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Comment by asdffdsa | Hacker News Reader

"Any student who is unable..." this is a sink or swim mentality that is just wrong imo and doesn't account for students' workload. Most everyone who started out had difficulty understanding software tools and the paradigm they operated in, and college students taking 4+ courses have 4x the material, not to mention the ramp up of 4x the tools to use, documentation to read, etc. If you're going to throw 40+ hours a week of course work, and then the responsibility of learning git, gdb, python, LaTex, fundamentals of the Linux terminal, etc without extra time or assistance, then most likely you're going to have a lot of pragmatic young people throw their hands up and say, "forget it, I'm gonna study business/physics/x engineering" instead

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Do you realize how many new programmers struggle with simply adding Python to their path? That simple concept is beyond most engineering students and can literally cost them days in research. It's easy to forget where we started.

If a person can't figure out how to use google to find out what they need to know and they don't have the social capacity to ask their fellow classmates then I don't ever want to work with that individual, and neither does anyone else.

So they are going to ask their classmates who are also college students without any real world work experience about which tools they should learn? If they are just going to teach themselves bad habits from Googling, what’s the use of college?

How many example websites are out there about how to use sql in programs have:

  sql = “select * from User where firstname = ‘“ + firstname + “‘“;

And it was just posted today about people committing their AWS credentials. Mostly because every AWS example has

  client = S3Client(secretkey,accesskey,”us-east-1”)

College is for educations. It's not a vo-tech academy. Also, you're running away from the discussion. The issue is about students becoming unhireable upon graduation. An associate level developer will be able to fix the issues with a junior level developer who would use that sql statement and AWS credentials, and frankly, being able to crank out that sql statement is far beyond what the average graduate can do to begin with.

Do you really think that the average American family is getting thousands of dollars of debt for college for any other reason than helping their kids get a job?

I was responding to the idea of just “googling for the answer”. In both of the situations above, the student would search for the answer and get back an example that was insecure, but how would they know that? In the first case, the sql statement is a prime target for a sql injection attack where they should have used parameters and in the second case, they should have not included their credentials in their code at all and configured their local box to store credentials in their user directory and used a role on AWS.

And you wonder why not only can’t Johnnie do FizzBuzz, but why in 2019 developers are writing insecure applications.

But why would I as a hiring manager (I’m a reformed dev lead), hire a junior developer who just knows theory and will spend the first six months to a year doing “negative work” when I could pay the boot camp grad or the recent immigrant who was focused on learning useful skills a few thousand more?

YMMV, but with my college education I've been able to work on critical upgrades for our networking infrastructure, write a code-generation tool which automated a substantial library migration, and diagnose/solve difficult bugs which come up late in the release cycle or in production. I take on tasks/projects which would usually require multiple offshore developers. Additionally, I spend nontrivial amounts of time fixing issues in our development environments that are caused by our offshore team. I end up taking on responsibility that no one else can, or perhaps wants to. On average, college graduates require a greater ramp up, but also have a more solid foundation and higher skill/impact ceiling.

Before landing at my current job, I was passed on by lots of tech companies because I was good at theory and bad at interviewing/coding.

Some people are slow starters for various reasons, often lack of confidence. As long as I see some interest in becoming better, I'll gladly mentor.

There's a difference between a slow starter, or someone who lacks confidence, and someone unwilling to put forth the effort to learn something because his professor didn't put him in a high chair and spoon feed it to him.

I'm a slow starter :) 20 million have watched me online and growing everyday. I struggled with the simplest of stuff but excelled beyond some of the most educated in my tortoise type way. I paid more in taxes last year than most people make.

The most overrated thing in the history of history is the workload of a college student. Nobody is asking any of them to be experts with using certain tools, but they should certainly be able to figure out how to use them without being spoonfed in class. Given that plenty of tools are used in multiple classes, and the assertion that students don't have enough time to figure out how their own tools work becomes even more invalid than it already impossibly is.

You're dramatizing other people's statements quite a bit. Nobody is saying that the use of Git should be the subject of lectures, unless you're using Git's source code or software design to exemplify some technical points. But grade based on projects and require the use of these tools - e.g. Git, GitHub, Maven, and Python - to work on them. Then, as a teacher, you should know how to use them yourself because you SHOULD use them in your own development. (Even if you're doing research you should use a version control system. VCS's are practically designed for the scientific method.)

Again, let's keep in mind the premise: CS and SE are separate departments in a uni. Professors who gravitate more toward forwarding computational science are in CS; professors who gravitate more toward the science of building software systems are in SE. I posit that such a division would put people where they belong and make people going for SE better prepared.

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