Universities haven't kept up with the pace of change in software development in 1-3 years.

Too many if not most can't even change a single sentence in their curriculum in 1-2 years.

It doesn't mean University isn't worth it, it's worth less if you aren't self-directed learner building things.

Universities never kept up with current practices and to be honest I don’t really think it’s their job to.

Universities aren’t vocational schools. An undergraduate education can, at best, teach you how to learn complex topics independently and give you foundational knowledge you can build upon later whether you’re going into industry, pursuing a PhD, or doing something unrelated.

The place for you to learn “practical” software development is an internship or an entry-level role, assisted with a lot of self-directed learning that hopefully university made possible for you.

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marginalia_nu 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Problem is that programming is as much practice as it is theory. You need years practical programming experience to be good at programming, and universities are really not set up to provide that.

One might argue that it might not be a bad idea to have apprenticeships like they do in traditional trade crafts. I'd argue that this is what the junior programmer role is.

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bee_rider 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is the well known weird thing about programming, right? University students learn CS, happen to also pick up some programming trade skills as a side effect, and then get hired as software craftspeople. The coincidentally learned skills are never quite up to date, just close enough.

But nobody wants to set up programming trade schools or apprenticeships so shrug.

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BoxFour 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Programming trade schools were (are they still?) quite popular for a long time - see lambda school et al.

They weren’t a panacea either.

	▲	ghaff 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I have to imagine those are the people being hit hardest at the moment.

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mschuster91 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Universities haven't kept up with the pace of change in software development in 1-3 years.

Maybe, just maybe, companies should invest into training again instead of outsourcing training to universities and saddle the prospects with the cost in the form of student debt? FFS we used to tell our children "if a job requires you to pay for entry, you're getting scammed" - and yet, we've all accepted it with "academia", "coding bootcamps" and god knows what else.

Universities should be a place for the gifted to advance science, not be degree mills for large companies too goddamn lazy and penny-pinching!

	▲	ghaff 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The problem is we've ended up in this place where most companies don't do a lot of training and employees often don't stick around for more than a couple of years. You can finger point about the chicken and the egg but it's more or less where we've ended up in a lot of cases. Extensive training made a lot more sense where people stuck around for 15-30 years but I expect a lot of people here would find that ludicrous.

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dataplumb3r 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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