Off base!

Weblog:		What would you put in a Computer Science Curriculum?
Subject:		Off base!
Date:		2005-09-11 18:46:10
From:		Dr.C.

I am a computer science professor at a regional state university in the U.S.A. I want to take exception with some of the attitudes expressed in Mr. Zambonini's blog. I think Mr. Zambonini is looking for the wrong thing in a graduate and potential employee. Like many employers, he is looking for a student who has been trained in the specific skills his firm uses and needs, and is not finding these skills in CS graduates. Such employers seem to think that university education is supposed to be about training. Sorry. It's not. Morons can be trained. Universities are about education. Another problem with Mr. Zambonini's critique is that it assumes that all firms desire the same skills as his firm does. At my university, many of our graduates go into IS, some go into design of embedded systems, and others do AI programming for commercial robotic systems. Lots go into Web design. One of our graduates is even doing PL/I programming for a major insurance company. How does he propose that we make all these companies happy? Make our bachelor's degree program seven years long? Only about the top 5% or 10% in intelligence can survive a CS major at any reputable university. If you hire a CS graduate, you are hiring intelligence. In four years, there is no way we can train a students in all the skills you are looking for, and, even if we did, by the time they graduate a good chunk of that training would be obsolete or inadequate. However, an intelligent CS graduate can learn virtually any skill you want, and in surprisingly little time, too. By the way, at my university we also have majors in IS and IT. Many of these students have been taught the skills you have asked for, but they are generally not as smart as CS majors, and if you really are doing interesting and complex stuff, you will be happier in the long run with a CS graduate. If your usual university is not giving you the quality of graduate you need, I'd guess that the problem is not the CS major, it's the university. Try another one! By the way, it's generally true that the more "practical" is the education at a college or university, the less talented is the student body. One more word about the value of intelligence: has it ever occurred to IT managers that the professors at universities never were taught the skills that their firms are looking for? How do you think I learned (for example) Python, so that I could teach it to my students? No one taught it to me; I taught myself. Similarly, smart graduates can teach themselves the skills you need. All you need to do is hire intelligent, motivated graduates. A word about writing: At virtually all universities, the English Department teaches the writing courses. Educational politics being what they are, this will not change. The problem is that virtually no one gets a Ph.D. in English to go teach college writing: they all want to study literature. That means that, when they become professors, they teach flowery expression, and consider clarity, brevity, syntax, and punctuation as secondary issues, issues they would rather not have to deal with. One way of helping this situation is to have "intensive writing" courses, with lots of writing, in the major department. In my department, several of our courses are set up to be "writing intensive". Unfortunately, in a systems analysis course I have time to mark up a paper that has bad English, but little time to teach good English. I'm afraid it's true that companies will have to live with this situation and make the best of it. Either that, or GET INVOLVED with your local university. Many CS departments have boards of advisors consisting of members of the companies that hire their graduates. Volunteer for this: you'll be surprised what a difference you can make! At my university, our Board of Visitors has given us leverage with the administration that we had never had before, and it has helped us eliminate some real problems.

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Not quite
2005-09-13 15:43:44 John W. Adams | [Reply | View]

Dr. C does a mostly good job of explaining the virtues of a CS curriculum. It's a shame he stooped to trashing English teachers in the process.

I went into IT in 1995 after having bounced between math and English departments at various colleges since the age of...well, since 1974...and when Dr. C says English professors "teach flowery expression, and consider clarity, brevity, syntax, and punctuation as secondary issues, issues they would rather not have to deal with", he is, in my experience, dead wrong.

I have never met a composition teacher of whom that is true.

In fact, I've never met a composition teacher who approved of "flowery expression"--flowery will get you redlined in freshman comp and laughed out of creative writing. The book we used in both my first creative writing course and my survey of poetry is the brilliant (now overpriced) Sound and Sense by Laurence Perrine, who has this to say in chapter 15, "Bad Poetry and Good":

"Rhetorical poetry uses a language more glittering and high flown than its substance warrants. It offers a spurious vehemence of language--language without a corresponding reality of emotion and thought underneath. It is oratorical, overelegant, artificially eloquent. It is superficial and, again, often basically trite. It loves rolling phrases like 'from the rocky coast of Maine to the sun-washed shores of California' and 'our heroic dead' and 'Old Glory.' It deals in generalities. At its worst it is bombast. In this book an example is offered by the two lines quoted from the play-within-a-play in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream:

"Whereat with blade, with bloody, blameful blade, He bravely broached his boiling bloody breast."

I will grant that creative writing teachers are typically tolerant of unusual syntax and punctuation, if they serve the purpose of the writer, but even that has its limits.

I never took a class from this guy because I was friends with him and his family: http://www.arktimes.com/Articles/ArticleViewer.aspx?ArticleID=b732eb20-4231-403d-a8fb-678f726c69e6 , but I do remember walking down the corridor of Kimpel Hall with him and trying to express my love and admiration for Kathy Acker's Blood and Guts in High School.

The book has a lot of power just from Acker's command of language, but she does more. She's got hand-drawn maps of characters' dreams in it, an Arabic grammar that tells a story, a tour de force passage in which two poems are interleaved, line by line, and are coherent narrative read separately or together. It's a piece of experimental writing which, atypically, works.

I remember Bill's response: "So, it's got some funny stuff in it?" He didn't mean comedy.

Math or English (and maybe philosophy, theology, or history) will prepare you for a complete, well-rounded life--personal, professional, and civic--better than any other undergraduate curriculum.

P.S. The current eleventh edition of Perrine is priced at about twice what it's worth, so if you see an old edition cheap, buy it as a gift for any aspiring poet, young or old.

Off base!
2005-09-12 13:06:27 paolodm@gmail.com [Reply | View]

Among all the responses here for this article, I think this one is the most right-on!!

Paolo

Off base!
2005-09-12 10:54:46 fat_lazy_programmer [Reply | View]

Thank you for your message professor. Especially for this comment, "Only about the top 5% or 10% in intelligence can survive a CS major at any reputable university. If you hire a CS graduate, you are hiring intelligence."

I believe next to the Physicists (mad geniuses), that us Comp. Scientists work the hardest. The Com. Engineers have it pretty tough too.

I imagine that the guy writing this weblog has a degree in management without any real technical background. What he doesn't realize, if a person is able to learn "neural networks, computer vision, artificial intelligence, robotics, compiler engineering, machine learning, quantum computing, Bayesian networks, embedded systems�,"

that the subjects in his trivial list are just second nature to us. I think that this guy, like most other non-computer science IT professionals, is probably jealous that he can't make it in a class like artificial intelligence.

Re: Off base!
2005-09-12 12:06:21 Dan Zambonini | [Reply | View]

I don't like rising to flame-bait, but I can't help this one... I (the author of this weblog entry) studied a masters degree then a PhD in astrophysics.

Re: Off base!
2005-09-14 18:46:41 jfaster [Reply | View]

So by the standards implied by your blog entry, how can you possibly be an authority on computing? Your university didn't teach you how to deal in all the acronyms listed in your bio, right?

Or did you maybe develop the skills and knowledge base there that allowed you to learn it on your own later?

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