Consider this. “Theory” may consist of anything one reasons about, but we choose to study the theoretical aspects of computing (instead of, say, the theoretical aspects of metallic floating sandwiches). Because of this, teachers who cover a theory are obligated to also eventually demonstrate how that theory can be applied. This is so sensible, it seems obvious.

Now consider this. Every semester, hundreds of thousands of CS students sit in a course that teaches them about operating systems. They learn plenty, and although they themselves might never go on to create an OS, they hope to at least apply their knowledge to other, adjacent tasks.

But in real life, a product as complicated as an operating system is usually created by a whole group of people. Using the reasoning above, isn’t it sensible that students expect from their teachers the practical knowledge that will allow them to contribute to such a group? Doesn’t this go without saying?

1. theory – the backend layer
2. application, projects – the middleware
3. co-op and internship building you to be a better engineer – app layer.

However beautiful the app layer is, if the backend like db design or interaction layers sucks, u r bound to be a failure. Thats why it’s easy (I am generalizing here) for an above avg engineer to become fully rounded prof than some above avg student (above avg, exceptions/anomalies are bound to be found everywhere) from community college learning applications

So I switched to comp sci, and I enjoyed the heck out of it. I ended up taking some graduate level courses even as an undergraduate, and I loved it. I even did an internship in the Financial industry in New York. But that experience at software development just worsened my skills, not improved it. Code that probably will be thrown away the next time someone works on it, a focus more on get things done right now and don’t worry about who will work on this next, because you’ll be mostly gone.

What I’m getting at, is even in the industry, its not taught. For every engineer who’s learnt through experience, there are 10 who just don’t get it. Writing maintainable code is not different from company to company. Follow a few basic tenets, and it works out the same. Sure, there might be style guides and naming conventions, but I am not talking about that. And why should it be that the theoretical and practical aspects of something be separate ? People pay a few thousand dollars for their education, can it not teach them just enough to land them a good job? People complain about the lack of good candidates from college, but when colleges go and teach pure theory and no practical knowledge, what do you expect? Why can’t there be a, say, special track for industry focussed graduates vs academia focussed students? Thats all I’m saying. There has been almost no attempt at this.

I’ll probably do a follow up article to this with an example of what my first code attempt was vs what it should have been. But I love this discussion, thanks for your opinions.

In case it sounds like I’m implying that developer is a “lower class”: I consider it the difference between an architecture degree and a materials science degree. It isn’t the amount, difficulty or the general subject of the schooling, just the focus. Graduates of both programs may end up working on the same building with similar levels of expertise, but each with their own domain, and similarly with CS and Software Engineering.

On a tangential note, could you give an example of what kind of things you had to change? As in why you built it one way, but the the manager needed it another way. Could be a good blog post…