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Comment by bo1024 | Hacker News Reader

I agree with some of the premise —- university education doesn’t focus on preparation for specific vocational skills.

But you could say the same about high school. It doesn’t follow that reading writing and algebra are bad vocational investments, in fact the opposite because they support many possible vocations.

As a CS professor, my goal is to push students to rewire their brains in ways that are better and more effective. It is also for them to gain foundational understanding that will allow them to learn advanced vocational skills. I teach theory so software engineering may be different. But of course I don’t want to teach something that will mainly be useful only for the next 2-3 years of their career, I want to have an impact on the next 20-30.

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So teach them the importance of testing, code review, and design documents. As someone who graduated 15 years ago, I feel like the only two truly useful things I got out of my CS degree were 1) lots of practice writing code and 2) my algorithms and data structures class. The latter was useful in exactly the way you hope for, but it was the only such class.

I learned unit testing early at UCDavis. My professor would take in assignments via ssh, run them, if it failed, it would "echo F" for grade.

That's how I do it, too. I give students a script which compiles their code with the test code (which is provided to them, if they want to look at it) and then runs it inside GDB (in case it segfaults or throws an exception). All of the tests are documented and, on failure, print an error message describing what was expected, what was actually returned, and include a URL linking to a fuller description of what might be going on.

In the future I'm hoping to run their tests inside Valgrind to check for memory leaks, enable the various sanitizers, etc., and I also need to figure out a way to check for conformance with my code formatting standard, but for right now it gives students perfect knowledge of what their grade will be when they submit.

I’m a student and in our CS department professors can test our code with valgrind and for formatting with Gradescope. I’m not sure how it works in practice but it’s an option if you are interested.

I thought my CS education at UC Davis was pretty worthwhile. Just learning C and C++ in those two intro courses was really useful for understanding everything built on top of those in a modern stack. The seams show all the time.

That said, I spent a lot of time building extracurricular websites in my spare time, which was also a huge leg up in my future career.

I often find it fascinating how worthless new grads view their university educations. We'd be vastly more underequipped to analyze and solve even the most basic problems without the rigid time pressure allowances university grants us. As a corollary, (and albeit rare), would you rather be pulled over by a police officer with an undergrad in law or one with three months of boot camp training?

Thanks for the comment. I'm always hoping to learn about these kinds of experiences on HN threads like this.

These were all taught at my uni, along with a course that paired student teams up with companies to develop for them.

It's still not what's most important at uni, imho. You have 5 years at uni, many decades at your job.

I do say the same about high school, and would also argue that mandatory education as a whole is a massive failure except as a means to babysit small children and eventually give them an opportunity to socialize, something which could also be done more effectively without the enormous apparatus of laws, policies, and folk beliefs we have built around what it's supposed to do and how that can be done

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