blog: Overlooked Essentials for Optimizing Code (Software Engineering degrees)

[Bruno Medeiros]

On 25/10/2010 23:09, Diego Cano Lagneaux wrote:
> En Mon, 25 Oct 2010 13:22:02 +0200, Bruno Medeiros
> <brunodomedeiros+spam at com.gmail> escribió:
>
>> On 22/10/2010 15:56, Diego Cano Lagneaux wrote:
>>>> Well, you think wrongly. :)
>>>> If you look at the top universities worldwide, the majority of them
>>>> have only one "computer programming" undergraduate degree. Sometimes
>>>> it is called "Computer Science" (typical in the US), other times it is
>>>> called "Computer Engineering", "Informatics Engineering", "Software
>>>> Engineering", "Informatics Science" or something like that (typical in
>>>> Europe), but despite the different names they are essentially the
>>>> same: courses designed to _teach and educate future software
>>>> engineers_.
>>>
>>> I must nuance: as an European* "Informatics (and Applied Maths**)
>>> engineer", I can say this degree is not 'Software engineer' but indeed
>>> 'whole computer engineer' as we studied both software and hardware, to
>>> the point of building a complete (simulated) processor.
>>> Furthermore, I can't recall they told us about profiling tools, but it
>>> was 10 years ago and I skiped a few classes, so it means nothing.
>>>
>>
>> Which degree did 'Software engineers' take then?
>>
> Well, depends of what you mean by "Software engineer". They could take a
> 3 years 'informatics' degree, which is not an engineering degree (even
> if it's called 'technical engineering in Spain) but is perfect for
> coders, or take the full 'informatics engineering' and just specialize
> later (or forget everything they don't need), for a more general and
> advanced degree.

Yeah, I meant the longer, more comprehensive degree (which like you said 
is usually 5 years long in continental Europe).

But yeah, you are right, these courses are not just for software 
engineers, but also other related areas (computer/hardware engineering, 
IT/systems administration, MIS). That was the case in my university, one 
would specialize in one of these areas in the last 2 years (of the 5 
year degree program).


> In most Europe, Engineering is always a 5 years (masters) degree,
> oriented to big project developers who'll (supposedly) lead teams. I've
> heard it's different in the Anglosaxon systems.

Whoa! :o
Shit, I'm going to go on a big tangent here, but I'm very surprised to 
again hear that notion that the 5 year CS/Engineering degrees in Europe 
are for "big project developers who'll (supposedly) lead teams.".
In my university (which, btw, is widely regarded as the best 
technical/engineering school in Portugal), that idea was often mentioned 
by some of the "senior" students in my degree. The details of their 
opinions varied, but generally some of them seemed to think that our 
graduates would soon become project managers and/or software architects 
in the workforce, whereas most of the programming and grunt work would 
be left to the "trolhas": the lowly developers who took the subprime 3 
year "practical" courses in other universities/polytechnics. ("Trolha" 
is Portuguese slang for a bricklayer, or also any guy who does 
construction work... see the metaphor here?)

Obviously I found this whole idea to be complete nonsense. Not that I 
didn't agree that the CS/E graduates from our degree were much better 
(on average) than the graduates from those 3 or 4 year CS/E courses, but 
rather the stupid notion that it would be perfectly fine (and ideal) for 
a software team to have one or two good software engineers as project 
leaders/managers/architects, and the rest to be "code monkeys"... These 
seniors students were completely blind to the importance of having the 
majority of your developers be good, smart developers (even if junior ones).
One or two of such seniors even went so far as to comment that 
programming itself was a lowly task, for "trolhas" only... we the 
Engineers might program in the first 2-3 years after entering the 
workplace, but we would gradually move to a architure/design role in 
enterprise and soon would not need program anymore... [end of quote, and 
you could feel in these comments how much this guy really disliked 
programming... ]
Man, my eyes went cartoonishly wide open when I read this. How 
incredibly deluded this guy was... :S

But the whole surprising thing is, I wasn't expecting this kind of 
attitude in other countries, I thought this was somewhat isolated in 
Portugal... a mix of personal delusion (derived from the fact that 
actually these guys sucked at programming, or anything else useful), 
combined with a still lingering non-meritocratic class arrogance in 
Portuguese society. Nobility may be long gone, but there are a lot of 
people in Portugal who like to put themselves about other people, and 
having a degree (especially with title-conferring degrees, which 
engineering degrees are btw) is a very common excuse for people trying 
to make themselves look superior, (even if their degree was crappy, or 
they sucked at it).


-- 
Bruno Medeiros - Software Engineer