alt Hacker NewsI'm an external examiner for CS students in Denmark and I disagree with you. What we need in the industry is software engineers who can think for themselves, can interact with the business and understand it's needs, and, they need to know how computers work. What we get are mass produced coders who have been taught some outdated way of designing and building software that we need to hammer out of them. I don't particularily care if people can write code like they work at the assembly line. I care that they can identify bottlenecks and solve them. That they can deliver business value quickly. That they will know when to do abstractions (which is almost never). Hell, I'd even like developers who will know when the code quality doesn't matter because shitty code will cost $2 a year but every hour they spend on it is $100-200.
Your curriculum may be different than it is around here, but here it's frankly the same stuff I was taught 30 years ago. Except most of the actual computer science parts are gone, replaced with even more OOP, design pattern bullshit.
That being said. I have no idea how you'd actually go about teaching students CS these days, considering a lot of them will probably use ChatGPT or Claude regardless of what you do. That is what I see in the statistic for grades around here. For the first 9 years I was a well calibrated grader, but these past 1,5ish years it's usually either top marks or bottom marks with nothing in between. Which puts me outside where I should be, but it matches the statistical calibration for everyone here. I obviously only see the product of CS educations, but even though I'm old, I can imagine how many corners I would have cut myself if I had LLM's available back then. Not to mention all the distractions the internet has brought.
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> That being said. I have no idea how you'd actually go about teaching students CS these days, considering a lot of them will probably use ChatGPT or Claude regardless of what you do.
My son is in a CS school in France. They have finals with pen and paper, with no computer whatsoever during the exam; if they can't do that they fail. And these aren't multiple choice questions, but actual code that they have to write.
Let them use AI and then fall on their faces during exam time - simple as that. If you can't recall the theory, paradigm, methodology, whatever by memory then you have not "mastered" the content and thus, should fail the class.
> That they will know when to do abstractions
The only way to learn when abstractions are needed is to write code, hit a dead end, then try and abstract it. Over and over. With time, you will be able to start seeing these before you write code.
AI does not do abstractions well. From my experience, it completely fails to abstract anything unless you tell it to. Even when similar abstractions are already present. If you never learn when an abstraction is needed, how can you guide an AI to do the same well?
> I'm an external examiner for CS students
> Hell, I'd even like developers who will know when the code quality doesn't matter because shitty code will cost $2 a year but every hour they spend on it is $100-200.
> Except most of the actual computer science parts are gone, replaced with even more OOP, design pattern bullshit.
Maybe you should consider a different career, you sound pretty burnt out. There are terrible takes, especially for someone who is supposed to be fostering the next generation of developers.
Ah, see, you're outside of the US.
In the US education has been bastardized into "job training"
Good workers don't really need to think in this paradigm.
> I don't particularily care if people can write code like they work at the assembly line. I care [...] That they can deliver business value quickly.
In my experience, people who talk about business value expect people to code like they work at the assembly line. Churn out features, no disturbances, no worrying about code quality, abstractions, bla bla.
To me, your comment reads contradictory. You want initiative, and you also don't want initiative. I presume you want it when it's good and don't want it when it's bad, and if possible the people should be clairvoyant and see the future so they can tell which is which.