I see this argument a lot; universities would like to not be vocational education, but unavoidably they are. Certainly for all the older class of professional job: engineer, actuary, lawyer, doctor. For those you absolutely have to go to university to even begin your vocational training.

Programming is different in that the degree is less of a hard requirement (but still mandatory for your CV for a lot of employers), and you can get by with a three-year degree. But the history of non-university vocational training for programmers is a bit controversial (e.g. Lambda school https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25415017/ ) and there's not that many of them even in the US. What's the UK equivalent to Lambda School? The French equivalent?

> Conversely, Jira-fu, unit testing, peer reviewing etc. is something a junior engineer learns in their first year at work

A formal apprenticeship model would be great for programming, but there's a lot of obstacles to that.

France has *tons* of vocational dev training, through a variety of systems. They are mostly split between :

- Public technical schools (ran by the state) that deliver degrees with ECTS credits (pan-European degree system) over 2/3 years.

- Technical training schools, mostly private, that deliver titles validated by the Ministry of Work. ie. industry certifications only valid domestically. Over 6/12 months.

French engineering schools are a completely different beast and would be considered part of the university system in the US. They issue masters degrees over 5 years valid pretty much everywhere and the title of Engineer (it's illegal in France to call yourself an engineer without it !).

likewise germany has the fachhochschule, which is also expressly for vocational education at university level.

i would not call those equivalents to lamda school, mostly because lambda school is private profit oriented startup, whereas french and german engineering schools are established government funded public schools with a history of more than 50 years.

one could argue that maybe US community colleges should be the US equivalent of those schools with a focus on vocational education.

I do some TA in such schools (ENSEIRB) and every year I make students contribute to OSS, generally by writing small plug-ins to an existing software, it always works fine. Not a lot of them keep going afterwards though.

" En breve:

Diferencia entre politécnico y universidad.

• Las universidades tienen un enfoque más amplio y enseñan materias con énfasis en impartir conocimientos básicos con muchos aspectos teóricos con un poco de trabajo de proyectos y tareas de laboratorio..

• Por otro lado, los politécnicos son más prácticos en su enfoque y toman cursos más pequeños que son específicos de la industria y no se enseñan en las universidades..

• Así que además de los títulos de ingeniería, hay una gran cantidad de otros cursos, diplomas y certificados que se ofrecen en estos politécnicos que son de menor duración y ayudan a los estudiantes a obtener empleos en industrias. "

For the english speaking crowd, https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=es&tl=en&u=https:/...

I just think universities should give their alumni focus on the big picture and long term, they will get enough exposure to mundane tasks like reviews at work.

You want some CS concepts, with emphasis on what is fashionable the work market, you got into a three year degree in a vocational degree.

This changed a bit with Bologna, but the overall process is mostly the same, just now the Enginnering order requires the master degree (which is the old 5 years degree).

(I had only heard of the city in Italy and the type of sausage so was confused, this was the most likely sounding thing that came up on a search)

Is there? The standard for the locality I live in, around the University of Michigan, is that students seem to be trying to pick up internships every summer now, including their first summer after being a freshman. It also not uncommon to see people who graduated with several internships on their resume. When I graduated ~2000 the general standard was one in your last summer.

It exists since 1997-1999, varying on the country. An apprenticeship takes nominally between 3 and 3½ years, concludes with a level 4 EQR and the rules and by-laws are determined by the chamber of commerce, who also holds the examinations. It is treated as a trade, similar to blue collar professions like heating installer, lathe operator etc.

I don't know how famous/big they are, but I have already heard about it from more than one person, which makes me think that they are gaining traction.

programming is much much more that being proficient in the current tools of the day.

University is a time to explore new ideas and old ideas at a level of detail that one hopes they can maintain throughout their career, but most likely once one enters a career they are focused on the needs of their employer, which is not necessarily the best for personal advancement or the advancement of software as a whole.

Their prices say they are. There is no way they could be as expensive as they are, except that they are capturing a lot of the value of the vocational education they are expected to provide. Their prices speak louder than high-falutin' principles.

I'll permit University's their "we're not vocational training facilities" argument when their prices come back down to something like a 1980s level and reflect their expectation that they are not doing vocational training.

In US Engineering is framed as a very practical, "how-to" oriented, to the point that people can be surprised to learn that engineers do research and publish papers.

the problem is that this doesn't matter, because all the industry expects is programming skills, and while any fachhochschule, french engineering school, or even a US community college could provide those programming skills, the university provides them too, and as a result, a university graduate has more job options than a graduate from those other schools.

if i can, i will prefer the school that gives me more options later on. that also explains why everyone wants to get into the top schools, because those provide even more options.

computer science students would have to have a bad reputation as programmers in order to stop companies who need programmers from hiring them.

or we change the system such that you always start with vocational training as a programmer on a school dedicated for that before you decide to either get a job or move on into academics. requiring that academic researchers have relevant industry level training doesn't seem like a bad idea.

i was not aware that the french engineering schools were at that level.

so in fact that means that france has achieved what everyone else should aspire to.

I don't think it is unreasonable to have alternatives to the university education model. But I also think that employers would be very foolish to demand that junior engineers have prior experience with git.

Becoming a senior engineer usually takes lots of on the job experience, one can't really train for it. A PHd helps, but unless it models the same shared industrial scale codebase, there will be gaps in the schooling vs a large engineering org.

One could get a masters (extra year in the US) in the missing semester skills. Learning to refactor could be a 5 credit course. Same thing with testing, could cover property testing, ci/cd pipelines, incremental repeatable builds, fault injection, gradient descent, rollback, fuzz testing, formal methods, proof systems etc. but in a practical way.

It is one thing to know about a skill vs having actually used the skill to solve a problem. It takes years to actually learn how to use Git well. Same for most processes and tools, a formal education in those areas would accelerate the state of the whole industry.

Two things should probably happen. One for early education and second for post hs.

The whole k-12 education system should get more rigorous, front load the early education and get everyone on a rock solid foundation. Like everyone exiting 5th grade can read the international phonetic alphabet and are fluent in a second language at at-least the 2nd grade level.

For post highschool academic education, the credit hours to graduate should be extended or be made variable depending on the degree. Some "hard" science degrees already do this, by declaring 5 credit courses as 3 credits. Still 90 credit hours to complete but the difficulty is much higher. Basically the 4 year degree is now the 5+ year degree. This is ok.

We have or did have a huge commercial market for computer jobs in the "code camp/school" space. All these new participants showed up because there was a huge need for these skills. They mostly teach the missing semester stuff and build a ton of context so they don't get shunned at the new job for the huge gaps in their knowledge.

I think the commercial votec school system does need to get some form of accreditation.

I will not discuss the levels of foolishness by employers in their hiring practices. Utter insanity.

In my opinion, there are far too many people enrolled in CS programs who would be much better served by a software engineering degree or program. However, modifying the way CS is taught us not the answer. A separate niche needs to be carved out.

Nowadays there are even bridges to "proper" universities if you want to pursue a more academic MSc after your vocational BSc.

The whole bachelors -> masters -> PhD process is just winnowing out the unworthy and stupid. The ones who survive this and go on to publish papers are the entire point.

The entire IT industry is a byproduct of CS research, not the point of it. The point of it is to explore the intellectual realms enabled by the mathematics of CS.

Reducing this to "university CS departments exist to train programmers" is ridiculous.

Slightly tongue in cheek, but not too much.

Also, most of their money.

The problem with trying to have all students (not "some exceptional students", but all students) going out and engaging with the real world of open source is that the degree of difficulty in navigating different open source projects is enormous and may not be obvious to the professors nor students ahead of time.

Some students may wind up working on projects with nice guard-rails, helpful communities, plenty of up-to-date high-quality documents for how to contribute. Others... maybe not so much. It will be very hard to judge whether students have been successful and to compare their performances against each other (a perennial chore of academia, but one that people seem to insist on: grades!).

Otherwise it creates absurd situation in which highly expensive institution is demanding that part of teaching is done by third parties for free.

That said, I would love if the professor would reach out so I could recommend specific issues and let them know whether I'll be particularly available for more in depth PR mentoring this semester.

It does seem like they're accounting for the burden put on maintainers as well:

> Getting a contribution accepted is not a prerequisite for passing the assignment

> a small-scale contribution is the only realistic goal. The key to making the course's assignment work, is to have what are, on first sight, very low ambitions for the students' contributions.

1) No, universities shouldn't waste too much time preparing people for the job; they should prepare give people the more scientific types of skills that one doesn't really pick up on the job: Data structures, algorithms, paradigms like OOP and FP, etc.

2) Unleashing a horde of yet incompetent newbies on the open source world with a mission to contribute won't be helping FOSS; what's more, if this was the norm, it would cause much more harm than good by spamming projects with low-quality contributions. See Goodharts law.

I do also wonder what people *precisely* mean when they talk about "data structures and algorithms" in context of academia

You talk from perspective of competitive programming?

University teaches you about theoretical computer science, not problem solving skills for software engineering.

No university teaches you about how to assess an engineering problem, how to break it down, how to create at timeline/estimate, etc.

Many of them do actually. Obviously you will not be very good at it before having actual work experience, but it is useful to be open to thinking about it.

Yet that's the opposite of what the article focuses on: mostly soft-skills and all the fluff that surrounds the actual engineering work, like dealing with project maintainers, figuring out github, etc.

This approach, when taken to the extreme*, would lead people to be very good at explaining why they opened a certain pull request, but couldn't even merge it on the CLI because that's not something you need for a FOSS contribution.

* note this part

It's dependent on the job, but anyway they can learn this stuff not only during work hours (learning hours or whatever it is called), but also in their free time

It's not like only Academia is authorized to teach DS&A, FP

It shouldn't be the default that university teaches you job skills and leaves you to learn the theory on your own.

Honestly, I really don't see a solid case there.

Have you taken a senior/graduate level DS&A class before? Part of it is about proving the correctness of the algorithms and making guarantees about the DSs. It's not about competitive programing or acing leetcode interviews at all.

In the class I took we didn't write hardly any actual code.

I've taken DS&A class during CS Eng. degree, it was bullshit about sorting algorithms while using 1-indexed arrays in languages that used 0-indexed approach, nothing fancy.

I wish it were about TLA+ and formal proving

Open source projects do not, and have never, gone out of their way to teach these things.

Ofc doing it for a grade is silly

But if you contribute to open source, you must follow the etiquette or your PR is denied etc.

What inexperienced programmers get from open source is that experience where they better learn how to fit in effectively, or they get bounced.

In the nicest possible way, open source is a great way for people on the HS/college track to take responsibility for themselves.

It doesn't require much active effort on the part of the open source community to deny a PR or exclude a bad apple if that makes sense.

And I'd say the majority of open source communities long ago put systems in place to deal with bad apples (or should have).

I'd recommend it for someone/student who feels like their technically competent but never got the chance to work with an already built codebase and a team because it really puts you up to the test.

This depends on your country. In many countries they are.

Also even in countries were the undergrad system is intended to be broader (e.g. US, Canada), politicians typically discuss it as if it were a job training system.

Or don't start by contributing code. There's a lot of work to do in areas like bug triage, reproducing issues or creating setups which do that.

I used to be part of a commercial, but open-source project. Unfortunately we didn't have the resources to scrutinise every pull request that arrived and I think few projects do.

I found one recently that does some interesting stuff, a formal verification library for Rust: https://www.pm.inf.ethz.ch/research/prusti.html

I am surprised that more Computing departments haven't embraced Open Source. It seems like it would be a great way to introduce students to larger projects, and act as a great advertisement for their core areas of expertise. After all who hasn't heard of BSD, or X11.

It ought to be out there along the ASME's racing events where students design and build race cars. Why shouldn't Computing students design video or audio codecs, raspberry pies, or other things for real world experience?

That may be the case, but the job market for grads is fierce (or at least was when I went through the gauntlet 5 years ago) and projects absolutely help students stand out.

>burdening open source maintainers with training students in these issues is hardly a good idea

I've had exactly this happen - a random Argentinian student I met on Reddit modernised a whole lot of my project's codebase and we went through the review process together etc. "Burden" is not the word I'd use; it was a positive experience without a doubt and the contributions he made were generally of a high standard.

In that context, it's not surprising that many public universities do see post-college employment metrics (employment rate, median salaries) as an extremely important measuring stick of success. Many of these programs do make efforts to include vocationally-applicable education in the core curriculum, because it helps to keep those numbers up.

Apart from the top ivy league schools, many schools are not going to teach the theory stuff well anyway.

And teaching the tools (not JIRA but, say git and docker) are not dry carpentry, there are concepts which a computer science student should be equipped to understand.

Last time I remember, an MIT course on programming tools gained traction on this site.

As for not contributing to OSS projects right away, I agree, universities should rather have a project after each course completion so that students get to exercise the concepts.