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Comment by Swizec | Hacker News Reader

> Maybe things have changed but when I graduated undergrad CS in 2017 the extent of frontend being taught in my school by professors was "hand write some HTML, maybe some PHP if you're lucky"

Here's a secret nobody told you: You don't need to learn frontend specifics. All the same lessons from business software engineering apply.

I not-graduated comp sci in 2012 and have been building webapps since before jQuery was cool. It's nothing special. The biggest problems are always the same: data and domain modeling, managing complexity, teamwork, and state consistency.

If your comp sci degree didn't teach you how to apply solutions to those problems in any context – frontend, backend, iOS, firmware, desktop app, Android, or data pipeline – then it was a worthless degree and you should get your money back. The point of comp sci is to learn about the ideas behind the scenes, not about specific frameworks.

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Preach!

Data modelling and managing complexity (or I prefer to say knowledge organization) is a prerequisites for every software program ever.

I'd add one more: System design.

Basically dealing with many asynchronous moving parts, managing entities' lifetime, separating and categorizing domain/data, and understanding what-is-important-to-whom. It is a knowledge that's applicable whether you are programming a kernel scheduler or managing people and projects

Yep and nowhere seems to teach this in practice other than job sites. I’m building a team right now with two mid level engineers and a junior. They’re great and I couldn’t ask for better guys to be clear; but your point stands.

They don’t understand this (subsystems architecture and the the living data model.) It’s like they think I have a giant list of existing solutions to every problem that they haven’t memorized yet so when hit with a problem needing a subsystem they were basically useless until I slowly started teaching it to them. I’m talking Ivy League kids with degrees I only ever dreamed of getting. There brains just aren’t trained to architect systems the way I expected junior/mid level engineers to be as a self taught engineer.

Also the data model stuff has been a real painpoint for me. We were set up with graphql and Postgres so of course the MVP forwent any working data store other than react states.

Eh, to some degree you do get a starting point in uni for various things. You’ll learn basic models for systems or databases as part of core requirements. If a web course exists, it’s most likely optional and out of date.

Web is certainly a different context, and some people struggle to pick it up. There’s no authoritative book like the C Programming Language, and the web is full of wrong information that sometimes comes above more authoratitve sources like MDN in Google results.

> Web is certainly a different context

I mean it's a thin or fat client talking to a fat or thin data source over a network. "We" have been building systems like that since the 1950's.

This is absolutely correct from the perspective of a senior developer. Junior devs generally haven't completed enough language/framework hype cycles to develop the required experience (or cynicism really) to look past the bullshit to this very simple fact.

how we present has changed a lot, though. And we reap the rewards of not teaching.

As a general example, part of why accessibility on the web is so poor is because we don't teach anything about it. It's become this mythical scary thing, when in reality a lot of the pain is avoidable with a little bit of thinking. We just don't teach any of it.

If we're talking language level (even in C, you'd usually be using other libraries and APIs even if it's just POSIX or curses), I'd argue that "JavaScript: The Good Parts: The Good Parts" is probably the most authoritative book out there.

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