“But we refuse to train those students after school or allow them to go back to college for free.”
I remember my microcontroller course professor telling us that if we just wanted to learn how to program assembly for microcontrollers, we could just pick up a book and skip the class.
Instead, he intended to teach us problem solving with microcontrollers.
The class was based around the Intel 8085 architecture, and this was in 2010. When I left the class, I started trying to make things using 8085s and assembly. These chips were so old, they needed external memory and flash storage to operate.
Anyway, I eventually learned about the larger microcontroller world; writing C; 32bit processors, real-time debugging, etc.
Understanding the fundamental goings on of assembly has been helpful, but it was only ever a building block.
That’s exactly not what is meant here.
If “learning 8085 assembly” only prepared you to program 8085 assembly and do exclusively that, you missed the entire point of higher education. Being able to generalize knowledge and applying it to other fields and specialisations is what is being taught. Not just following a tutorial.
Are we not reading the same post? That was exactly their point.
Reading comprehension. Are we still doing that?
The important skills haven’t changed in awhile.
Version control still works the same overall.
The concept of CI/CD are still just as important.
Understanding A/A/A for unit testing is still the same.
All the useful patterns are just as useful.
All the same antipatterns are just as important to watch out for.
Largely speaking while languages may evolve, the core foundational principles of how to write Good Clean Code remains the same.
See I’m ahead of the curve; I didn’t learn anything in college
I thought my data structures class was useful. A few others were interesting. But other than that, no, Java development was not useful to anyone’s daily life.
no, Java development was not useful to anyone’s daily life.
You’ve never worked with the US Federal Government. For every software problem the Government has, there is a Java application written to make your life a living hell trying to solve that problem. It’s also even odds on said application requiring a version of Java which is about a decade old and it just mysteriously breaks with anything newer.
I think that was supposed to be my daily life. Not sure what happened between brain and fingers there. Java development was probably useful to some of my classmates.
Haven’t they been saying this since the early 2000s?
Funny story time, intentionally vague to shield identities:
I have a friend who was hired to teach a course at a local University for their new CS degree that had a focus on video games some while ago. He was a bit of an expert in a particular portion of the material that they needed, and when they started putting out feelers to find someone to teach the subject matter, everyone locally in the industry gave him the highest praise and said he was the man for the job. The University met with him and eventually selected him to teach, which he did for 3 semesters. After 3 semesters, they dropped him because he didn’t himself have a college degree in what he was teaching (which was something he made very clear in the hiring process.)
He went into making games straight out of high school, he was basically there at the ground floor, self taught, acknowledged by everyone in the industry locally as a foremost expert in the field where they had him teaching, and they couldn’t keep him because they couldn’t have him teach when he didn’t have a degree in the field. Without his having a degree their program couldn’t be accredited. So… They wanted him to have a degree in a subject he was an originator of and without that degree they had to drop him.
He makes financial software now because the games industry was/is brutal and he wanted to see his family now and then. I’ve always found it hilarious that a University had to let him go because otherwise the snake wasn’t eating its own tail and the ouroboros apparently can’t have that.
The obsolete skills they are learning are “prompt engineer”.
If some piece of knowledge or skill becomes obsolete in less than 4 years from its inception than it was not important in the first place.
I think the article should focus on how everyone or most people at work do keep up with the times. At least when I learned my teachers understood this issue and focused on providing a good theoretical foundation on which you can build on, the particular technologies are just examples of what’s available at the time when you are being educated, it’s not the actual focus of the education.
Applies to many fields. Studied translation at university and, kudos to the head teacher, he kept saying we worked on current software for illustration but the point was to learn transverse skills to apply to whatever tools are trendy once on the market. Turns out I work in a firm working outdated software older than my uni did. But I always agreed with the dude, we’ll have to adapt or die as businesses.
