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How Computer Science Education Got Practical (Again)
jfruh writes: In the 1980s and 1990s, thousands of young people who had grown up tinkering with PCs hit college and dove into curricula designed around the vague notion that they might want to "do something with computers." Today, computer science education is a lot more practical — though in many ways that's just going back to the discipline's roots. As Christopher Mims put it in the Wall Street Journal, "we've entered an age in which demanding that every programmer has a degree is like asking every bricklayer to have a background in architectural engineering."
We have hired, and let go, 3 "computer science" majors who didn't know how to calculate a range of IPs given a single IP and a netmask.
CS != IT. This makes as much sense as complaining that your car mechanic knows nothing about plumbing. If you want a sysadmin, then hire a sysadmin. But that is not what a CS grad is, or should be.
You should also change your hiring practices. If there are basic skills that you require, you should test for that during the interview process. By failing to do that, you are wasting your time and theirs. Letting one slip through may be excusable, but three in a row is a sign of serious dysfunction.
The link is paywalled, but programmers are not bricklayers. So just based on that one quote I can tell the article is stupid.
Indeed. TFA equates programming with bricklaying, and implies neither needs to be educated like an architect. But writing a program is much more like architecture than it is like bricklaying.
I have worked as a bricklayer. The first day, the foreman told me to pull the wall down and try again. The second day it was "good enough". By the end of the week, I could work as well (but not as fast) as the guys with years of experience. A programmer with a week of experience can not come close to someone with years of experience, and likely can't write a working program at all.
I am a recently retired software developer who specialized in scientific, engineering, and image processing applications. I must have been considered pretty good because I kept getting significant raises and I retired with a net worth of over a million dollars. I do not know what a netmask is.