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Comment by danmg | Hacker News Reader

Engineering is the same as CS in this regard. You might have a CAD class to give you some fundamentals, but that's a very small part of what engineers learn.

Medical and Law are professional post-graduate degrees.

Education in the US is heavily subsidized and incentivized to keep a pipeline of K12 educators coming in.

Journalism is a liberal arts discipline. What vocational skills are they coming out with? How to follow a style guide? Most of them have to be fully supported by their parents if they want to take a prestigious unpaid internship in an expensive city, and even then the job market is very bleak. I'm really not sure where you're trying to go by bringing up journalism.

I'm really not seeing what point you're trying to make. The vocational skills learned are incidental. You will be employable in the field if you didn't slack off and challenged yourself while getting your degree.

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You still didn't answer the main question. What are these CS grads going to do without any practical skills when some can't even pass the FizzBuzz challenge?

How are they going to compete when they get in the real world? Most companies aren't willing to train junior devs how to program and why should they when there are plenty of junior developers who came out of the equivalent of "Java schools" and boot camps that can immediately be somewhat productive?

Yes, I've told my sons that I won't help them pay for any degree that won't help them be employable when they get out of school -- basically their choices were STEM related, education, or the medical field. Liberal arts was not an option.

I was also okay with them choosing trade school.

>You still didn't answer the main question. What are these CS grads going to do without any practical skills when some can't even pass the FizzBuzz challenge?

Nice straw-man you built there. If these graduates have either fallen through the cracks for four years and not learned a damn thing, I don't see the point of holding everyone back and forcing them to have remedial write iOS and webpages classes for four years. Why would you assume the outcomes would be any better?

Computer Science grads that can’t program isn’t some rare phenomenon. It made the FizzBuzz interview test famous a decade ago.

https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/

Jeff Atwood isn't an authority on the skills of fresh computer science grads. He was a blogger with some anecdotes who came up with a meme.

I really don't understand the point you're trying to make.

It became a popular meme because it reinforced the idea that we needed to import more H1-Bs to fill these roles that are going unfilled. Please don't be so naive.

This was in 2005 and he posted links. He is a blogger and the cofounder of a little site called Stack Overflow. He also posted a link from his fellow cofounder.

I’ve interviewed computer science grads who can’t do the equivalent of FizzBuzz - write a function that can tell if a number is odd. Even after you tell them what An odd number is.

Is it really that hard to understand the “point I’m trying to make”? When students come out of college most have to get a job. What do you think they go to college for?

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