[btheshoe]

I personally don't like the undertone of the class (tho very grateful that this material exists!!!) - this idea that universities are failing their students by not teaching them necessary material. I think a better phrasing is that students are failing themselves by not learning the material. I've personally never considered it the responsibility of my university to educate me - some of the classes are certainly useful for learning, but the ultimate onus falls on me to gain the skills that will lead me to success. I find it kind of distasteful how classes encourage a sort of passive victim mentality when it comes to learning - as if students need to be bribed with credits and cudgeled with a gpa to be forced to learn genuinely useful things.

[bmitc]

You don't consider paying tens of thousands of dollars as creating responsibility to educate?

Of course, students need to be active in the learning process. But in my experience, it is more likely that professors and departments are terrible at educating than it is for students to not be motivated to learn.

[ramblerman]

> You don't consider paying tens of thousands of dollars as creating responsibility to educate?

I get OPs point. It's like getting an english literature degree and you've never read a book on your own.

My guess is most people needing the missing semester never coded outside of their assigned tasks. Which is fair enough, but its surprising to me to meet phd candidates who marvel over the missing semester (I've met 2).

[bmitc]

To be clear, I was responding to the commenter's general point and not regarding this specific class or its contents.

[sokoloff]

There’s absolutely a responsibility to educate on the topics needed for the degree to be granted.

This class is an adjacency to an EE or CS candidate. Are universities also failing their students by not offering/requiring a touch-typing class? I don’t think so, in large part because computer science is not programmer occupational training.

[Niksko]

A CS course isn't programmer occupational training in name only. Practically, there aren't many CS research jobs and working as a programmer is more often than not the career path for someone with a CS degree.

Universities can choose to be puritans about what CS is as you seem to be advocating for, or they can be realists and fill a very real gap in skills and knowledge.

Your point about "the topics needed for the degree to be granted" is also a very purist view of the role of university. Is the role of university solely to teach a curriculum that aligns with some abstract ideal of what a particular degree title means? Partly it is. But again, that doesn't match the expectation and the practical reasons why students choose a course. There are very few students studying CS for the beauty of it. Those that do probably do end up in academia and don't need this course. The rest are there for jobs, and they certainly could benefit from this.

[patmorgan23]

What occupation are the vast majority of CS students intending to pursue when they enter a computer science program? What occupation did the vast majority of computer science graduates end up pursuing?

I'm willing to bet the answer to both of those questions is a computer programmer.

[ModernMech]

> Are universities also failing their students by not offering/requiring a touch-typing class?

Universities make assumptions based on the larger student body as to what requirements are needed for admission. Generally, we assume students can read and write and have general computer literacy, but actually the last assumption is starting to fray a bit; more and more, students are coming into school without basic computer desktop literacy. This hasn't been a problem for decades, as students tended just to pick up skills like touch typing. But today, some students are hard pressed to to save a file to the desktop.

I could see universities might actually have to start adding computer literacy as an entrance requirement, the same way we require basic reading and writing and English speaking, so we don't have to teach those things.

[tkiolp4]

A degree takes already 3 or 4 years. In order to incorporate this “missing semester” universities would have to either a) remove existing material to make space for it, or b) extend the degree one more semester.

I don’t think universities should remove existing material in general to incorporate “bash 101”. Mainly because learning bash is easy and one can learn it by oneself without a professor. Extending the degree one more semester doesn’t make much sense either.

[BeFlatXIII]

Half the value of having the material in a course is that it specifically highlights what should be learned.

[_dain_]

>a) remove existing material to make space for it, or b) extend the degree one more semester.

It's not literally an entire semester's worth of material. "The Missing Semester" is just a catchy name they gave it.

The site says:

>The class consists of 11 1-hour lectures, each one centering on a particular topic. The lectures are largely independent, though as the semester goes on we will presume that you are familiar with the content from the earlier lectures. We have lecture notes online, but there will be a lot of content covered in class (e.g. in the form of demos) that may not be in the notes. We will be recording lectures and posting the recordings online.

And in that paragraph the word "semester" it doesn't mean a normal full-length semester:

>The class is being run during MIT’s “Independent Activities Period” in January 2020 — a one-month semester that features shorter student-run classes.

So, 11 lectures over the course of a month (actually three weeks if you look at the listed dates). And it's an unofficial class taught by grad students, alongside other classes.

If a CS program made this official, it could fit into the first two weeks of the course. And that'd be a great thing, since these tools make you way more productive in everything computer-sciency you do. It's like compound interest: the earlier you get good at the shell, the bigger the returns.

I think they call it the "Missing Semester" because

a) it's as useful as an entire semester

b) when you don't already know this stuff, it seems much bigger and more difficult than it really is. and your fellow students who already do know it seem like they're a semester ahead of you in comparison.

c) it might take you a semester to learn the material if you don't have instruction, feedback, a roadmap, while you're juggling your other academic obligations. people remember the things they succeeded in teaching themselves but forget the immense wasted time of rabbit holes they went down because they didn't have a mentor to guide them.

-----

I didn't study CS, I studied Physics instead. My hands-down favourite course, the one whose material I still use even though my day job has nothing to do with physics, was called something like "Problem Solving for Physicists" (google "university of sheffield PHY340", you can find PDFs of past exam papers to see what I'm talking about). It was this lovely hodge-podge of material, much of which had nothing specifically to do with physics at all. It had stuff like dimensional analysis, how to come up with sensible approximations and Fermi estimates, how to sanity check your calculations, coming up with lower and upper bounds, how to rule out certain classes of solutions even when you can't find the exact answer, that kind of thing. It was in the second or third year of my course, I forget which, but either way nothing in it had more than high-school level mathematics, so it could have been taught in the very first part of the first year, before we even did mechanics 101. That would have been tremendously helpful for everything that came afterwards. That was my "Missing Semester" (or perhaps, "Misplaced Semester").

[pcthrowaway]

I'm surprised anyone would object to this. Universities have a responsibility to prepare their students.

When I saw the title I figured it was another "computer science" class. But the curriculum was a significant portion of what I lacked when I graduated, which prevented me from finding work for a year.

Had someone at university told me before I graduated that I'd have no chance of finding work if I didn't know Git, Linux, REST, how to use the command-line, how to use an IDE, how to use an editor on the command line, and bash, I would have prepared myself for those things.

[l33t233372]

Can you elaborate on how not knowing those things specifically is what led to you not being able to find work

Did your interviews ask specific questions about Git, Linux things not covered in a standard operating systems course, and command line editing?

[_dain_]

go on indeed, search for "software engineer", look at how often those things crop up in the "essentials" section

[l33t233372]

I’m just not sure how jot knowing these thing practically stopped you from getting a job.

Did they specifically ask about them in an interview?

[pcthrowaway]

Yes, they were asked about in interviews, when I managed to get interviews.

Also, since I wasn't using git (and hadn't even heard of git or github until after I graduated; mind you, this was in 2012), I didn't have any visible work to highlight when responding to job listing. I also didn't have any demonstrable ability to collaborate, dive into existing projects and find my way around, or do things like make PRs.

I didn't have anything to say about my ability to work with software tooling, using an operating system beyond just opening a web browser, notepad, Borland C++... I think I used netbeans for a group Java project also.

I definitely wouldn't have been able to demonstrate editing a file on the command line. Most tutorials were too dense for me without significant head-desk banging, because they assumed you knew how to compile a file, or run make.

Yes, we did do a lot of these things in a very limited way for our classes, but the teacher would always tell us exactly what we needed to do, and the very small amount of actual programming we did in our program didn't require me to know how to do something like debug the code, enable linting or error highlighting in the IDE (it was mostly simple enough that I could get it right, or close to right, with a few tries anyway).

I know these things contributed to me not getting a job, because I spent almost a year learning them and more, and was able to get jobs after.

All that said, I didn't do an internship, I didn't have a good GPA, and my school wasn't considered good. I was about as unattractive a candidate as I could be while still having a CS degree.

[l33t233372]

What school did you go to?

Regardless, I have my doubts that not knowing about git or software tooling held you back. I know many recent grads that don’t include anything about Git on resumes and it doesn’t come up in interviews.

[adrianmonk]

> the ultimate onus falls on me to gain the skills that will lead me to success

I see where you're coming from, but sometimes you don't even know what the necessary skills are. Even if you're very self-motivated and enthusiastic, you can still benefit by being pointed in the right direction. That's part of what a good school or teacher should do for you. (And while they're at it, they can provide materials that smooth out the path to get there.)

You should never expect them to cover 100% of that, but if they're aware of a way that they can get closer to 100% than they currently are, then it's a good thing for them to do it.

[enumjorge]

I think you’re conflating two different things: universities selecting and presenting a syllabus needed to earn a certain degree, and students actually learning the material.

The latter is the solely the responsibility of each student, but I don’t understand why the former would be. Some of the content in this course strikes me as unknown unknowns for new programmers. Why would they be to blame if no one told them to learn a particular skill?

[jimbo9991]

Honestly, because its something that should be a prerequisite for starting the degree program in the same way basic algebra is a prerequisite. Likewise, not knowing you need to know this stuff is a sign that you are probably not at the point where you should even be able to have declared the major. The fact that colleges allow this at all is doing a disservice to students, many of whom will go on to permanently damage their academic records.

[Falkon1313]

We don't expect med students to have spent their teenage years doing experimental surgeries on their friends. Or accounting students to have taught themselves by doing accounting for a major business in their after-school time. Nor do we expect a microbiology student to have spent their childhood experimenting with infectious viruses and bacteria in their garage.

I think we expect that in comp sci just because many of us did happen to grow up doing that. But it's a weird and unusual expectation, and probably not a good one.

It also certainly wouldn't have been expected a few decades ago. You just wouldn't assume that a kid had a mainframe in their house to have learned on. Now that PCs have been around for awhile, we make that assumption, but again I don't think it's a good assumption. Certainly not for the less-affluent, nor the younger ones who grew up with smartphones and tablets instead of a PC.

I think there's also a bit of disconnect in what the purpose of the major is. Actually having a separate 'Software Engineering' major is relatively quite new and generally, Comp Sci was what everybody took if they wanted to learn to work on software. But now some people think it's a totally academic thing, while others think it's industry training, and that always confuses the discussion. But even in spite of that, it's just a bad assumption/expectation.

[ghaff]

So, beyond a fairly standard high school curriculum and not too much distaste for math, what implicit requirements should we add for physics, mechanical engineering, chemistry, chemical engineering, material science, etc.? Because where I went to school, there were no special requirements for those majors--nor for CS/EE. Is CS today unique for some reason among STEM majors?

Different majors have varying degrees of difficulty for different people. By and large schools don't (and shouldn't) get into the business of heavily policing who gets to give a particular major a whirl.

[jimbo9991]

People are going to really dislike what you said but I agree to a certain extent, especially when it comes to the basics of working in the command line. If somebody can't read the manual on that and figure it out then they are going to be so hopeless for so many other things that I don't want anything to do with them.

[ghaff]

If someone has literally never opened a terminal with a command line, you're probably being rather dismissive of how unintuitive it will be for a lot of people at first.

[TheBigSalad]

"I've personally never considered it the responsibility of my university to educate me" - you're going to have to explain yourself