The courses that introduce big-O are often the weeder courses, they don't aim to education, they aim to flunk out the people that might be hard to teach so that CS departments can gate keep.
When you have top CS researchers having to give talks to remind people that layout matters more than instruction selection, the CS as a whole has focused on the wrong things.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7g1Acy5eGbE
Figure how to build people up, not tear them down.
That is an often re-iterated conspiracy theory. In practice nothing could be further from the truth. Professors have nothing to gain from weeding out students. They have to gain by ensuring a certain standard. By the way it is also better for a student to encounter the difficult parts of their subject as early as possible, so that they can decide whether they have chosen their subject wisely. On the other hand, not failing students on fundamentals means complicating advanced subjects even further --- for everybody.
At some point in life students have to accept that neither their time in university nor their time in the industry will consist only of externally motivating tiny bites of tasks that are awesome. In order to understand complicated matters, you have to put in the work. Spending hours in the gym is also quite boring, but most people accepts that it is necessary for certain results.
I've been involved with undergrad teaching in a University. And the amount of time we spend on finding ways to teach and test better was way more than I could have expected as a student myself. On the other hand I couldn't have imagined the arrogance and sometimes stupidity of first year student claiming to know already what they will need in there career and what not.
So much to unpack there. Some rhetorical hyperbole, other false dichotomy and we are both arguing from anecdote.
Weeder courses exist and as you even admit, they aren't solely meant to educate. That is the point. Anything that is designed to test students resolve as well as not waste professors time is not designed to educate, it is designed to reduce the size and shape of the student population. I applaud that CS departments are adding more and more courses for non-majors. But lets look at the syllabus for a 10 week quarter for the first UW CS course, Foundations of Computing [1] which also expects the students to layout their homework (proofs) in LaTex. Jesus. This is mostly a hazing ritual. In my 3 minute sampling of Reddit, most CS students rank 311 as the hardest course in the major and it is the first. [2]
> At some point in life students have to accept that neither their time in university nor their time in the industry will consist only of externally motivating tiny bites of tasks that are awesome.
I never said anything of the sort, you putting words in my mouth.
[1] https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse311/21sp/
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/udub/comments/cdb5kp/cse_311_cse_33...
Your argument might make more sense if 311 were the first CS course, but it's not. You can easily verify that by looking at the course listings which reveals it has a prereq, CSE143, which has a prereq of CSE142. So short of skipping those, it's the third course at the earliest.
311 is the first course of the major and is also by the sample of folks in the reddit discussion also the hardest, covering the most advanced material in the shortest amount of time. It is a weeder course for the major. The 100 level classes are open to everyone.
Also probably a part of a course many people snooze through.