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Comment by david_shaw | Hacker News Reader

This sounds like the age-old conflict that computer science students have long bemoaned: computer science is not software engineering.

If you're interested in algorithmic development and the actual theory of computer science, you'll probably enjoy most four-year degree programs in that area. If, however, you're studying computer science because you want to write software -- and that's what matters to you -- you're probably going to be frustrated that the coursework veers more strongly towards the theoretical.

I think that most college degrees are more about showing some sort of credential for inexperienced people than providing solid value in and of themselves, but I also don't think they're completely useless. It really depends what you're trying to do.

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Knowing the theory can help in the real world. It really can.

But it's not everything in the real world. It's only a small part. And the CS degrees aren't teaching enough of the rest of what real-world programmers need to know.

And that would be fine, if the CS people were headed for academic careers in computer science. But they're not. 95% of them are going to become software engineers, not computer scientists. That means that CS departments are failing to properly train 95% of their graduates. (Alternately, it means that 95% of the CS students are in the wrong department.)

CS departments need to choose: Are we going to teach software engineering, not just CS? Or are we going to be a real CS department, only much smaller? Or are we going to be of little value to most of our students?

Alternately, it means that 95% of the CS students are in the wrong department.

I'm always confused when a well-respected university is criticized for not delivering a vocational education. How did people think that the university became respected in the first place? Hand-holding dummies through the other majors' equivalents of paint-by-numbers web application frameworks?

I'm not criticizing them for that. But how many CS departments give the students any preparation for having to maintain and modify an application for a decade? How many of them teach how to structure code so that a million line application is maintainable? How many of them teach application security in any usable form?

If, say, chemical engineering were taught without any instruction on how to make a process ready for actual industrial use, we'd criticize them for just teaching chemistry, not actual chemical engineering...

At the university I attended, Chemistry and Chemical Engineering were two separate degrees with different focuses. I think the same could be said for Computer Science and Software Engineering.

> How many CS departments give the students any preparation for having to maintain and modify an application for a decade?

I'm not convinced that your example(s) fall under the category ‘science’ — what is the research aspect of maintenance coding, and where does the scientific method come into play when structuring million-line programs? You mention CS (== Computer Science) after all. I guess this discussion is off-topic though, since the headline asks about college in general, not CS.

I side with the sibling post that argues for a distinction between CS and SE programs.

That's fine. I've got no problem with making that distinction. But if we do, then 95% of the people who are currently taking CS should be in SE programs.

Note: 95% is a number pulled from absolutely nowhere, but I think it's of about the right order. It expresses the idea that most people are not going to go on to academic CS careers, and therefore need different training.

Now that's a statement i'm willing to agree with :)

Exactly. The more people who come to this conclusion and start to put up a fuss like the GP did the sooner we'll solve this whole conundrum. CS != SE and people trying to shoehorn the latter into the former are going to be disappointed.

That said, I'm personally glad that my education was heavy on the CS. Nearly 20 years later (yuck) I attribute it to providing me an ability to stay flexible and learn new technologies rapidly.

Why would one think that theory only comes from schooling? Some of the largest contributions ever made to hard sciences have come from people with litte formal schooling. E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Faraday

I agree with your idea that degrees are mostly about credentialing. In the best case, they can lead to a close mentorship from an expert, but that's rare these days.

It's worse. I know someone who came out of a 4 year CS degree, knowing only php, because that's as new-fangled a technology as their professors were willing to bother to learn. They ended up going to a boot camp in order to learn how to get anything done.

Knowing PHP extremely well would be a great place to start a career.

agreed. some people still think that you should get out of college and be ready to make 90k in the exact area you studied. That's just not the case with so many areas of study. You can make your way into some sort of company or agency or partner up with a fellow student and start to consult. You might only make 35k for a while but that's how it works. If people know that going in, they probably would budget how they will spend on college in the first place a little better. Maybe they woulnd't accumulate 100k of debt if they knew they'd only be making 32k for the first couple years and have to buy a vechicle on top of that.

In other words, it's a terrible place to start a career in software engineering.

That doesn't even sound like a datapoint on the theoretical/vocational line, it sounds like just a shit CS department that doesn't deserve accreditation.

As long as the resulting people don't think that graphs are charts, static typing is ceremony and functional programming means programming functionality - everything goes.

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