[LeifCarrotson]

> lacking the fundamental engineering background to write software.... young coders graduate with less knowledge about the underlying hardware on which their software will run.

There's a lot of software being written in Excel macros and Wordpress web development. These tools actually get work done - they automate things that were not automated before, they publish things that were not published before, and they generate revenue and improve productivity.

Young coders, and the authors of these programs, should not be forced or expected to go through low-level programming classes to get work done. The tools are good enough and the hardware is fast enough that for 99.99% of all projects, they don't need this expertise.

I say this as someone with an EE degree (from less than a decade ago) consisting of classes that spanned the entire pyramid of complexity: from analysis and simulation of individual transistors, through construction of a CPU on an FPGA, through writing an RTOS for a microcontroller, up to programming a web server. That understanding benefits me greatly in what I'm doing today.

But I work with plenty of people who don't have that background. For all the business logic that seems to be found in any software project, that's just fine. Most of the work is in translating people's desire for the software to "do what I want" into actual requirements and then codifying those requirements into a database or UI. For construction of state machines, they should use a library or have someone more competent construct the framework and let them implement the actual states, and when the work requires an understanding of how microprocessor interrupts, they should defer to someone who understands that technology.

And yes, they should teach some version control in college as well. It would be enough to give students one major project that ends up with the filename laydn-Project-complete-final-actuallyfinal-3-done-8-29.zip, which just worked a minute ago after which you barely changed anything and now it's completely broken, and that thing that worked once stopped working at some unknown time in the past. Then just mention that git and svn are things that exist.

[nur0n]

I agree with you for the most part. Writing poor code is fine if the code will only be run for a limited use case. But much of the power of software comes from its potential to be easily reusable and extendable. This potential is thrown away when people write poor code. At some point, it becomes detrimental to keep reusing poor code and there is no choice but to rewrite it. So writing poor code is productive work in some sense, but it is useless(almost always, in my experience) in constructing higher levels of abstraction.

The complete disregard for good design I have seen troubles me as a software engineer. When I've had to rewrite code, usually its not because I disagree with its design, but because there is no design to disagree with! IMO code design should be taught better (or at least taught at all...). Only then can someone make the judgement call of what parts can be poorly written and which parts require more care.

This next claim is anecdotal: the people which don't bother to learn even the basics of how actual machines work tend to be the same people which don't bother to properly design their code. Good design necessitates some understanding of how the machine works, it can not be accomplished through brute force pattern matching. I understand that code is becoming increasingly common and that some people have no choice but to interact with it. But if a significant portion of your income is generated through work in software, then I don't really think a valid excuse exists; you should do your job correctly. I'm not saying everyone needs to be an expert. The culture of apathy for the most basic computing principles is what troubles me, and it should trouble anyone who has to read code written by others.