Hacker News Reader

A CS degree was never intended to produce skilled coders. It's not a vocational training course.

ABET accreditation (not as important in CS as engineering, but still very common) requires a CS program to teach software development and strong programming skills.

Training for professional roles (like engineering) is essentially vocational training. There is an industry need that drives the curriculum requirements.

Someone should tell that to companies hiring programmers.

If one succeeds in a CS program, then "programming" should be straightforward. I have a CS degree. We never learned any computer languages in college; you were expected to 'pick up' them well-enough to succeed in the course. (These languages were APL, Maclisp, and PL/I). A CS degree can be a proxy for 'this person proved they can learn computer-related stuff'.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com