Comments on: Most of our CS students suck at CS

By: -= Linkage 2007.01.23 =-

-= Linkage 2007.01.23 =- — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 15:39:39 +0000

[...] CS students suck at CS
These people are extrinsically motivated, and while there’s nothing wrong with wanting a decent job that might make you an unlikely bazillionaire that wanting isn’t going to make you a competent computing scientist. [...]

By: Mark Brandsey

Mark Brandsey — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 00:30:41 +0000

Is it not cliche to always think the generations beneath us are worse than we are. I think software today is a testament to how far we have progressed. Modern systems are much more advanced than anything 10 to 25 years ago and all built by, in your opinion sucky CS students. I’m amazed by how many people think the days of EMACS and VI in UNIX were somehow a testament to being a REAL PROGRAMMER. You can remember all that Automata crap that was shoved down our throats in college, I’m perfectly happy making money.

By: Sp3w

Sp3w — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 14:10:18 +0000

[...] CS students suck at CS These people are extrinsically motivated, and while there’s nothing wrong with wanting a decent job that might make you an unlikely bazillionaire that wanting isn’t going to make you a competent computing scientist. [...]

By: bluntobject

bluntobject — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 06:40:58 +0000

I shall reply to these comments in reverse chronological order.

Ted: I’m amused that you think I’m writing about American universities. I’ve been complaining about Canadian CS standards lately. (Oh, and you ought to re-read your stats textbooks; the normal distribution doesn’t hold for all statistical populations.)

In any case, I believe you’ve willfully missed my point.

Mr. Diedrich: This ain’t my CSS. You’re welcome to buy me some wordpress.com credits if you’d like me to change it. Still, thanks for your comment; I’ll keep an eye out for a more strongly contrasting (free) theme if I can find one that doesn’t look like ass.

Reid: I favour teaching assembly language (something sane; perhaps 68k) and straight C in the first and maybe second years, followed by Common Lisp and Haskell.

TK: Thanks for your insights, but if you weren’t intrinsically drawn to CS you really oughtn’t speak for those who were. I’m glad to hear that you’ve found an interest in the subject, though.

Adam: Maybe this is just my happy fantasy world leaping out of my brain onto my keyboard, but I imagine that those who are drawn to Fog Creek are less interested in developing FogBugz and more interested in working in an environment where their talents are recognized and catered to.

Mike: I’m pleased to hear that you found a vocation which you don’t hate. Best of luck with your endeavours.

JR: There are plenty of tech colleges around which do exactly that. One of the themes of my rant (which everyone seems to have missed; my fault) is that it’s better to do that at which you excel than to try to wedge yourself into a discipline which you despise.

Thanks for showing up, though, folks; I hope you stick around for the politics. (Except you, “ted”: die in a fire.)

By: ted

ted — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 06:24:49 +0000

It’s more like why America sucks at education.

You guys have elite universities, good universities, okay universities and TONS of not-so-good universities.

These not-so-good universities keep popping up bad students.

Besides, what do you expect? everybody to get an A? Bell-shaped curve, bell… bell.. bell..

But anyhow, let’s substitute “CS students suck at CS” with “Most software company sucks except Google, Microsoft, FogCreek” then you’ll figure out that all of us work at a sucky company (^_^)

By: Jack Diederich

Jack Diederich — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 00:02:57 +0000

Light gray text on a white background. This looks nice with lorem ipsum at the design stage but is *ahem* not ideal otherwise.

By: Reid

Reid — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 21:33:12 +0000

I think the best move for a CS curriculum would be to move it towards something almost entirely theoretical. First programming course in something like Smalltalk or Pascal, subsequent courses using LISP and Haskell. Lots of algorithms, math, design and engineering, absolutely NO “practical stuff”. Then, offer a one year after-degree program on current technologies.

This way, graduates come out with the required theoretical knowledge and some experience with things that aren’t four years old.

By: Adam

Adam — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 17:53:04 +0000

Oh, BTW, I do agree with the rest of your article. Today’s graduating CS population should only exist as a limited elite subset of what it actually is. However, computing will inevitably become more and more ubiquitous, and we’ll need to deal with more technical problems. Thus, I’m not interested in growing the number of people who graduate with CS degrees, but rather, finding those potentially excellent CS students who were detracted from CS and went on to study physics, engineering, piano tuning, motorcycle maintenance, or what have you. There are many approaches to make CS more appealing to the mainstream–from books like Freakonomics for CS or WYSIWYG application- or game-development tools for kids and non-technical folks. If you have ideas, I’d like to hear them.

By: TK

TK — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 17:49:06 +0000

I agree, except on “the irony of all this is that it’s at best a sideshow to the people who’re inexorably drawn to computing science”. I wasn’t drawn to CS until I took some CS courses in university. Only afterwards I have realized how shallow the CS education really was. So, it is not a sideshow, it is a very sad proposition to those who perhaps naively believe the university CS education as a way to get started in CS.

By: Adam

Adam — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 17:46:12 +0000

Are really good programmers really trying to get jobs at Fog Creek? Don’t get me wrong–I am a big fan of Spolsky’s writing–but surely, there are more interesting problems to be solved than writing bug-tracking software in .NET?