If they’re not teaching about the most basic principles of building scalable systems, what is the point of doing a degree, or hiring people who have done a degree?
Several of the top CS programs specifically do not teach details like configuring a load balancer as with a proper background in computer science it is assumed that you can figure out the latest programming languages and the install instructions for popular software packages. It would thus be a waste of a very expensive degree as you could learn about configuring LAMP and a load balancer at a trade school instead of a theoretical research university.
No one hires MIT grads because they graduate with more extensive load balancer knowledge.
My university taught me the most basic principles of building scalable systems. It didn't teach me about setting up load balancers.
What it did teach me: locks, semaphores, mutual exclusion, the memory hierarchy, threading... the core concepts of concurrent and distributed systems that are independent of the specifics of running a large-scale web application.
In the mid-1990s, a respectable CS program would certainly have all of its graduates familiar with TCP/IP. They would know a little about routing and have built a few toy programs that implemented socket-based communication. Hot topics included "firewalls" and the race to build a gigabit-speed router. (But packet filtering at gigabit speed was quite a ways off in the future.)
The point of a technology degree had better be to teach you how to learn about new technology and experiment with it, or else a 2014 degree will be worthless in 2034.
The S in CS is science. Load balancers have nothing to do with the science of computation. It’s just like no self-respecting university will teach PowerPoint or “fixing Windows” in their CS curriculum.
Rightly or wrongly, universities are not vocational colleges. They exist to teach the theoretical principles of a field, not the practical skills of a particular job.
> If they’re not teaching about the most basic principles of building scalable systems, what is the point of doing a degree, or hiring people who have done a degree?
Some degrees in CS are really vocational certificates, while more traditional degrees are not.