Re:University of Florida guts computer science department in...
by kls on Monday April 23, 2012 @02:56PM
(#3880362)
I don't believe the poster is wrong per say, I believe that their perspective may be colored by their experience. There are a lot of schools out their teaching their CS and IT degrees like an expensive vocational school. Sure the top schools with research centers are teaching theory that stands the test of time, but many of the lesser schools are teaching Intro to Java and Business Math for Programming. For these schools the poster is correct, a 6 month vocational course would be cheaper and would probably put a student in the market, better equipped, than a 4 year degree that started out with a mid-lifecycle language to start.
Re:University of Florida guts computer science department in...
by cantankerous on Monday April 23, 2012 @03:05PM
(#3880409)
CS != IT. I think a lot of people have begun to think that it is. The core difference is that the foundations of CS change at about the same pace as a discipline like Formal Logic from Philosophy/Mathematics (that's where CS has a lot of formal roots). IT's core varies a lot more, as it's a younger discipline with less formal and more varied roots than Computer Science. Granted, this is all ideals, there are bad CS programs that teach you the wrong stuff, and there are stellar IT programs that teach you to change with the times, but, ideally speaking the two are quite dissimilar in their foundations.
Re:University of Florida guts computer science department in...
by kls on Monday April 23, 2012 @03:09PM
(#3880434)
I apologize if it appears that I implied that it was, that was not my intent. My intent was to highlight that their are bad CS and IT programs out there, and that may be what is coloring the perspective of the original poster.
Re:University of Florida guts computer science department in...
by cantankerous on Monday April 23, 2012 @03:19PM
(#3880483)
Nah, consider it "supporting-commentary" to you. It was more about the original post referring to the shelf-life of programs.
First off, at any decent school the CS curriculum focuses on theory and other things that are relatively slow changing. Big O theory, language parsing, etc are absolutely just as relevant now as they were 10 years ago.
Second, it is asinine to suggest that people with CS degrees don't get interesting jobs. In the end, people with good degrees just have access to a superset of the jobs available to someone who skipped school. Both can be hackers who make cool web apps, or iPhone apps, etc. But only one has the ability to go to Google or Facebook and work with machine learning algorithms. Or go to Apple and work on the iOS platform. Or go to Pixar and build the guts of their rendering engine. That's the value of a degree - there are a lot of really awesome jobs that are very likely out of reach for you having never gone to school for CS.