What do you think about:“You don't learn software engineering at university”? | Hacker News Reader

What do you think about:“You don't learn software engineering at university”?

2 pointsdonnie123455 comments

What do you think about the statement "You don't learn software engineering at university"?

Older developers have told me that:

1.Today we have very few actual senior developers

2.Reputed Universities don't teach their students software design/software engineering.

3.Modern day software is at best mediocre

What I have said above has came from old developers Give me your honest opinion

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My boss and I have this week literally been talking about how there has been so much title inflation that job title is meaningless now. “Senior” means 3 years of experience and is asking for salary far beyond many peoples deliverable value which makes it hard to justify hiring people like that that need a lot of development and growth still. The thing is that while some people who have three-five years experience are really good, they’re at the right hand side distribution on the bell curve.

I’ve interviewed people who tell me they’re experts in X but can’t tell me common tooling, how they might debug poorly performing code, etc. etc. I don’t think this is sustainable personally, when you look at what “senior” is in other industries (like engineering) people are expected to be much more competent relative to their peers before they get such a title.

I've personally seen this that companies are handing out senior developer title to graduate with 2-4 years of experience. In fact most of them are still Juniors

I would say that most universities turn out CS graduates, not software engineers. This is like turning out Chemistry grads when the market needs chemical engineers. Sure, they're somewhat related, but they are not the same field. It takes a couple of years for a CS grad to learn (via OJT) what software engineering is.

We could have universities that teach software engineering, in the same way as we have ones that teach chemical engineering (or mechanical engineering, not just physics). But it appears to me that most do not.

All of those statements sound reasonable, though with regard to #3 I would say that most software has always been mediocre; we rarely get enough time to do things well in the first place, much less the time it would take to go back and clean up the old messes before layering new mediocrities on top of them.

I've met people fresh out of CS programs who can't explain a hash table to me (simple basics) or why it would be useful.

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