Hacker News Reader

Comment by andai | Hacker News Reader

Re: incentives being weird in higher education: we once overheard the director of the CS department respond to complaints about the program not being a good fit for industry by saying, "our job is to create researchers."

I recall something like 7% of students going on into research, meaning that they weren't even trying to meet the needs of 93% of their students.

View on HN

What would be the percentage of researchers left if they weren't trying this hard to create them?

With a good theoretical background in CS, most of what you need for the industry can be learned more easily throughout your career.

That universities are not dedicated to teaching how to be an immediately productive economical actor makes sense. That's of course assuming you don't have to take on 300k of debt to get a degree...

It's way easier to make a good programmer out of a researcher than a researcher out of a programmer.

I have always had programming jobs (job title: software engineer) that required the 'researcher' mindset. We didn't mind teaching them our stack or even good coding practice, but if they didn't have the 'explorative/innovative mind' of a 'researcher', we could never train them up to the level they needed to be.

You don't need a university degree if you just want to learn the last javascript frontend framework, a good coding bootcamp can teach you that. Inflation of credentials is not a problem that universities created, it is an industry issue.

Since when did we start making the assumption that university is supposed to be vocational?

When they started teaching mechanical engineering, not just physics. And chemical engineering, not just chemistry.

They need to start teaching software engineering, not just computer science. And 93% of their CS students need to switch.

The issue is having made university the institution one has to go through to access employment.

University was meant to be the destination of future scholars.

Then go study Software Engineering not Computer SCIENCE lol. Idk why this mind virus continues to eat people's brains. College isn't and never was meant to be a job training program. Some majors do more then others and if that's what you want select those majors it's pretty simple.

What do you think the S in CS stands for?

Between the two sentences "good fit for industry" gets rephrased into "needs of 93% of their students".

I think it would have been clearer to just stick with "good fit for industry".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com