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Comment by junon | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, this. My home state's college's CS program boasted it was one of the best in the northwest. My friends that went through it constantly had to ask me to explain simple stuff to them because the professor's assignments were wrong or confusing.

Compare that to our local community college, which seemed to have a much more well-rounded course and taught the fundamentals in a way that made much more sense.

Anecdotal of course but certainly defies the "rule".

Another anecdote: I did maybe 100 interviews while I worked at Uber. If I had to guess, I'd say 30% were from university grads (or soon-to-be grads).

Of those, most couldn't hardly write a line of code. Several candidates in the same age group came from a non-college/-university background and usually outshone those who did.

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The fact that so many people are getting CS degrees and yet can't even FizzBuzz is alarming.

Is it the students? How many people are going into CS because they've had a taste of programming somewhere outside of school and decided they want to be a software engineer, and how many of them just get into CS because they heard that CS grads have very good employment prospects (Low unemployment, high salaries)? Anecdotally, I can tell you that during my senior project for my CS degree, someone in my group admitted to hating coding, but was pushed into CS by family, and that he couldn't code worth a damn.

Or is it the schools? In my school, the first two years were much heavier on the code, where the latter two years were heavier on CS theory. But in both cases, the quizzes and tests were on syntax and other things that could be answered with a short answer, or they were multiple choice. The only time your coding ability was tested was in the homework, which is easily plagiarized with Google and Stack Overflow.

We had a decent solution to this in my undergraduate school.

Tests were basically all theory. Practical knowledge came from labs and everyone did the majority of their homework on lab computers that had no network connection. Not everyone was a rockstar of course, but as I recall pretty much everyone was at least a passable programmer in the end. Of course that was the early 90s...

Cheating is really rampant in CS degree programs and it’s very difficult to do an actual test of coding skills in a reasonable timeframe rather than pure memorization.

So much of this. In my CS class, I could hardly find anyone who actually had some curiosity to learn. Everyone does their homework by sharing answers on the class chat. And in team projects, either there is one person who does all the work, or they end up copying from google and stackoverflow.

> The fact that so many people are getting CS degrees and yet can't even FizzBuzz is alarming.

CS contains more disciplines than just software engineering. Some people get into CS but have no interest/knack for coding: it just doesn't "click" for them the way it does for others, and they will fallback to rote memorization/copy-pasting from StackOverflow to scrape over the line.

I did Calculus 1 & 2 as part of my CS; but today, I don't think I'd be able to solve the FizzBuzz of Calculus, Linear Algebra, (or even the finer points of OS process schedulers if I'm being completely honest). I'd be alarmed if Software Engineering graduates weren't able to solve FizzBuzz

Not to nitpick your Uber anecdote, but the "candidates in the same age group came from a non-college/-university background and usually outshone those who did" probably had to have some strong non-university background like significant practical experience in projects or work to pass the resume filter process to make their way to your interview stage. So there's probably a great deal of selection bias in that specific example.

Lol, probably not. To be clear, these were people doing on-sites, which means they passed resume filter AND a TPS.

Uber's hiring pipeline was a mess.

I'm someone outside USA. Can you clarify your comparison between state vs community?

State colleges serve the entire state, or a large portion of it (i.e., University of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University) are are typically universities instead of colleges.

Community colleges serve a smaller area, typically one county and its neighbors. Community colleges often have a much higher emphasis on trades and job prep. They will often offer more 2 year associate degrees, trade certifications and less 4 year degrees. They are rarely universities.

State University: typical higher-learning university that requires application and awards degrees. Funded in part by its US state via taxes.

Community College: no application, no traditional degrees, no prior learning required. Often vocation in focus. Adult classes. Anyone can attend (dropouts, elderly, anyone). You even just sign up for individual classes. You, 8589934591, could likely sign up for an online class next semester/quarter. Some are highly regarded, Foothill College in SV for example.

Just for my understanding. Is the person who I replied to saying that even though state univ are "considered" better, their personal experience is that community college (which is considered inferior to state) students performed better?

The difference is also one of focus. A Community college will offer things like a 2 year certificate course in .Net Enterprise Development, rather than 4 year degrees in Computer Science.

If you need a junior .Net Enterprise developer to write WPF apps in C# to talk to a SQL Server using LINQ, then it is very likely that the student from the community college, who has spend 2 years focusing very practically on learning exactly those technologies, will be able to perform better out of the gate compared to the university student whose education has a broader and more theoretical base.

In theory the University student should be 'better' in the long run since they have a deeper understanding of the field as a whole and should be able to solve harder problems and more quickly transition to new technologies, but that is of course up for debate. And most companies don't need to solve many hard problems, they need a WPF app that can talk to SQL Server using LINQ.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_colleges_in_the_Unit...

In the USA Community College can mean a private or publicly funded 2 year university, college or trade school. A state university is pubicly funded and can be a community colleges. See the New York State SUNY system for an example. There is also the New York City CUNY system which is publicly funded by the city at the local level.

I went to "Queensborough Community College", a CUNY university in NYC. So I tend to define "community college" as a publicly funded 2 year university/college.

The difference in curriculum in the Community College I went to and the "real" college I am going to right now are astounding. There are four year CS students who are going to college and don't know how to write a line of code, contrast that to the community college where the expectation is that you create real function programs from scratch. I wonder if this is the case with all colleges, and if so why are FAANG companies not recruiting from CC's by default.

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