I guess it is official now: IT programmers are the blue collar workers of the digital age. Nothing against hard working men and women regardless of the color of the[ir] collar, but software is a mind product and this disparages the true measure and worth of [what] we do as software engineers.
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Computer Scientists should be (mainly) scientists.
I see a lot of people who I have gone through school with enjoy the first 2 years where it's mostly practical work. Then they hit the last 2 years where it comes down to theory and they struggle with it.
A 2 year vocational school that focuses on learning a couple of languages, data structures, and gives a few options for specializing a bit sounds like a good idea to me. Then you can software engineering which is focused entirely on the actually engineering of a system.
In a seperate but equal sort of setup you can have more theoretical CS.
If you haven't seen this, I recommend this lecture by Dr. Alan Kay, that does address this issue (besides being a phenomenal talk):
Thing is, I've called myself a "programmer" for well over a decade now, and I just don't see it. Where are these programmers who just "implement"? I guess if someone had wireframes and made all the technology decisions and handed it over to a programmer, maybe that would count?
A company I worked for tried this, they made me an "Architect" and gave me an offshore team, and it was a disaster. It could be that I wasn't good at providing precise instructions, but to me, precise instructions are hard to distinguish from code. Well, maybe that's why "programmers" have poor job prospects - all programming work is now done by "software engineers"...
Does google, or facebook use "programmers" who are distinct from "software engineers?" Any startups out there that do this?
Even worse, you have "computer engineering", which is a real engineering discipline (at least when focussed on hardware) and then you have the disaster that is the CS/programming community's attempts to ape standard engineering practices when the blueprint and finished product are the exact same thing.
(2) Read. The school is not structured like a vocational school.
One day his wife was asked what he did and when she said "oh hes an engineer" they reply was "that's nice dear what sort of cars does he work on"