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The Academy For Software Engineering: a High School For Developers
rjmarvin writes "The Academy for Software Engineering, right off of Manhattan's Union Square, is in its second year of educating students for a future in computer science and software engineering. No entrance exams, no admission standards, just an opportunity for any student interested in software to take specialized classes like robotics and programming, go on trips to companies like Google and Facebook, and spend summers interning at Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase before heading to college and into the workforce, powering the next wave of innovation as members of the tech workforce in New York's burgeoning 'Silicon Alley.'"
So is it absurdly expensive or do they use a lottery system?
But why should you do evil and work for the criminals in the financial sector? Have you no sense of ethics ?
Just because an inner city kid is poor and needs a free education doesn't mean he should do the dirty work.
JPMorgan owes a lot more than 13 billion and a free tech farm for grooming new corporate fall guys.
Why should crime pay when its too big to fail, with labor that is too small to pay, except for the dirty work.
I'm glad for the free school but I can't help but be cynical about Wall Street.
It's a fully accredited NYC public high school. RTFA before posting your "OMG SCAM SCARE" nonsense.
John
Well, some of it. I went to a fine arts high school and I heard from some old classmates that they've started teaching web design in the art classes there - including HTML and lower end web programming. Considering how many of us ended up in IT that may not be a bad idea. Previously, the only tech stuff they taught was theater lighting.
Can't be any worse than Common Core, regardless.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
at least it's better then theory loaded CS colleges where you learn skills that give a big skills gap on the stuff needed to do the job.
Nail, head hit. What is needed is to teach the basics about languages, so jumping from perl to java to ABAP to Scheme to Ada is a relatively minor item (you figure out syntax, variable convention, etc... perhaps procedural versus lambda based, etc.)
After these basics, one can learn Java and be a Java dev, but when that peters out, it doesn't take much to grab an O'Reilly guide and start programming in PHP, Python, or perhaps even back to perl.
In most languages [1], a ring buffer is a ring buffer. A queue is a queue, a stack is a stack.
What I dislike are these "tech schools" who teach something so dated that it means nothing. For example, "fiber optics". What is that? Is that level 1 networking? Is that physically laying down the cable and lighting it up? Is that not looking down a single mode fiber with remaining eye? CS degrees tend to be more generic, but at least the concepts stay constant, barring a fundamental change to architecture [2].
Of course, it would be nice to merge CS and MIS, where one learns both the programming aspect as well as the human factor that is needed in IT to survive.
[1]: Good luck trying to do a double-ended queue in LOGO, so I say "most" to cover those.
[2]: I've always wanted a set of FPGAs on a machine so when security sensitive code is executed, there is a Harvard architecture "core" made for that job, and after the tasks are done, it is back to the von Neumann world. This wouldn't be fast, but it definitely would help in the security department.
at least it's better then theory loaded CS colleges where you learn skills that give a big skills gap on the stuff needed to do the job.
Universities are not vocational schools. If you want to learn the languages and operating systems that are used at a job ***today*** then go to your local junior college (JC) and take the relevant vocational classes. JCs do a fine job in this regard. If you want the theory and background knowledge that is more persistent, that will outlast the programming languages and operating systems that are popular today then you go to the university. In the university you are often expected to learn the programming languages and operating systems of the day on your own time. As you will have to do throughout your career. Even things necessary for class are often on your own time. For example in a compilers class the class time may be mostly spent on compiler theory. You may be offered an optional session led by a TA to introduce you to lex and yacc (used to implement your compiler) but you are expected to learn these mostly on your own. Similar story in AI classes, theory in class, a TA session for LISP or Prolog, but mostly you learn the programming language on your own time. Programming languages and operating systems are implementation details, they change over time. The theory tends to last a bit longer.
I have two books from the early 1980s. A book on programming MS-DOS and Knuth Volume 3: Sorting and Searching. The former is full of what was once useful info for a job and went into the recycle bin when cleaning out the garage recently. The later is theory and is still a valuable and useful reference today and still sits on my bookshelf.
If you have a skills gap after the university you made some sort of mistake. At the university you are surround by people (professors and fellow students) with an incredibly variety of skills and knowledge, you have incredible resources (hardware and software) available, if you are not doing some sort of independent study on your own you are making a mistake. If you are doing nothing other than homework assignment on the default hardware using the default languages you are making a mistake, you are making yourself less attractive to employers. Assuming of course you don't have a job or some other "legitimate" demand on your time.