Ha! I remember the source you mention [1]. 25 million lines, haha. Man-made software mountains :)
Thanks for reading my comment by the way. I wish I had more time so I could write succinctly. If you're ever in the position to hire people from my uni send me an email if you'd like some introductions to professors and what not.
> Alternative learning avenues have opened up like Coding Schools and Bootcamps who do lot better job at focusing on job skills.
Ah, got you there! ;-) *
* Probably not, but it's fun to imagine that I did for a second.
My first job out of CS was being a web development instructor. You might think I wasn't qualified, since I never touched NodeJS in my life and wasn't super familiar with JavaScript. I told them this but my teaching skills were really good so they gave me a unique challenge.
My challenge: make one NodeJS app in one month. I pried a bit what they wanted me to showcase, and they'd be happy with a custom blog that had user login, CRUD on blog posts and user registration.
In that month I made:
- A voting app for the game Werewolf of Miller's Hollow / Maffia
- An online sentiment analysis app based on my bachelor thesis
- A simple CMS designed to list all the hackathons in The Netherlands (though you could also retrofit it into a job board or party calendar)
- A blog app with the extra feature of adding markdown to it (what they actually wanted)
When I showed all this to them they asked me: you learned this in a month?! The thing is, I think most of us CS grads would have. And I think a lot people with a master in CS wouldn't be surprised that I created 4 apps within a month instead of the blog app only.
It's all function calls, for loops, if-statements and variables in the end. Sure, JS has closures, but we had compilers in class, so understanding on a high level the JS engine internals work, it isn't that hard. The same goes for callbacks, promises and all the other fun JS stuff that makes JS quite unique. *
* I use the debugger a lot when I learn a new language. I do think this is a super power since not many programmers seem to do it, but it gives a lot more context. It's the only way how I was capable of getting a foothold to understand X86-64 in binary and malware analysis. I'm pretty bad at simulating code in my mind, but now that I've seen it 1000's of times in debuggers, I'm a lot better at it.
Moreover, even in 2017, the resources available to self-teach how to do it were available and I self-taught everything via the official NodeJS documentation, code school and random YouTube tutorials.
So, in my case, I've seen both sides. Ironically, I became one of the best JS teachers by virtue of my CS education (and my upbringing, had to teach family members a lot of stuff). I know what coding schools teach, IMO the CS education I had was superior to that. Maybe not in time effectiveness though, but of those 6 years I spent on it, I'd say that 1.5 years was super useful, 1.5 was useful and the other 3 years is where I got C's anyway and did other things to enrich my life (such as a course on Buddhism) :)