To me, there should be at least one course where students are given moderate sized codebases and asked to understand it and add some features to it, or maybe debug a broken part.
But that said kids are pretty bad at just using computers. Courses need to spend more time on getting them up to speed with using CLI tools and familiarity with file systems.
I feel like people need to graduate into using an IDE because teaching people about build tools and configurations or scripting can be a nightmare, no one seems to know how to do it coming out of school.
Yup. Assuming every CS undergrad is becoming a software engineer is extremely presumptive.
There should be options to pursue a Software Engineering focus but we shouldn't water down CS departments by disregarding the hard stuff.
My alma mater basically has two options: CompSci or Business Technology.
CS works in C++ mainly. Business Technology works in C#. Everyone who likes computers but couldn't hack it at theory would move over to the Business Technology major.
Boot camp devs are at a massive disadvantage ime, so much so they're soft banned from hiring pipelines without tons of work experience from most places that I've worked.
Presence of a degree does not guarantee a successful candidate nor does a bootcamp certificate guarantee unsuccessful one. I don’t have a degree and I’ve been a successful, high performing software engineer for over a decade.
But I think bootcamps are at a disadvantage in such comparisons because they tend to be so accelerated -- I wonder what a good 2 year bootcamp curriculum would look like.
It depends how you define Engineers. Because you could be a Software engineer in the modern day with zero knowledge on anything but software.
It is also interesting you mention well rounded engineers. CS is not an engineer curriculums. That is CE. Computer Engineering. And I would argue you cant be a well rounded engineers when you have little to zero hardware knowledge. Go around on HN, Reddit and Twitter to see how many devs have really zero knowledge on Hardware. It is not about trends, or latest development, but the fundamental of computing. CPU, Cache, Memory, Network, IOPS. And how the OS hides some of these hardware issues.
I still remember I thought I picked the wrong course when I was doing CE. I often wish I had more software or programming materials. Compared to CS when they had more fun. But 20+ years later, I think CE provides much better foundation than CS. Especially when moore's law is dead. You cant ignore hardware any more.
And there is one more thing that CE taught which as far as I am aware of is completely lacking in CS. To this day I still dont understand how an engineer could have zero understanding in cost and business. It only takes a few lectures to provide enough ground work for student to think through this. And yet they are mostly missing in CS.
- How do you think through a problem and solve it.
- I think a good engineer is someone who is akin to a detective and enjoys that kind of work
- Intro ethics isn't enough. Also intro philosophy isn't enough. We need actual applied ethics where they sit students down, explain how to say "no", and how to know when you should.
- Students go from living on $10k a year to $10k a month, basic personal finance is alright but someone really needs to explain how to go through this huge sudden boost in earning power, how to handle it, what to do with it, etc.
- Personal finance, in my estimation, is more about how to fit your expenses into your income. I think "high-income personal finance" would assume a basic understanding of how to budget (or even the assumption they won't necessarily need to), but more about setting yourself up long-term and not making financial mistakesLess traditionally, at least some digital history, politics, and ethics. History of computing at minimum, but ideally also things like the dot-com bust, the rise of search engines pre-Google, a basic idea of when and how the internet + WWW started to grow, the intersection of tech companies and governments, political issues in digital spaces (decentralized versus centralized, "real names" versus pseudonyms, how property ideas translate (or don't) to the digital world etc.) and going over some of the ethical dilemmas and fuckups the profession has faced in the past.
They need to teach software engineering.
First, what's the difference? Software engineering is about building programs that are useful in the real world, which typically means it worries about the efficient construction of larger-scale programs, and whether those programs actually meet the need for them when they're done. And then it worries about maintaining them over generations of new developers as the old ones leave. ("Efficient" should be understood as "minimally inefficient", because you cannot make the process of building larger-scale programs efficient. All you can do is minimize the inefficiency as much as possible.)
Second, why should they teach this? Because 95% of their graduates are going to work in software engineering, not in computer science. (If they don't teach this, then they should create a separate software engineering department, as chemical engineering is a different department from chemistry. But if they do that, the computer science departments are going to be a lot smaller...)
Ill even go a step further and say that anyone doing any other engineering discipline should start with that, and then do additional classes to specialize. Mechanical or Aerospace or Bio engineering professions are essentially exercises in optimization, which a modern computer does 1000x better than any human.
Unfortunately, supply of crappy CRUD devs is oversaturated, so degrees help weed out lower tier devs. On the other side of things, I don't have any issue getting high-pay, high-skill gigs and my education history never comes up (if it does, that's a red flag).
Everyone has their own style of writing code but I find code in the vein of
bool system_has_room_to_store_new_data = num_objects < db.limit;
if (system_has_room_to_store_new_data) {
// ... proceed
}
if (num_objects < db.limit) {
// ... proceed
}
In almost every language, the compiler can and will inline this for you avoiding the extra variable and memory usage and even if it won't in a GC language the memory will be freed nearly immediately.
This doesn't need to be a course, but it should be applied across existing courses, sample code shown in class etc.
Also, no more
for (int i = 0; i < myArry.length; i++ {
myArr[i] += 1
}
Another one is early returns for validation checks:
if (someConditionIsntMet) {
return null;
}
if (someOtherConditionIsntMet) {
return null;
}
// Proceed with logic and function implementation
FP has also become far more popular now - a brief overview of Option, Result/Either, and Future types would be nice. We don't have to get into the theory of functors or monoids or monads, but students should be aware there are better patterns of handling errors than try/catch and throw
Each assignment could be a process of writing a summary and then breaking down a component of the paper into a diagram and walkthrough process. Writing in this case would have to involve more than just words too. You could do a section on diagraming and another on screen recorded walkthroughs or video-based show-and-tells.
> NASA and IBM's early software development efforts > Mythical man month. > Rise of the tech giants. IBM. Microsoft. Google. Amazon. Meta. How they approach team based development. > Team based tools. IDEs. Version Control. Now github rules them all? > Why data was neglected for so long. The "OO database impedance mismatch". Or why OO doesn't believe data should exist. > Prototype approach. Prototype and refine first. Then a mad scramble to complete. > Requirements approach. Detailed documentation. Then a mad scramble to complete. > Agile approach. <We still don't agree on what agile is>. Then a mad scramble to complete.
- What does it teach? - What does it not? - Why that, and for what purpose? - Who should take it? - What are similarly valuable alternatives, for people who want something else?
The department head refused, saying it's important to have a "well rounded" education, not one focused on math. Instead, I had to take bioinformatics to fulfill the requirement. Because that's, like, more related?
My point is, there was inflexibility in what the department was willing to accept, that seemed pretty arbitrary. Perhaps allowing a broader view of computer classes would lead to a better mix of student's learning.