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We aren't asking for vocational training, but for teachers that teach how to think, how to design, how to run experiments, and so on. So many schools (even the 'top' ones) turn out people that cannot do this, and I find it appalling. These things are foundational, they are not vocational. Unfortunately that does in fact meaning having to learn some tools which will become obsolete. So what? I did EE labs, and while resistors are the same none of the digital components really are. I learned how to design NPN junctions, which are now largely replaced with CMOS, but so what? It was the experience that mattered. You can't hand wave that away ('you' is global, not you mandor), teach the math of junction biases, and expect that anyone will be able to do anything with it once they graduate. But so many CS programs try to do exactly that. I walked out of undergrad knowing how to do recurrence relations, prove the complexity of graph algorithms, and so on, but with almost no clue about how to actually design an algorithm, how to structure and design software, and so on. It took grad school and some good teaching professors, to change that. I've rewritten this three times or so - it is hard to address without sounding like I'm attacking you, which I am not. But I am truly dismayed about the skill sets of people graduating from CS programs. I'm not asking for Java vocational training, but for a recognition that 99% of the graduates will be asked to function as "engineers", not "scientists". The people that come out and that function well seem to do so despite the schooling, not because of it. Incidentally, the best EE teacher, or any teacher, that I ever had, had worked in industry for many years, decided he wanted to teach, and went into teaching. His classes were practical and pragmatic. Oh, you were failing if you didn't master the math and theory behind the material, but he taught you how to design, how to think, how to manipulate all of this book learned stuff to make real things that worked. We had to cost out our projects, write design reports, and so on. Extremely hard courses, but absolutely fantastic, because of, not despite, the focus on what might be called 'pointless' things (who cares what the cost of a transistor was in 1986, after all?!) Unfortunately, you cannot gain experience, and develop the process, without using tools. It needs to be part of the education. Just look at the post by the poor person you are responding to. Think of how much better his entire education would have been if in some freshman level lab he had been taught some of these basics. I shudder to think how much he probably spent for that education vs what he got. |