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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

So there are engineering degrees without OS knowledge?!?

Yes, and on the other hand, there are surely also degrees with OS knowledge, but without AI knowledge. And degrees with AI knowledge, but without 3D graphics knowledge. And... well, you get the point.

Hard to do AI or 3D graphics without an O/S.

But easy to do without understanding the OS's inner workings. And there are far more people working on 3d engines or AI than on operating systems.

I would be willing to bet that some OS knowledge comes in very handy for almost anyone who writes software than runs on an OS. I’m sure it’s more important for the 3D graphics programmer to understand the execution environment within the context of directX or OpenGL etc. But it is hard to imagine building any native application without some grasp of cpu scheduling, memory paging, device i/o etc that you’d get in an basic OS course

Really strange perspective. Sure it’d be nice if everyone understood those things. But to think they’re absolutely necessary for any application level programming is… odd.

Not odd at all.

To me if you don't know these things, you shouldn't be writing code.

In most of the last two decades of my career, the OS has been abstracted away from developers by their sysadmins. And things have only gotten more extreme with the emergence/resurgence of managed hosts in the form of cloud computing “serverless” services.

At least Portuguese universities always have introduction lectures to everything relevant in CS, electives are for deep diving, and you always need to do a bunch of them for getting the graduation credits.

Pity it isn't the same everywhere then.

>everything relevant in CS

Literally not possible in 3 years.

Traditional Portuguese degrees in Software Engineering are 5 years, on average people take 7.

When Bologna came around and reduced them to 3, Portuguese universities got around it by offering degree + MSc, so basically business as usual.

Known in English as Licentiate Degree.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licentiate_(degree)

So, nope not 3 years.

Yes, but we have been discussing bachelor's degrees, not bachelor's + master's.

In Licentiate, bachelor's are 5 years, master 2 years, and PhD another 3.

One of the reasons to Bologna was to try to harmonize the fact that countries like Portugal, someone with a degree would be downgraded when applying abroad.

So we are pretty much discussing bachelor degrees.

Everyone either uses an operating system or builds one.

Few people actually do real "AI".

Worse, there are a lot of SW engineers who have no idea how a computer works. One common mistake is that code is executed "instantly". Especially in embedded, this is problematic.

At my university the compilers course was optional. I always thought it was weird that such a foundational part of computing was an elective. We did have to take an OS course though!

And lots of people... I was curious so I checked a video that taught JavaScript to newbies. It was full of errors. I would say that this is a common thing, unfortunately.

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