Xref: utzoo comp.edu:2610 comp.software-eng:2322 Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!dogie.macc.wisc.edu!uwvax!rang From: rang@cs.wisc.edu (Anton Rang) Newsgroups: comp.edu,comp.software-eng Subject: Re: CS education Message-ID: Date: 10 Nov 89 08:50:52 GMT References: <1337@accuvax.nwu.edu> <11064@cbnews.ATT.COM> Sender: news@spool.cs.wisc.edu Organization: UW-Madison CS department Lines: 54 In-reply-to: kww@cbnews.ATT.COM's message of 3 Nov 89 03:44:30 GMT In article <11064@cbnews.ATT.COM> kww@cbnews.ATT.COM (Kevin W. Wall) writes: >Exactly! But of course "code stealing" (or "stealing" of any kind) is another >thing which is strongly discouraged in traditional education. Some undergrad departments kill user accounts between quarters. This seriously discourages going back and reusing code from previous classes! Also, I've noticed that a lot of algorithm/data structure courses never actually mention that there might be *uses* for what's being taught.... A lot of CS curriculums, IMHO, don't have any sense of continuity or connections between courses--the classes are presented in isolation, and it's pretty rare for teachers to point out that techniques taught in one course can be useful in another. (I wouldn't have thought this is necessary, but some students seem to be rather dense... 1/2 :-) >I don't know how many green horns fresh out of grad school I've worked with >who wasted needless company time [ ... writing new code instead of reusing >existing code ... ] Seems to me like grad schools/academic CS in general encourage writing new code (the NIH syndrome). How many universities have hacked up their own UNIX versions? For that matter, when presenting a thesis project, it looks more impressive if you wrote tons of new code. :-) > IMHO, I think a large part of the blame for >the software crisis has to be placed on the shoulders of the formal education >system. To put it bluntly, CS departments are not teaching the necessary >skills to be successful in industry. I agree totally...software engineering is missing almost totally. Undergrad programs emphasize working on individual projects, which is good (teaching "the basics"), but rarely have any work done by more than a 2-person team. Grad schools (even MS programs) really don't teach much in terms of programming, at least in my experience; they cover more advanced theory in various fields. If I was advising a company, I'd probably advise hiring BS types for generic programming positions--I am totally unconvinced that a grad degree helps here, and BS's are cheaper. Grad degrees hopefully imply more knowledge about certain areas (i.e. an MS in database probably knows lots about concurrency control--at least the theory, if not practice!). However, I don't know of any grad programs which teach coding/testing/designing, though I'm sure there are at least a few out there. Anton Disclaimer: I'm a grad student, so my comments about grad students can probably be taken with a grain of salt... :-) +----------------------------------+------------------+ | Anton Rang (grad student) | rang@cs.wisc.edu | | University of Wisconsin--Madison | | +----------------------------------+------------------+