This thread on Hacker News terrifies me

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Friday, August 31, 2018 5:20:08 PM MDT H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d 
wrote:
> A consequence of this disconnect is that the incentives are set up all
> wrong.  Professors are paid to publish research papers, not to teach
> students.  Teaching is often viewed as an undesired additional burden
> you're obligated to carry out, a chore that you just want to get over
> with in the fastest, easiest possible way, so that you can go back to
> doing research.  After all, it's the research that will win you the
> grants, not the fact that you won teaching awards 3 years in a row, or
> that your students wrote a glowing review of your lectures. So the
> quality of teaching already suffers.

The are plenty of cases where the teachers actually do an excellent job
teaching the material that the courses cover. It's just that the material is
often about theoretical computer science - and this is actually stuff that
can be very beneficial to becoming an excellent programmer. However, many
teachers really aren't great programmers. They aren't necessarily bad
programmers, but unless they spent a bunch of time in industry before
teaching, odds are that they don't have all of the software engineering
skills that the students are going to need once they get into the field. And
most courses aren't designed to teach students the practical skills. How
that goes exactly depends on the school, with some schools actually trying
to integrate software engineering stuff, but many really don't. So, even if
the schools do an excellent job teaching what they're trying to teach, it
still tends to be on the theoretical side of things. But that may be
improving. Still, the theoretical side is something that programmers should
be learning. It's just that it isn't enough on its own, and it serves more
as a good foundation than as the set of skills that you're going to be using
directly on the job on a day to day basis.

The school I went to (Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo) at least tries to focus on
the practical side of things (their motto is "learn by doing"), and when I
went there, they even specifically had a Software Engineering degree where
you had to take a year-long course where you did a project in a team for a
company. But at least at the time, the big difference between the SE and CS
degrees was that they required more classes with group work and fewer
theoretical classes, and there certainly weren't any classes on something
like debugging. The software engineering-centric classes focused more on a
combination of teaching stuff like classic design patterns and then having
you do projects in groups. And that was helpful, but it still didn't really
prepare you for what you were going to be doing in your full-time job. It's
still better than what a lot of schools do though. I'm frequently shocked by
how little many CS graduates know when they first get out of school.

- Jonathan M Davis