<p>As the population skews olderand in many cases fatterthere’s a growing demand for fitness trainers, physical therapists, pre-med students and scholars who study the science of obesity, movement and performance. As a result, few majors on college campuses are growing faster than kinesiology, as the science of exercise is known.</p>
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<p>It’s good to keep an open mind about the value of college majors.</p>
<p>Beliavsky, I like the way your perspective is fluid. </p>
<p>I do often wonder if the 4 years for a diploma are always the right replacement for OJT. Depending on the field, many of us do end up working alongside successful people who have the experience and the skills, but didn’t take that detour.</p>
<p>While philosophy has no direct application to most new graduate jobs, it does indicate that the student can think in both humanistic and logical modes. Not sure how much employers value that, though one would expect that skills in both modes of thinking should be more valuable than skills in either one alone.</p>
<p>All I can say…is I am grateful for any type of intellectual debate that promotes civility, listening and learning from someone with a different point of view. You never know what you may learn on any given day. Be open to knowledge.</p>
<p>Many better companies do ask interviewees to write simple programs on the spot. It’s widely known that most typical new CS graduates can’t write code worth beans – some claim that 99% of them can’t: </p>
<p>Why? Among other reasons, CS classes are too full of theory, the information taught may be out of date, project assignments are narrow and unchallenging and creativity is often discouraged.</p>
<p>On the spot assumes the resume got past the hundreds or thousands that applied and got an interview. Once in a while I see CS jobs that ask for code samples but one might as well attach /usr/lib/stdio.h :). Many of the art/design jobs require samples right off the bat, which likely makes it ‘easier’ to weed out candidates.</p>
<p>Most people can’t code for the same reason most people can’t paint watercolor lillies or sculpt or what not. The selection process that puts a six-pack worth of drawings is a lot quicker. I’ve done my share of hiring newbies and the days of full day or half day interviews are over, now it’s all a phone first, then an hour or two at most. (why bother?)</p>
<p>I would like to thank idad for an excellent article. If I were to summarize it, I would simply quote the following:</p>
<p>*The long and the short of it is that there is no instrumental reason to get an education, to study in your courses, or to pick a concentration and lose yourself in it. It wont get you anything you wont get anyway or get some other way. So forget everything you ever thought about all these instrumental reasons for getting an education. The reason for getting an education is that it is better to be educated than not to be. *</p>
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<p>Up in my part of the woods, women from the upper classes tend to major in art history or French. As far as the men go I really dont know I guess I never paid any attention to them.</p>
<p>That Andrew Abbott speech is a beautiful exposition of the educational philosophy of what is increasingly looking like the ancien regime. It was effectively a coalition of intellectuals with a deep love of Western Culture and voracious, multi-disciplinary intellectual curiosity, who made all of what we consider the elite universities what they are today. (Contrary to popular imagination, there is not a lot of connection between today’s Harvard and that of 1636, or even that of 1836. Modern elite universities were essentially constructed from the 1870s on, which is why newbies like Stanford and Chicago were able to become prominent so quickly.)</p>
<p>As Alan Bloom (then a professor at the University of Chicago) wrote in the 1987 bestseller “Closing of the American Mind”, the universities are no longer filled with a “coalition of intellectuals with a deep love of Western Culture”. An update published this year is “The Victims’ Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind” by Bruce Bawer.</p>
<p>My brother’s company always gives a programming test before he hires anyone and I know my son was given tests at Google and I think for all his summer internship interviews as well.</p>
<p>Allan Bloom and Bruce Bawer are full of it. They don’t get to legislate where a deep love of Western culture leads you and how it gets expressed. It’s not identity studies that threatens the old values, it’s finance and hospitality services majors, and the notion that engineering is so important students don’t have to know anything else.</p>
<p>Programming tests are not exactly what I would consider good ways to select candidates unless they’re back office coders and the like (i.e. offshore or soon to be). Mrs. Turbo works daily with offshore resources that would ace any programming test you could throw at them, but require handholding navigating the ‘business knowledge’ unknown…</p>
<p>The difficult part is to find ‘good’ programmers and engineers, not separate those who are the wannabes from the ones who have a decent grasp of what they’re doing. It’s a lot harder than one thinks, and over the years I’ve hired a good number of people and only a couple ended up being clowns :)</p>
<p>Ummm, from what I remember of CS courses, upper division courses (other than the theory courses, but most courses were not theory courses) included programming assignments and projects for students to put the theory into practice. For example, in the compiler course, a series of programming assignments produced a compiler for simple source and target languages by the end of the semester. Looks like it still does (see the projects): [CS164:</a> Programming Languages and Compilers, Fall 2012](<a href=“http://www-inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs164/fa12/]CS164:”>CS164: Programming Languages and Compilers, Fall 2012) .</p>
<p>Compiler class is no longer a pillar for CS programs. In the old time, compiler, data structures, operating system were core CS classes. They are not now (except data structures). There are lots more to cover in undergraduate CS programs now: software engineering, object oriented design, design patterns, security, system performance, human interface design,… plus a slew of modern computer application topics.</p>
<p>While the compiler course has decreased in importance these days (particularly for those going to industry, as opposed to grad school), data structures is a typical lower division CS course a CS major must take as a prerequisite to upper division CS courses, and operating systems is often still considered a core CS course (since every computer program you write interacts with the operating system). But these, and the other courses you mention, should include programming assignments and projects.</p>
<p>Too much theory? That’s odd considering one common problem some past workplaces I’ve worked in and friends at household name computer technology firms complained about is that too many CS programs don’t bundle ENOUGH theory alongside the programming courses. </p>
<p>That’s great if you’re looking to be an average code monkey for the rest of your life. However, that’s not viable if you’re looking not only to advance, but to remain employed in the industry considering an increasing number of entry-level coding jobs have been off-shored. </p>
<p>On the other hand, if you want to advance and continue in the field…theory and knowing how to work in multiple operating system environments(especially the Unices) alongside good coding skills are all critical for long-term career success in those workplaces.</p>
<p>Well of course theory can be extremely useful when combined with hard practical experience in actual coding – just like knowing how a math formula is derived can aid in a better understanding of how to use that formula with more complex problems. But generic theory lectures with tests that require you to regurgitate the professor’s words don’t lead to much insight.</p>
<p>My gut feeling is that the elite schools that are known for CS and attract the top professors in the field do an outstanding job of teaching CS. But your average non-flagship state school doesn’t have the resources or the reputation to hire the creative cutting-edge thinkers that will best educate their students. My older son has a CS degree from the state college nearby and tells me frankly that he learned a lot more CS while coding an online role-playing game – and patching security hacks – than he ever did in the classroom. My younger son, however, is taking CS at Brown and his instructor and TAs strongly encourage creativity and going “above and beyond” just for the joy of knowing how. Very, very different environments!</p>
<p>I haven’t read the previous pages so my comments might be off the topic. Based on what I read on this page, I have a few comments. </p>
<p>Right now CS is still an emerging field and there are openings for people who write the software given the specification/requirements (I would call it “technician equivalent” ). There are a lot more of these openings these days and may continue to be the case mostly because we always need more people implementing. Good software people who can write with fewer “bugs” and faster will always be prized. </p>
<p>If a person’s goal is to be a programmer, theory classes may seem like wasting time. But college is also teaching a person to be able to independently learn new “things” and that’s where I believe the theory classes and the push to find out creative solutions helps a lot. It is not only important to know “how-to”, it is also important to find out “why” that “how-to” works, the theory classes provide that.</p>
<p>My experience with some top professors is that generally they’re way too busy talking about themselves in class to teach anything. There are exceptions but for every world class professor I’ve had that could teach goldfish to solve differential equations there has been one - or more - world class professors that pretty much would have the school’s marching band walk in front of them and sit in during lecture accompanying the lectures…</p>
<p>Don’t get me wrong, theory is good, but even back then the official Pravda of computerdom, Communications of the ACM, got to the point that the majority of articles looked like someone practicing equations on TeX. This incredible disconnect between theory and practice has not helped in my opinion. </p>
<p>Computer Science is all learning by doing - if one does not have the curiosity to do things outside of assignments, just because, then they’ll be decent coders but they won’t be coding the next Halo or the next Visual Studio or what not. The best thing the school can do is offer good, challenging assignments, decent faculty that is doing interesting stuff, and good facilities. </p>
<p>In my (again, biased) view, the problem with theory is that it works great in small problems, but fails miserably in real life. All the theory in the world and even the ghost of Dijkstra helping me out won’t make up for some junior offshore resource that ‘fixed’ my code by changing a data type from enum to bitmap without thinking. A week later, I’m still fixing.</p>