alt Hacker NewsIf that's "the idea", then clearly we need a more holistic, useful degree to replace CS as "the" software degree.
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The degree is (should be) about CS fundamentals and not today's hotness. Maybe a "trades" diploma in CS could teach today's hotness.
Cloud computing is not some new fundamental area of computer science. It’s just virtual CPUs with networks and storage. My CS degree from 1987 is still working just fine in the cloud, because we learned about CPUs, virtualization, networks, and storage. They’re all a lot bigger and faster, with different APIs, but so what?
Devops isn’t even a thing, it’s just a philosophy for doing ops. Ops is mostly state management, observability, and designing resilient systems, and we learned about those too in 1987. Admittedly there has been a lot of progress in distributed systems theory since then, but a CS degree is still where you’ll find it.
School is typically the only time in your life that you’ll have the luxury of focusing on learning the fundamentals full time. After that, it’s a lot slower and has to be fit into the gaps.
There has to be a balance of practical skills and theory in a useful degree, and most CS curricula are built that way. It should not be all about random hot tech because that always changes. You can easily learn tech from tutorials, because the tech is simple compared to theory. Theory is also important to be able to judge the merits of different technology and software designs.
Despite what completely uninformed people may think, the field "computer science" is not about software development. It's a branch of mathematics. If you want an education in software development, those are offered by trade schools.