[dijit]

I think the author is conflating vocational education with university curriculum.

It is often the case that universities offer courses that are much more theoretical than the practical application, even medical studies to some extent begin with very high level concepts and theories; the reason for this is because they’re attempting to optimise for better understanding of the underlying foundations of the discipline than for any particular job.

Vocational qualifications are extremely handy, but they have a bit of a bad reputation these days. Code academies are not seen as prestigious, despite being the authors ideal. The game assembly (TGA) is one such vocational studies program in southern Sweden with an excellent reputation in the local community for churning out quality (junior) game devs that are ready to work, but suffers with backend programming sections still; since most people who do game dev do not enter to be in the backend.

I would be extremely happy to return to apprenticeships, I would have killed for one going into this industry, but given that employers only care about getting new mid-levels or seniors and not investing in what they already have: it’s always going to be a losing battle as the invested talent atrophies and leaves to go to other places.

[savolai]

That’s not the point of view the author is advocating though. It’s not that they think CS is not practical enough.

To me, what they’re saying is that CS has a point of view that is so narrow and constructed from such a limited perspective that it’s actually harmful to society as a whole.

i.e. CS is removed from science as a whole, not by virtue of being too theoretical but as a result of being applied, but in a very skewed fashion. CS practitioners have a lot of power in society and ethical norms are lacking, so this has consequences.

[fullshark]

The author isn't the only one confusing the two, a very large % of kids in college confuse the two. They don't even know what they (or their parents) are actually buying, just that it's the required training for a career, thus they assume practical skills are what they are getting.

[dorchadas]

This is because companies have basically made university vocational training. They don't want to train their employees, so they want the universities to do it. This harms both universities (as institutes of learning) and students, imo, but the companies come out ahead so it pushes on sadly.

[johncessna]

Do you have a citation? Every year I get a new load of CS degree students who can tell me what a nondeterministic automaton is, but don't know how to write a PR or write/maintain code in project longer than 1000 lines.

[Apocryphon]

Well, maybe that's why FAANG and the startups cargo culting those companies love to ask Leetcode questions that are closer to academic CS than everyday software engineering.

On the other hand, university courses that cover algorithms and data structures tend to be more about using the Master theorem and doing theoretical proofs than trying to do merge intervals or do 3sum.

[chmod600]

From the article:

"If the point of a CS education is to prepare people to work in software (and that assertion is debatable!)"

The author uses a premise, while acknowledging that the reader might not agree with the premise. That's not conflating anything.

And the author's suggestions are far from "vocational"... they just move out of the limited field we call computer science.

[tonnydourado]

I'm struggling to see where in the article the author suggests that her ideal is code academies, although maybe you get that impression from some other source. To me it seemed clear they she is advocating for a change in approach for academic education itself, and not in a "giving students more readily marketable skills" way, but rather almost the opposite: less narrow, technical focus, more critical thinking and multidisciplinarity.