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Comment by dhosek | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that computer science ≠ software engineering, especially in academic contexts.

I've seen this a lot on here combined with cs degrees being frequently mentioned and software engineering degrees rarely mentioned.

Are people widely choosing computer science over software engineering and then being surprised they aren't studying software engineering or is it rare for institutions to offer software engineering as an option?

I am not aware of anyone with a software engineering degree. Is that really a thing?

Was where I went. Two separate degrees:

https://www.newcastle.edu.au/degrees/bachelor-of-software-en...

https://www.newcastle.edu.au/degrees/bachelor-of-computer-sc...

Looks like there's even a "computer systems engineering" as well.

https://www.newcastle.edu.au/degrees/bachelor-of-computer-sy...

Yep, I'm the software engineer with diploma. I have master degree in Computer Sciences (Software Engineering Department). I'm from Ukraine.

At least in the UK, "Software Engineering" degrees are just Computer Science degrees with a different name and a restricted subset of course options. From what I can tell, they're a marketing gimmick, but even respectable universities will offer them. The more questionable universities will also offer actual specialised courses under that moniker (in the same vein as "games design" degrees), but they aren't great.

Some Unis also offer different tracks for Masters degrees - MA (Master of Arts) in Software Engineering, or MSc (Master of Sciences) in Computer Science. Those differences are a bit more meaningful. The MA will be softer, with less research focus, and is (ostensibly) explicitly designed as preparation for industry.

My uni offers both a one-year MSc SE, and a two-year MSc CS. For organisational reasons, the 2 yr program is basically SE+MSc Information Science.

Students can pick their final subject; there is no difference in subjects between the two programmes, though we obviously expect some difference in result. After all, you should show some proficiency in both masters if you're doing the 2yr programme.

I'm currently supervising a student (SE) on file recovery, to whom I'll definitely forward the link. It's right up his project's alley.

Side remark: had he been enrolled in the 2yr programme, the subject would have been the same. I'd just expect him to extend his current work with a research question towards information science.

The Computer Science college at Oregon State University offered both CS and Software Engineer degrees. The CS degree focused more on theory and technology, SWE more on management strategies (Agile, etc) and project architecture. I was really frustrated hitting the workforce and not knowing much about the "flow" of large team software projects.

It was interesting seeing what the EE's and ME's were learning about, standardized practices, vs what CS was taught, the "figure out a system" method.

At the Oregon Institute of Technology we start with three terms of C++ for Software Engineering and code all four years in several languages. We might not go as deep into the theory, but we can safely use a pointer and understand what the NullPointerException actually is in managed languages. By the time we graduate we have worked on a lot of code and two large projects, one of which is with a team of other students.

In the end, a good engineer rarely becomes a professor. This is both because the industry pays better, and the universities don’t value engineering expertise. The best SE courses in my university were offered by “guest” teachers from big software companies. (Which were very rare.)

Unfortunately, at my University the SE program was mostly building UML and ER diagrams and memorizing agile terms. Software design was a minor part of it.

I was CS, but had a lot of SE friends, and we all agree that the best SE course was the one that was mandatory for all computing majors. It covered version control and branching, testing, design process, abstraction design, etc. That class was probably one of the most daily applicable things I learned, I took it in my third semester. If my university offered more courses of that caliber, that didn't rehash and force memorization of buzzwords, then that program would've been incredible.

I don't think that's the problem. The problem is that Universities aren't punished for teaching inadequately. And when challenged, people justify it by saying, "ah, but this course that 90% of you took so that you could be prepared for a career as a developer wasn't really about being a developer."

> The problem is that Universities aren't punished for teaching inadequately.

They are punished in a way. It hurts a school to get a bad reputation among local companies for poorly-prepared grads. R1 research schools, particularly if they are public, may feel it less. But even then, the ones I've dealt with have always chased all the fads in trying to improve learning and metrics. A tenured professor who's just there for the research may choose to ignore it all of course.

Not if every university is like that. Punishment will only happen when there will be that one university that has adequate courses and stands out above the rest

This hasn't been my experience in practice. I went to a top-5 CS university in the UK and some of my classmates graduated almost unable to program (and they still, somehow, got jobs). Seeing that first-hand was extremely jarring. It didn't and still hasn't damaged the reputation of the university.

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