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Comment by simonh | Hacker News Reader

Not the OP, but Computer Science is a scientific discipline not an engineering discipline and is generally taught as such. Unless you take specific Software Engineering topics you're unlikely to learn things like unit testing, build and integration tools, how to use a debugger effectively beyond maybe a brief introduction at best, etc.

If you were being taught software engineering as an engineering discipline, these should be absolute bread and butter core components of the course.

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Not at all, in Portugal we don't have Computer Science as it often discussed around here, rather Informatics Engineering, with certified professional Engineering titles.

If you want computing theory without programming, you do a math degree with specialization in computing theory.

Plenty of other countries follow similar practices.

I don't see how you are disagreeing with me. It sounds from your description that your Informatics Engineering courses really are more engineering oriented than our Computer Science courses, which is what I would expect.

I guess that depends on the school offering the curriculum. I went to school as a Computer Science Engineering major. It wasn't EE, but it was way more than how not to write an infinite loop. It was billed as "you could design/build your own computer, and then write the software for it" type of path.

There are very good reasons why whiteboarding focuses on computer science, and not the actual practice of writing software.

This got me to wondering what an interview about "the actual practice of writing software" would look like, and having a look at Glassdoor's mechanical engineering interview questions [1] for comparison, it doesn't seem these kinds of questions would elicit much better quality candidates.

I'm increasingly convinced that the apprenticeship program approach would yield far better, deeper results than how we're going about recruiting these days, but most business leadership is fiscally addicted to short-term hire-fire cycles instead of looking for ways to exert more control over their destinies. I suspect that recruiting model is an ingredient to systematized innovation (the "deeper" part I mentioned, which I use to denote internalized concepts, procedures, mental models, etc. necessary to fluent application and craft that I believe are absolute table stakes in innovation).

[1] https://www.glassdoor.com/Interview/mechanical-engineer-inte...

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