But maybe it's good that you were taught how to become a software engineer. My guess is that 90-95% of CS grads will actually work as software engineers.
But, a question if I may: How good of a software engineering training was the CS degree? Would a real software engineering degree have done a better job?
In my opinion, it was pretty bad. We didn't get to write much code after CS 101, and we only had one group project in a class that I cannot remember - so there wasn't much opportunity to learn how to develop in a collaborative environment.
What this meant for me is that I learned on the job, and my first job was at a very small PHP/JS shop where I learned some very bad habits that I didn't know were bad habits at the time.
I think a software engineering degree would have been significantly more useful, and I don't think the CS portion of it would have had to suffer much. I think the college even offered that degree at the time; I'm not sure why I didn't switch.
Yes he is; he put "You can't do good work with bad tools" in bold.
> Also big disagree on the final statement of the article. CS is not a vocational major, nor should it be. There are plenty of good post-secondary schools that focus on writing code and the tools you use to do so; CS curricula should not be focused on producing programmers, it should be focused on producing computer scientists. The recent insistence that we turn CS programs into job-mills is one of the big reasons for declining quality in my opinion, my local university CS program was recently told to "push more people through" and to make the curriculum "less theoretical" and more "career oriented". If you want that kind of stuff, go to a career college.
Colleges should make this distinction clearer as well. I got a CS degree, and my belief was that I was being taught how to become a software engineer.