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Comment by sam0x17 | Hacker News Reader

A real concern right now is that the course material in both academic CS and academic SE is behind by 5-10 years in terms of tooling relevant for industry jobs. This has always been true, but the difference between circa 2010 and now is there is 10x more domain-specific knowledge needed to be useful in industry because of all the frameworks and tools we now use. CS grads who haven't spent years dabbling in web dev on the side are now essentially useless for their first 1+ years in industry as they learn all the tooling. Gone are the days where you spend the first month learning a few things and suddenly you're on par with most web devs.

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I doubt most CS grads find working as web devs attractive. Plenty of other, better paying, more fulfilling, more prestigious software engineering jobs with a low bullshit factor available where they can thrive. And it just so happens that you don't need to "spend 1+ years to learn the tooling".

But isn’t a computer science degree supposed to prepare you for writing code to control hardware, write a compiler, build the software tools. It seems like a completely different education is needed to understand the hardware/software relationship vs working with an already built web development environment.

the goal of academic programs is to teach you computer science concepts that stay relevant regardless of new languages or tooling. it's not the job of universities to teach you go or rust or docker or whatever the latest hipster language or solution is.

there are a lot of programs that claim to teach you web dev in a few weeks. and what about all the "coding schools"? also, web dev has nothing to do with building real software or computer science. it's 80% CRUD apps anyway.

> A real concern right now is that the course material in both academic CS and academic SE is behind by 5-10 years in terms of tooling relevant for industry jobs

Meh, the most important skill a computer scientist or a software engineer needs to have is to be able to think critically which good courses, especially ds/Algo and the like, will teach - tooling changes every month and varies across companies.

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