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From: dgil@pa.reuter.COM (Dave Gillett)
Newsgroups: misc.jobs.contract,comp.edu
Subject: Re: Qualified? or Dreaming?
Message-ID: <279@saxony.pa.reuter.COM>
Date: 29 Jul 90 06:40:35 GMT
References: <1990Jul8.063302.4076@xavax.com> <2616@igloo.scum.com> <1990Jul11.233006.17884@nmt.edu> <1990Jul23.060010.20406@grian.cps.altadena.ca.us> <37714@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> <1990Jul24.140502.17990@cec1.wustl.edu>
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In <1990Jul24.140502.17990@cec1.wustl.edu> conrad@wucs1.wustl.edu (H. Conrad Cunningham) writes:

>CS curricula should be focussed on principles rather than specific
>technologies.  Emphasis should be given to concepts which cut across
>several areas of technology, instead of arbitrarily breaking CS into
>many technology-oriented subfields.  Instead of core a course on "operating
>systems" why not a course on "concurrent programming".  Such a course
>could unify important concurrency-related concepts drawn from
>operating systems, programming languages, database systems, networks,
>algorithmics, computer architecture, computation theory, etc.
>Couldn't such a course be more useful as well as conceptually cleaner.

Hear, hear!  The CS grads I've known who "didn't work out" in professional
employment had taken all the courses, but didn't seem to have abstracted the
concepts, and so couldn't see how to apply them to the job at hand.

On the other hand, it's amazing how many people manage to get a CS degree
without any clear understanding of how memory, registers, and pointers
interact at a practical level.  I hesitate to call such people "professional
programmers", but when that's what they get paid for and they have CS degrees,
how's an employer supposed to tell the difference?

                                             Dave