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Comment by gcatalfamo | Hacker News Reader

While commendable, I don’t think this approach is useful. I also had a professor that only wanted to use FOSS for its students but the reality is that university should prepare - at least to a certain degree - for work.

The radicalization of this approach leads to students that land their first job without knowing how enterprise commercial software work lacking therefore a very useful entry level skill.

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I do not think the job of universities is to teach how to use any specific piece of software - be it enterprise, commercial, proprietary, free or not. That software changes and often different between companies, so what should be learned is knowledge that applies regardless of software.

And TBH i do not see why a university should provide free (or worse, paid[0]) advertisement material for a commercial product.

[0] i mean paid by the software companies and it is worse because usually the students either paid for the admission to the university, meaning they paid to get advertised to, or they enrolled in a public university, meaning the taxpayers paid money to have their children advertised to

It is the job of university to participate in what our future will be. In that sense, I'm all for universities to push student in a direction or in another (provided that direction doesn't put them in difficulty later in their live).

IMHO, you don't advertise free software. Because free software is not commercial per se. Advertisement is for commercial products (and with a bit of sarcasm, I'd say that most commercial software need advertisement either because they don't have enough value either because they just want to be bigger than the other; in both case, the mankind is not well served).

>>> the taxpayers paid money to have their children advertised to

spot on.

You cite "a professor", and this article is also about a singular professor. That implies that this is the exception, not the rule. Students have ample opportunities elsewhere for exposure to "enterprise commercial software".

The delta between Jitsi Meet and Zoom or Teams for video-conferencing is minimal from a user experience perspective. The idea that a CS graduate from MIT would struggle to figure out Zoom or Teams at their first job is laughable.

> The idea that a CS graduate from MIT would struggle to figure out Zoom or Teams at their first job is laughable

What is worse, is that if this was the case, the University failed spectacularly in their goal. I would mean they trained a monkey to do one trick.

I sincerely hope a university like MIT is better than simply training monkeys some tricks which they then repeat ad-infinitum at "their jobs".

Universities do not exist so businesses can outsource job training. Academia is an end in itself, not a means to an end. It's about teaching different ways of thinking, and performing research.

Vocational schools exist if you want to be spoonfed how to do something cut-and-dry.

"Pre-med" is explicitly outsourced job training. It's in the name.

My university had a College of Nursing - again, job training for nurses.

Oh, and a College of Education which includes training teachers.

Don't be a snob. A 4-year college is only one of many good ways to get an education and an explicit career-path isn't just a "cut-and-dry" education.

>Academia is an end in itself, not a means to an end.

Sorry my overly idealistic friend, but as long as every job posting "prefers" (i.e. requires) a BS CS, it's fine to see the pursuit of that BS as a means to an end.

Why? It sounds like a symbiotic relationship still.

Academia trains people for academia, which is an end in itself. Industry happens to like the skillset that people with that training have. This motivates people who do not wish for an academic career to undergo academic training.

Win-win. It doesn't mean that said academic training has to adapt to the whims of industry, or turn into trade school.

Is there maybe room for a less academic higher education system next to the more academic one? Sure. But getting industry to accept that (as in e.g. Germany or Switzerland) is not academia's concern.

Academia don't only train people for academia for the simple reason that there's clearly not enough academic jobs for all of the students who come through.

And the teachers and professors know that.

Here's one CS department which explicitly states how they can help students improve their career changes in the professional world, quoting https://cse.unl.edu/focus-areas :

> The Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln introduces Focus Areas for its Computer Science and Computer Engineering majors. The goal of the Department is to equip our graduates with advanced skills focused in specific areas to better position them for successful careers. In today’s professional world, computing and computational problem solving skills are ubiquitously in demand in a host of advanced technology and scientific applications.

And they are far from unique. Here's an English department, quoting https://www.saddleback.edu/la/english-department :

> Of course, the first thing people imagine when they think of getting an English degree is teaching high school. Teaching is certainly a noble profession, but there are many career paths one can pursue with an English degree outside of teaching due to the excellent training provided in this field.

Emphasis mine in both quotes.

Sure, but then don't put your entitlement on the university. The university offers you an academic degree, if you want to use that to get a job, play by their rules, or don't go. Free market and all that noise

I must be doing something wrong, because all of my work over the past decade was done using mostly (like 95%) free software. And as a hiring manager I cared not at all if my hires know about "enterprise commercial software". In fact, I'd also add that the time I spent learning commercial dev tools (Microsoft stack) turned out to be absolutely useless in the long term. Worse than useless, in fact, because I could have spent that time learning tools and libraries on which some commercial company doesn't pull the rug from underneath me every 2-3 years, like Microsoft has a habit to do, to force upgrades.

> The radicalization of this approach

Seriously? In 2020, the idea of writing software using free tools is "radical"?

> without knowing how enterprise commercial software work

What software specifically? I mean, you want to write web clients? Almost entirely free tools. Android or ChromeOS drivers? Ditto. Backend cluster deployment paradigms? Free. Docker? Free. Kube? Free.

I mean, it's not like you can't find some worthwhile "enterprise commercial software" out there to buy. But to pretend that the bulk of the most exciting work in software isn't almost entirely done with open source tooling (and has been for more than a decade!) is... just very strange.

> for work

Please no. It is already difficult to find unis whose undergraduate degrees are not filled with things like java and enterprise-grade programming.

Regardless, universities are not for teaching you to use specific products. This is what manuals are for.

Allowing students to suffer through blackboard is like arguing kids will learn the value of bread through starvation.

Using “free for education” software is how you end up over a barrel with MathWorks.

FWIW, most people that take classes with Sussman are self-selected to be people who care about FOSS.

His courses are about obscure areas of programming, not some business-facing spreadsheet juggling.

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