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Comment by Mapiarz | Hacker News Reader

What I have noticed in the first paragraph: "It seems that some schools have caught on and are teaching students the ins and outs of being a mobile developer but for the most part graduates seem to only have a course or two of mobile dev under their belt."

Am I the only one who finds that weird? During my 5 years of college education in "informatics" I never had a 'programming for..." course. We were taught how to tackle problems, algorithmics, patterns and practices, formal languages, ai, distributed mechanisms and so on. We had to get that hard concrete experience on our own. IMHO having courses like "programming for Android" or "Web/JS programming" is a great way to mass produce monkey programmers.

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Totally agree with the "mass-produced monkey programmer" comment. I've seen it in practice, when interviewing new graduates.

The grads from good (not necessarily great) schools tend to have solid fundamentals, and even without lots of "buzzword" coursework, they come out better. The grads from mediocre schools often have more buzzwords on their resume, but often lack solid fundamentals.

Of course, that isn't written in stone. We have several great new hires from schools that are typical regional universities.

The graduates from schools with higher entrance requirements have better graduates than the schools with lower ones?

And you think it's their course material...

Yes. Based on what I've seen, there is absolutely a curriculum problem at some schools. None of these were terrible schools, just not R1 universities.

Worse yet, my college is offering a Mobile App Development class, under Computer Information Systems (as opposed to Computer Science, which I am in) which uses App Inventor. And they're charging $240 per credit for this 4 credit class!

> IMHO having courses like ... is a great way to mass produce monkey programmers.

Definitely, I took a RoR elective and I wish there had been a Lisp/FP elective I could have taken. I'm pretty sure I only had one class where first class functions were even mentioned.

Programming is really hard, much harder than regurgitating facts about AI or distributed mechanisms or 'patterns and practices' sitting in an exam hall. To do that all you have to do is memorize your notes and repeat back what your lecturer told you and you'll pass.

Programming is a barrage of 'problems', you don't need a course on 'problems' if you actually just programmed.

So perhaps they do need to change like this.

Shhhhhh. The CS grads are puffing out their chests. You're supposed to act impressed and slightly intimidated.

When did you have that education though? I think it's very useful today.

There are relevant different design decisions to make that go much further than just a touch screen vs a mouse. You don't want to drain your users' battery or drain their wallet by going over their data limit, you make different decisions about what part of the workload to keep on the client or move to the server.

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