It's certainly reasonable to expect colleges to be 'trade schools' for many skilled trades, traditionally that was the main purpose of universities. A traditional classical university has/had four faculties - medicine, law, theology and philosophy (some centuries later separated in many subfields from natural science to humanities), and the first three of them quite explicitly were there to prepare "skilled tradesmen" to work as doctors, lawyers and clergy. Afterwards in the industrial age many other colleges and academies were explicitly formed to prepare various disciplines of engineers that the growing industry needed, again, the primary focus being skilled workers not science.

Of course, there is a place for liberal arts colleges and research-focused universities, but that's far from being the only role of universities; and IMHO our society needs a dozen software engineers for each computer scientist, so universities can't focus only on the latter.

The above isn't correctly distinguishing between the meanings of "trade" versus "profession". It's not a value judgment; the words simply have different meanings.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tradesman

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profession

Doctors, lawyers, clergy, and (non-software) engineers are considered professions, requiring lengthy and wide-ranging education. The blogpost author is advocating much narrower vocational training in practical topics, which is characteristic of a trade.

Developers are not computer scientists any more than auto mechanics are automotive engineers.

And automotive engineering is not even a scholarly discipline.

Now what's fair? (Actually none of that, given that the problem is usually some kind of inequality and not a kind of qualification.)

Many computer scientists are developers as well. But yes, many developers are just software developers who lack foundational concepts of CS. They often learn the CS concepts gradually while working at a programming job in order to tackle different problems. I believe the author will also appreciate CS education once faced with difficult problems.

I think the point is exactly what you brought up in your car example:

A mechanic is not an engineer is not a physicist.

A developer is not an engineer is not a computer scientist.

The problem is that CS is a young field, who lacks both trade schools (ie, places to train working developers) AND struggles with the engineer/scientist divide within universities.

> What this person wants is a trade school for software developers, which is not unreasonable...

This is a booming business, and indeed billion dollar startups exist just to teach programming and interviewing skills. So, I guess author isn't far off from wanting Universities to also have a similar program.

It is what people assume they are. Nobody does a CS degree for fun, they do it for a job in the field.

Although there are code boot camps and the like, they arent as recognised as unis.