You make a really good point here, and the it's odd how many people get computer programming confused with computer science. I own a company that develops software for fairly mission-critical systems, and the last people I need to hire are scientists; I'm not in the business of solving confounding scientific problems, I'm just in the business of building reliable software for my clients. It's even weirder that they actually use the word "science" in the degree - how many freaking CS graduates would most of you consider to be real scientists? I've met about a thousand or more CS people over the course of the years, and the only time I ever met any that were actual scientists was when I visited a research institute to talk with some guys about licensing a technology they were developing...
Anyway, to the previous poster's point - I would be more in favor of some universities dropping their CS program entirely and replacing it with one focused on pure software development. This isn't to say that CS should go away, but I think that universities should make a stronger distinction between the scientific and vocational aspects of the field - have a software development degree and have a computer science degree. Leave the contemporary programming languages out of the CS degree, and leave the intense math, etc. out of the software development side of the house. I can't imagine how excited I would be about being able to hire candidates with a four-year degree in "Commercial Software Development" rather than having to look at the same old crap resumes from CS graduates - "I took a lot of advanced math classes, and wrote a logging program in C." Sigh...
Anyway, the whole point of technology is to make things easier for us, not harder. The "real" computer scientists have done great things and made life very easy for people like me (who just like to build applications software), so why don't we show them the respect that they deserve and stop using CS as a catch-all for anything related to computer software?!?
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You make a really good point here, and the it's odd how many people get computer programming confused with computer science. I own a company that develops software for fairly mission-critical systems, and the last people I need to hire are scientists; I'm not in the business of solving confounding scientific problems, I'm just in the business of building reliable software for my clients. It's even weirder that they actually use the word "science" in the degree - how many freaking CS graduates would most of you consider to be real scientists? I've met about a thousand or more CS people over the course of the years, and the only time I ever met any that were actual scientists was when I visited a research institute to talk with some guys about licensing a technology they were developing...
Anyway, to the previous poster's point - I would be more in favor of some universities dropping their CS program entirely and replacing it with one focused on pure software development. This isn't to say that CS should go away, but I think that universities should make a stronger distinction between the scientific and vocational aspects of the field - have a software development degree and have a computer science degree. Leave the contemporary programming languages out of the CS degree, and leave the intense math, etc. out of the software development side of the house. I can't imagine how excited I would be about being able to hire candidates with a four-year degree in "Commercial Software Development" rather than having to look at the same old crap resumes from CS graduates - "I took a lot of advanced math classes, and wrote a logging program in C." Sigh...
Anyway, the whole point of technology is to make things easier for us, not harder. The "real" computer scientists have done great things and made life very easy for people like me (who just like to build applications software), so why don't we show them the respect that they deserve and stop using CS as a catch-all for anything related to computer software?!?