[araneae]

It depends on what branch of CS you're in.

Just like computer science is not about computers, it's also not really about programming. Certainly there's overlap. I have a pH.D. student friend who works on proving the correctness of programs. He doesn't write code, he writes proofs. Of course he'd be more rusty in C than a full time C dev.

But I also have pH.D. students that build proof-of-concept software. Yeah, they're not optimized in the way that live software is optimized, but they can certainly code.

And I really have to wonder where you went to school if "most" of the TAs and profs "can't code" and what kind of standard you have. That was not my experience at all when I went to school.

[fab13n]

Sure there are some researchers who can and do code, but their coding skills rarely do much good to their career. I bet that's why you delegate PoC software development to PhD grunts :) Moreover, it seems to me that most academic coders don't have enough occasions to collaborate on long-lived code bases; I don't think you can call yourself a developer if you can't deal with code decay and team collaboration.

Finally, I didn't realize how many teachers and TAs couldn't code while I was a student--although I had serious doubt about some of them; I fully realized it when I was a PhD and TA, with a background as a start-up developer.

I don't see it as a huge issue, though: as the article points out, many developers successfully learn to develop on the go. In my opinion, school is there to teach you the foundations which would be very hard to learn on the fly as a junior developer: maths, formal reasoning, hardware architecture, algorithms, maybe a bit of formal semantics. As I recall, those happened to be the most interesting lectures, given by the most awesome professors; it's probably no coincidence.