Why Top CS School Doesn’t Mean Top Software Engineer | Hacker News Reader

Why Top CS School Doesn’t Mean Top Software Engineer

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8 pointsiheartramen3 comments

If UC Berkeley acted as the author thinks they ought, I would have graduated in 1989 with outstanding skills focused on Fortran, VMS, sccs, troff, and XView. My design skills would probably have included an awesome ability to draw block diagrams of code. Best of all, I'd be very knowledgable about the pros and cons of various tty brands.

Fortunately they taught me stuff which has stood the test of time instead. If you can grok P vs. NP, the Dragon Book, Computing Theory, Data Structures, and a half-dozen programming languages, you can certainly manage to grapple with such mighty topics as "code reviews" and "unit testing".

disclaimer: I don't think there's anything wrong with what Berkeley focuses on. My favorite classes here so far have been discrete math & probability/stochastic processes. What I do think should change is the emphasis employers put on coming from a top cs school. And also I wanted to point out that for students whose goal is to become a software engineer, learning stuff outside of school is extremely valuable since the curriculum doesn't focus on what's important for them to get a job right now.

Let me come about this from the point of view of an employer:

If you are fresh out of school, you are a huge potential. The better the school, the greater the potential. We think you have so much potential that we expect you'll be a leader at our company.

We can teach you what you need to know about our system of doing work. All that stuff you listed? Don't care. You're smart: you'll pick it up.

Being interested in your profession is key: We want to hear about stuff you've done and the interesting problems you've faced. Learned some extra stuff out of interest? Tell us. Done a project just for fun? Tell us.

Someone won't hire you because you lack certain line-item skills? You're not missing out.

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