[redeux]

I’m glad this was your experience, but your school’s CS curriculum isn’t universal.

I was once chatting with a jr sw engineer that had recently graduated from a respectable state university with a CS degree about which database would be optimal for our upcoming project. He confided in me that he hadn’t taken the DB course in school because he heard bad things about the professor who taught it. I was absolutely blown away.

The moral of the story is that your shouldn’t assume that just because someone has a CS degree that they have knowledge of all the fundamental areas.

[lightbendover]

Databases were not part of my CS curriculum until I took an elective web development course at the very end. People struggled. I had been doing hobbyist web development since I was quite young so the whole class was a breeze for me, but I understand that for those who are only taught the fundamentals and theory, anything pragmatic can feel daunting. I'm sure curriculums have changed greatly since I went through (KV/graph stores were not yet adopted, distributed DBs were merely a thought), but it still doesn't feel quite right for faulting a student for choosing certain classes or not being perfectly suited for learning a given domain instantly.

[redeux]

My point is about not assuming people know specific topics in CS just because they have a CS degree. So, I feel like we agree here. There were no problems with his attitude, and it was a quick fix. I just assumed he knew, having recently gotten a CS degree and I was wrong.

[Version467]

Were you asking him about what kind of db would be best suited for your project (i.e. relational, document based, graph, etc.), or were you asking about specific products, like Postgres vs. Mariadb?

If it was the latter, then I doubt he could have answered that even if he had taken the db course at his college. And that's probably fine, I don't think the differences between specific db products counts as the sort of fundamental knowledge that should be taught at a university.

[redeux]

We were talking about kinds of DBs, not specific products.

[Version467]

Oh okay, yeah that makes more sense then.

[rs999gti]

I would take a CS degree with no experience over a boot camp or for profit school's fresh graduate.

At least I know the CS degree has standards and academic rigor, with mathematics and some problem solving, which to me means they can think and adapt.

Once both groups get experience though they are pretty much the same resume wise. Then it is up to the interview process and probation period to shake them out

[redeux]

I don’t think this is a very controversial take, and I’m not arguing against the value of a CS degree. You just can’t assume that someone knows even foundational topics because they have one.

[govolckurself]

No, but it makes it fairly likely that they were exposed to the fundamentals, like a lack of a degree makes it likely they weren't. "Well, actually, not EVERY CS major knows their fundamentals!" is not nearly as strong of an argument as people seem to think.

[bluefirebrand]

One example I can think of: A CS major is likely to have at least been exposed to the idea of Big-O estimating algorithmic complexity.

A non-CS grad is much less likely to have. They may not even have a concept that estimating algorithmic complexity is even possible. They may have zero understanding why a massively nested loop structure is slow.