Hacker News Reader

Comment by dikaiosune | Hacker News Reader

I do think it's interesting that there are no (that I can find) reputable competency-based CS programs.

Have you found Western Governor's University's B.S. Software Development? Competency-based program from a non-profit and regionally accredited U.S. university. (the real kind of accreditation, as opposed to the national accreditation most for-profits have)

http://www.wgu.edu/online_it_degrees/software_development_de...

How would a degree like this look in the job market compared to a traditional CS degree? This looks more vocational, which could actually prepare a student better for many software jobs.

At the same time, I would be concerned about having employers recognize the degree as valuable. Looks like there are some mixed opinions online from students and employers about the quality.

One of my coworkers holds their M.S. IT Management. We work at a 3 year-old, ~150 person start-up in Mountain View. That's the only data point I can provide.

Edit: I should point out he already had many years of experience before he picked up that M.S.

I mostly agree with Universities and CS programs. It seems that most competency-driven stuff are the "hand-on" schools like ITT tech (local example). Even their quality varies widely based on reviews I've seen. In security, the only thing I ran into was the SANS GSE certification that involved interviews, paper tests, and hands-on demonstration of skills. That's a nice combo if following an education teaching fundamentals and practice.

Anyone seen something like that in accredited institutions or even affordable training companies?

Maybe you stumbled into a business opportunity? On the other hand, judging the ability to program is very hard.

Indeed, although I would wager that current CS programs don't effectively gauge that either.

I think part of what's interesting is that there is this massive proliferation of non-college sources of education for CS, but none of them seem to have the clout and accreditation that a lot of employers look for. So why aren't universities copying the coding bootcamp model as a hybrid with CBE? I hope it's not just because they're being sticks in the mud.

I don't know whether or not judging programming ability is hard. But judging ability in computer science, which is what we're talking about, is not at all "very hard".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com