OT: CS education gone wrong (Was: Re: TDD is BS?)

[Wyatt]

On Friday, 21 June 2013 at 05:59:00 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> In spite of it all, though, we still sometimes end up hiring 
> people who,
> 6 months down the road, write code that makes you scratch your 
> head
> going "huh?! that genius coder we hired wrote *this* junk?!". 
> But maybe
> some hiring managers are less discerning than others. *shrug*
>
In my (admittedly U.S.-centric) experience: if you're getting 
people who know how to use external libraries, what a debugger 
is, more than one programming language (or, indeed, any language 
other than Java), and any form of source control at all, I'm 
afraid you're hitting among the cream of the crop as far as CS 
baccalaureates go.  And if you want them to admin a box at the 
same time, good luck with that.  You're often better off with a 
passionate dropout if you're interested in hiring someone to 
write code.

My hypothesis is this happens because the curricula are heavily 
skewed toward theoretical aspects of computer science. (In my 
view, the exemplar for this was OSU before they axed the 
mandatory RESOLVE/C++ series.)

Cheers,
Wyatt