Comment by flatline | Hacker News Reader

Comment by flatline | Hacker News Reader

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I have worked with interns and young devs just out of school who are sharp as tacks. I had an intern a few years ago, the first task we paired on was to figure out why our MySql connections from Qt were misbehaving. We stepped through the application code, the Qt code, found where it was failing, and ended up backporting a Qt patch from upstream to fix it. Yes, I gave him some guidance, but once he caught on he was able to navigate this complex mess of C++ code across a few technology stacks and effectively reason about it and make changes.

A lot of CS skills are generalizable. Knowledge is one component you pick up with time. A good education, self-taught or otherwise, should allow you to drop into any sort of code and be effective without much spin-up. College covers CPU architecture, assembly, networking, operating systems, web, algorithms. This is not esoteric stuff, it is very standard and you can get it all in class or from textbooks free online!

There's a huge gap, though, between the boot camp methodology of essentially "here's a visual design or a set of fields, I'm going to pattern match that onto a single React component or backend endpoint that's isolated to a single file" vs. "I'm comfortable looking up functions 8 files deep into a codebase and maintaining a mental map of what data flows where."

Once you have the latter, either by having built such a codebase, having worked in one, or even having experience with puzzles or games requiring multi-step planning and understanding of the potential failure points at each step... it's absolutely transferable. But there are also a lot of people in our industry who have memorized interview questions and see their role as churning out components. And while arguably that's not a CS education, it's being called the same, and it does a disservice to those people's careers.

I’ve worked with around a dozen interns/co-ops, and only 2 stood out to me. The rest often made me wonder if they could reasonably handle this kind of career. I hope they could!

It’s tough if you feel a degree of responsibility for their success. Mentors are one of your greatest assets early on (and arguably later as well), and to try hard to have them succeed and thrive only to see them languish on trivial tasks is awful.

I think part of the problem is that CS education where I live is awful. The kids come out of school expecting real work to be wildly different than it is, and it hits them like a brick wall.

Maybe a difference between then and now is that "back in my day" CS still wasn't considered to be a "hot" college major. And there was believed to be more flexibility in choice of a major relative to whether you could get a decent job.

Today, there are probably a vast number of entrants who heard that CS is the ticket to a high paying job, and they are also told that an internship is a vital bullet point on their resume, if not a guarantee of a job at the internship site.

Then, as now, students studied under the constant drone of "you will never use this stuff once you finish college." They still have to decide if they're actually interested in the subject matter or not.

A good bellwether of career interest is the students in the youth symphony. They've all aced every subject in high school, plus rocket club, gentleman sports, and orchestra. The program for the end-of-season concert will have a little bio for each graduating senior, including their college interests. Half of these kids want to major in CS.

I also see plenty of smart young guns. And if i think back I was better myself when I was younger. I’m less excited by digging into problems with each passing year.

That's one in a hundred CS majors today in my experience.

That’s an underestimate, and is it really that unexpected given the huge interest in CS? Previously there was an implicit filter that only the most skilled people could make it into this new world, that was just being built. Now that it is built, and everyone wants to enter - of course the average quality will decline.

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