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by sokoloff 1645 days ago
Is university meant to be vocational training or learning the unchanging fundamentals and how to learn new things in the field? I think it serves a better purpose to teach the underlying fundamentals and not to do vocational training.

I don't think it's a serious flaw that you can graduate from a top university with a CS degree without ever having written SQL, react, or used revision control. To me, those are vocational topics and can be learned on the job or in [paid] internships.
2 comments
jimnotgym 1645 days ago
You may be right, but then shouldn't the standard route for most developers be vocational rather than academic? How many developers do we need in the workforce with this academic background?
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sokoloff 1645 days ago
Most of what we do doesn't require a CS degree. Among the best devs/IT workers I've worked with, non-degree holders are over-represented. I don't have a CS degree (I have a Mech E degree).

Nonetheless, if a company has got a load of not-difficult programming that it needs done, they're probably still going (and will be well-served) to hire someone with a college degree. Why? Because completing a degree shows you can follow directions, are basically compliant to a framework of rules, can doggedly pursue something over multiple years when the payoff isn't obviously tied to each day's effort. It's not needed, but it's also not insane to think that companies prefer college grads.

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stnikolauswagne 1645 days ago
Given how many different technologies/languages/frameworks an average developer has to learn over his career isn‘t a solid background in the fundamentals worth more than 3 years intense focus on one such set?

That‘s not to say that going through uni without having heard of git is the sign of a good program, I don‘t consider my program to be all that great but at least I had to go through two labs that required us to build software from scratch using git or svn.

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jimnotgym 1645 days ago
Couldn't CS be studied later to good effect. 3 years coding then some CS course to get chartered, or senior or whatever?
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rjsw 1645 days ago
If I was teaching CS then I would ask students to use VCS so that I could see the stages they had gone through to get the submitted solution.

No different from expecting to see workings for maths homework.

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