This thread on Hacker News terrifies me

[Nick Sabalausky (Abscissa)]

On 08/31/2018 07:20 PM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> 
> The problem is that there is a disconnect between academia and the
> industry.
> 
> The goal in academia is to produce new research, to find ground-breaking
> new theories that bring a lot of recognition and fame to the institution
> when published. It's the research that will bring in the grants and
> enable the institution to continue existing. As a result, there is heavy
> focus on the theoretical concepts, which are the basis for further
> research, rather than pragmatic tedium like how to debug a program.
> 

I don't know where you've been but it doesn't match anything I've ever seen.

Everything I've ever seen: The goal in academia is to advertise 
impressive-looking rates for graduation and job placement. This 
maximizes the size of the application pool which, depending on the 
school, means one of two things:

1. More students paying ungodly tuition rates. Thus making the schools 
and their administrators even richer. (Pretty much any public liberal 
arts school.)

or

2. Higher quality students (defined by the school as "more likely to 
graduate and more likely to be placed directly in a job"), thus earning 
the school the right to demand an even MORE ungodly tuition from the 
fixed-size pool of students they accept. Thus making the schools and 
their administrators even richer. (Pretty much any private liberal arts 
school.)

Achieving the coveted prize of "We look attractive to applicants" involves:

First: As much of a revolving-door system as they can get away with 
without jeopardizing their accreditation.

And secondly: Supplementing the basic Computer Science theory with 
awkward, stumbling, half-informed attempts at placating the industry's 
brain-dead, know-nothing HR monkeys[1] with the latest hot trends. For 
me, at the time, that meant Java 2 and the "Thou must OOP, for OOP is 
all" religion.

[1] "I don't know anything about programming, but I'm good at 
recognizing people who are good at it."  <-- A real quote from a real HR 
monkey I once made the mistake of attempting basic communication with.

But then, let's not forget that schools have HR, too. Which leads to 
really fun teachers like the professor I had for a Computer Networking 
class:

He had a PhD in Computer Science. He would openly admit that C was the 
only language he knew. Ok, fair enough so far. But...upon my explaining 
to him how he made a mistake grading my program, I found *myself* forced 
to teach the *Computer Science professor* how strings 
(remember...C...null-terminated) worked in the *only* language he knew. 
He had NO freaking clue! A freakin' CS PhD! Forget "theory vs practical" 
- if you do not know the *fundamental basics* of EVEN ONE language, then 
you *CANNOT* function in even the theoretical or research realms, or 
teach it. Computer science doesn't even *exist* without computer 
programming! Oh, and this, BTW, was a school that pretty much any 
Clevelander will tell you "Oh! Yea, that's a really good school, it has 
a fantastic reputation!" Compared to what? Ohio State Football University?