Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway45886 | Hacker News Reader

You could "fix" hiring juniors if there were a school that taught real world professional software engineering by immersion. Colleges don't do it, boot camps don't do it.

I want every junior dev to work on a fake team building a fake product for 24 months, with a senior (not a "professor", but a real senior dev) shadowing and pointing out common pitfalls and how to avoid them. I know they wouldn't write amazing code, but I could trust they would do everything else right. (My dream would be that CompSci was taught more like a trade school)

View on HN

Computer science is only vaguely related to software engineering. Having CompSci knowledge helps but isn't enough by itself, and similarly, not having it isn't a big deal for the majority of projects.

We don't need to change CompSci, what we need is a proper "software engineering" trade school that focuses on actual day to day software development (including soft skills and dealing with project management, etc).

The fact that a lot of companies only hire senior people and want experience suggests that there's a lot of stuff people only pick up with experience that's not being taught anywhere - something that a proper school should be able to fix.

> We don't need to change CompSci, what we need is a proper "software engineering" trade school that focuses on actual day to day software development (including soft skills and dealing with project management, etc).

There are plenty of "software engineering" degrees that do focus more on these areas than traditional computer science. As an industry we look down on them and quiz textbook knowledge of algorithms to keep them out. This is something that needs to change or it turns it into a self fulfilling prophecy that these courses get seen as second rate (because the good candidates know they're making getting their first job harder by selecting such a course).

The software engineering track has long existed separately from comp sci at my tech school, at least. They discouraged people from taking CS who aren't primarily interested in theory.

> My dream would be that CompSci was taught more like a trade school

I hope that never happens. I think opening trade schools for programming is fair enough, but compsci is not about programming it should be treated as a branch of mathematics.

If somebody funded this, I would love to teach it. One reason I haven't looked for a job teaching bootcamps (despite wanting to be a teacher in a previous life) is because 3 months seems like way too short of a time to impart meaningful skills. I do think it's better than nothing, but if I were going to devote a non-trivial portion of my career to teaching, I'd like to do it confident in the knowledge that I had a real impact on the students.

Halo and talon, you look to be shadow banned. Your comments show up as dead even though the ones ive seen from you here are reasonable.

FYI, if you have enough karma you can unkill dead comments by clicking on the vouch link from the page for the comment (which you can get to by clicking on the timestamp for a comment).

Thanks. Did not know that

Appreciate the heads up. I assume it's because I'm on a VPN.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com