| When was the last time you worked with many CS students versus amateur developers and could really compare? These are shallow takes because they're always reflections on personal experience and not really a view of others. Or when it is about others, it's extremely shallow - this article's take is "is salary times expected employment probability minus degree cost positive" which is basically saying nothing at all. MOOCs like EdX and Coursera have deeply harmed CS degree quality. The most striking evidence for this isn't the crummy completion rate or as you're eluding to, lack of coercion or whatever. It's that in my experience with Harvard and Stanford interns, whose curriculum these MOOCs copy, the quality of the student declines with the number of years they have spent in their institution's CS program. In other words, freshmen and sophomores outperform seniors and just-recent grads! This is crazy, how could that be? By putting everything on rails. In MOOC CS50x and CS50, as long as you follow all the steps in the videos, you will complete the course with an A+. After the first few problem sets you're conditioned that if you're thinking too much you're doing something wrong because it's supposed to be on rails, it's supposed to be easy enough that you can just complete it by reviewing or copying. There is no space in that class for thinking, you should not be puzzle solving, the things that look like puzzle solving only look that way, they are not actual puzzle solving. It is an amusement park ride for entitled and mediocre people disguised as an elite university course. This makes sense for what the goals are. It's not really about education. It's about the psychic pleasure of feeling like you learned something challenging. It's about preparing someone for a corporate gig, where in reality it is really bad if a junior person is doing any thinking - they really should be going out there and cramming, copying something or asking someone for the right answers! David Malan and Andrew Ng gave people want they wanted, that is capitalism, that is okay, it just isn't necessarily education. How is performance defined? What am I asking these students to do? Something original. Like at the end of the day you want people to sit in front of computer and solve an original weird problem, MOOCs will unprepare them for that. |
I work in a very technical area where you need to have taken a PDEs course to even understand what's going on. The only amateur developers who can even carry on a conversation about the work have math or engineering phds.
> There is no space in that class for thinking, you should not be puzzle solving, the things that look like puzzle solving only look that way, they are not actual puzzle solving. It is an amusement park ride for entitled and mediocre people disguised as an elite university course.
Being a generic software developer cog in a giant corp sounds soul-crushing. I think smart students who have the drive and intelligence to learn CS on their own should seriously consider if that's the type of job they want.