona) and exams were always "prove this fact (which you have never heard of before)", never "what is the proof of XYZ theorem (which we studied)"
Is this different than any other field? I was under the impression that most BS programs do not require novel research. That doesn't come until post graduate courses.
An example might be writing a compiler for a language you design with features not covered in the book. It's probably not publishable, but it is doing CS in a way that just following instructions in a book or from lectures to write a compiler isn't.
Fill in the blank programs ("Here's the skeleton, make it display a list") and 3 projects with < 200 lines that aren't doing something CS specific are not novel, but all too common and wide spread.
Making people do continual simple demos and nonsense programs instead of teaching them actual CS is BS. They can be simple programs, they don't need to build huge things, but what they build should reveal and teach them things beyond how to shift text around the screen.
"I consider computer science to be the art and science of exploiting automatic digital computers, and of creating the technology necessary to understand their use. It deals with such related problems as the design of better machines using known components, the design and implementation of adequate software systems for communication between man and machine, and the design and analysis of methods of representing information by abstract symbols and of processes for manipulating these symbols. Computer science must also concern itself with such theoretical subjects supporting this technology as information theory, the logic of the finitely constructable, numerical mathematical analysis, and the psychology of problem solving. Naturally, these theoretical subjects are shared by computer science with such disciplines as philosophy, mathematics, and psychology."
http://i.stanford.edu/pub/cstr/reports/cs/tr/65/26/CS-TR-65-...
I think this was the author's point. You state it is a minimum requirement, implying a CS degree is a more challenging requirement. Yet it's not hard to find people with CS degrees who do not have the minimum requirement.
I dont see where. The implication is that they are assumed to be contrary to reality. It's supposed to be a list of obvious facts.
This reads to me that Patrick wishes that the joke were not true, which is corroborated by other comments of his, such as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7761134#7762383
The fact that you think that the article is in any way objective is why it is so dangerous. Ideology is like water. Patrick's assumptions and biases shape how he presents his "facts" and which facts are left out. It's not objective! What he is really doing is presenting a specific market-based worldview, which has certain insights and major deficiencies.
Consider for example "There is no hidden reserve of smart people". It sounds like an actionable insight, but is it true? Is it even falsifiable? What does it mean? And what actions would it lead you to take?
My answer: it reinforces the perspective that smart people are the only people worth considering, that there are few smart people, and (in context) that these people are mostly "generalists" and entrepreneurs. It values "intelligence", probably measured in terms of short-term ability to make money, and leaves out values and self-reflection. It leaves out the possibility that you can learn from anyone (c.f. the story of the $20 fan[1]). It leaves out the possibility that your hiring process could be discriminatory or unwelcoming. And so on.
This, I argue, is a good demonstration of why programmers need liberal arts; technical decisions are never just technical decisions. We must remember to ask who wins, who loses, is that desirable, is that just?
[1] http://cs.txstate.edu/~br02/cs1428/ShortStoryForEngineers.ht...
I still don't see this argument being made in ANYTHING you posted now.
> The fact that you think that the article is in any way objective is why it is so dangerous.
How does this relate? I asked for how you came to a conclusion and have gone off into other topics that you're using to characterize a perspective or ideology. I don't care about what you think or what the author thinks. I care about finding how you jumped to a conclusion based on the article's text.
The handwaving to make your own intellectual assertions (right or wrong) have nothing to do with my issue, in the content of what you originally stated. Good luck with whatever.
You can liken CS to something like Chemistry. Is Chemistry about test tubes and HPLC devices? No. Will you learn how test tubes work when you do a chemistry degree? Probably.
It just happens that the practical skill practiced by CS majors is coding. And coding has this unusually large applicability that wet lab work doesn't. Does that mean CS is about coding? No. But you'll probably learn more about coding doing CS than most other things.
Sure, you learn some mathematical tools that can help you solve some very practical problems, but it stops about there. I was not taught anything close to creative mathematical thinking. I was never taught the fundamentals of things: the axioms and the theorems on which the tools we "learn" are based on. I can guarantee you no one in my graduating class could read a proof of even modest complexity, let alone write one.
Granted, I did go to a school with a good reputation, but one of a very practical/applied program. Still, I'm pretty convinced that math and engineering are very, very different fields, even if all engineering programs include a handful of math classes.
What's that about? Does the lecturer just state theorems without proving them, or does it mean that the students aren't required to be able to prove them?
This describes 99% of the math that most Americans (including engineering students) who are not math majors will ever encounter. Proofs may be presented as curiosities, and students may even be quizzed on them, but students would not be expected to come up with proofs they haven't seen before.
And which is why they should be moved out of the College of Engineering and placed into the college that has mathematics. Curiously enough, the only school he mentions where he can reliably know their grads have programming experience actually does place CS under mathematics.
I think being able to program basic tasks should be a requirement for all engineering programs. They all require a course in CS - mostly not because they want ME's to know CS, but they want them to be able to program basic things.
Yet, many/most engineering grads are really poor at it. I feel for any given engineering degree program, we should make all seniors who have declared they will graduate that semester to take a basic exam on very basic concepts that all grads of that program should know (strong emphasis on the word "basic"). If it's acceptable for them not to know basic material in an introductory class, then remove the class from the curriculum!
Example: I was in a top 5 school helping an grad student in CS do basic probability homework. We were disagreeing on the correct answer, so I suggested he write a simple program to simulate it and compare with his calculated answer.
This is the simplest program possible: A for loop, and a random number generator.
He had no idea how to do it.
I'm not picking on him because he's a CS student. I think it's a valid question for people in all engineering programs that involve introductory programming courses. What's the point of making such a course a mandatory requirement if they can literally do nothing based on that knowledge?
Similarly, an electrical engineer who does not know, say, Kirchoff's laws should not be allowed to graduate.
Yes, I do think universities are for education, but if they cannot apply what they learned, they are not educated.
As for the CS students, lectures were often on the theory, and homework was usually focused on implementing demonstrations of the theory. A grad student who wasn't a decent programmer was either a cheater in undergrad, or didn't come from our school.
This particular student came from a different engineering background. Yet, he still got admitted into a top 5 CS program.
And whether he did CS or not in his undergrad is beside the point. I think this is a task any engineering grad should be able to do. If not, the university should not be listing programming as a core skill they teach their engineering students.
BTW, he is not unique. I don't think many (perhaps 20-30%) of my fellow grads (non-CS engineers) could code something that simple either when they were graduating.
I hope you helped out as good as you could to bridge the gap and maybe you were rightfully disappointed if the student hadn't prepared to catch up to undergrad material in spare time.
First of all, I'm not asking them to know "advanced" random number generation theory. As a kid, using random number generators in BASIC was one of the first things we did when we learned programming - it makes writing programs a lot more fun. Granted, it's not usually covered in introductory programming courses. But all that is needed is one API call. I pretty much told him what he needed to do. I showed him the API he needs to generate random numbers. We talked in big picture terms about the algorithm (set up the experiment, run 10000 times, take the ratio of success over number of runs). We talked about the theory on why such an experiment would answer his question. I helped in every way other than the actual coding. Had he written some code, I would have helped debug (some probability experiments are tricky to code correctly - that is acceptable).
He just couldn't translate the problem to code.
>You are being very critical, a part of university education is tolerance, although some opinions differ on if that relates to knowing literally everything. Trade-offs are a part of engineering because optimal solutions don't always exist.
I definitely am being critical. When you graduate, you get a seal from your institution that is supposed to be a guarantee of something. My question is: What is that something? If you start dealing with math graduates from a university and you find they often cannot do basic algebra, you stop valuing the seal the university provides - which damages all math graduates of the university. They are working very hard to get a certificate that is not valued by others.
Would you trust a physics graduate who cannot do basic calculus? You can argue that he may know all the theories (conservation of energy, electromagnetics, etc), and understands the principles behind calculus (area of curves, rates of change, etc). But if they struggle with basic evaluation of integrals, you probably will wonder about what kinds of courses they taught in his university that allowed him to get a degree without actually solving problems with calculus.
This is the problem the author is talking about. If you consistently interview people with computer science degrees, who cannot do a simple fizzbuzz, you stop valuing the degree - and that is the general landscape in the software world. Those who worked hard to gain a lot of knowledge relevant to both theory and practice are right to be upset that because of lax (or at least misguided) standards from their educational institution, they have to go through more hoops to convince people of their skills.
It goes beyond the simple mantra of "Universities teach computer science, not software." I would question the technical ability of anyone who cannot write such a simple program, with as much guidance as I provided - be they a CS major or a math major. I'm not asking for practical knowledge like whether unit testing is useful, or how to architect large software, or the virtues of OO over FP. Just a basic program. Can you write it?
Certainly there is not universal agreement on the curriculum. I'm saying there should be agreement on some basics. Historically, universities handle this by ensuring some introductory course is in the curriculum. My argument is that in the US the education system is a little too modularized, and there should be more coupling. If programming is seen to be a core skill that engineers should know, make writing code an aspect of every engineering course (it's really easy to construct assignments/projects in pretty much any engineering course that could involve writing code).
Don't let someone get an A in the introductory course in his freshman year, and then allow him to forget pretty much everything he learned from it by the time he graduates. If you do, you wasted the student's time, the instructor's time, and the time of all the interviewers who cannot trust your degree and have to check for themselves if this person knows the basics.
Again, it all boils down to: The university is giving you a degree. Is this degree a guarantee of anything? If so, what? I'm all for education for the sake of gaining knowledge. But how many of us would be OK with gaining the knowledge without any kind of certification from the university? Not many, I suspect. I actually did this personally (dropped out of PhD after many years as I felt I gained the knowledge but did not feel a degree would help me), and can assure you from the conversations I had with others who tried to convince me otherwise that pretty much almost everyone wants that paper to have some value.
I suspect there is just a cultural issue, where the CS faculty doesn't want to do that style of teaching. I had a professor hand out debugging assignments because that was part of the industry feedback they'd gotten, but only the one professor listened to the feedback.
- Graduate of the North Avenue Trade School
(* Most times)
So yes, after that you can't start as a Senior Java Developer but I think you have a very good foundation to quickly pick up other Object Oriented languages.
So you do not have to teach the latest hyped language to give students the ability to programm. Instead you can use clean languages to teach CS and let your students excercise them to show you that they understood what you taught them.
You were free to construct a degree out of proofs rather than source code if you wanted, but those of us who desired a more practical education could fill our days with systems programming.