> I say it's shitty because they don't follow best practices and just focus on pushing out workflow apps as quickly as possible. No docs, old tooling, etc. Really a mess.
I doubt schooling would fix this. It tends to be more about theory and algorithms than building "real world"(depending on what you're doing) apps.
Also, those are problems you can fix by reading a few books on best practices, learning from your team, keeping up to date on tools and just doing it (docs). If anything, the school would likely be behind on things like tooling and many best practices related to the modern frameworks.
It's not all bad, you'll learn things that from time to time come in handy, but getting a CS degree won't turn someone into a good programmer. That's a skill you'll develop over time from doing it and learning from others.
I'm already well aware of best practices and I was really surprised that they didn't have any documentation or anything.
I meant, is going to school for CS worth working at a place like that.
They really aren't willing to make changes, as I said the goal is to push out apps as quickly as possible.
Coming from my previous job, where I was the only developer, I have full jsdocs/phpdocs, quite a few tests and high level user manuals. They have nothing resembling that.
Is the CS program high quality? If yes, then the job you work in order to attend that program is merely a means to an end. Think of it as waiting tables, just slightly more related to what you're interested in.
You could take the opportunity (not too quickly, be mindful of politics) to make a case study out of it and attempt to apply some best practices, it sounds like it could turn into a thesis about software development in the real world.
I doubt schooling would fix this. It tends to be more about theory and algorithms than building "real world"(depending on what you're doing) apps.
Also, those are problems you can fix by reading a few books on best practices, learning from your team, keeping up to date on tools and just doing it (docs). If anything, the school would likely be behind on things like tooling and many best practices related to the modern frameworks.
It's not all bad, you'll learn things that from time to time come in handy, but getting a CS degree won't turn someone into a good programmer. That's a skill you'll develop over time from doing it and learning from others.
This repo is pretty cool and links to lots of free courses that show the kind of things you'd learn at Uni: https://github.com/open-source-society/computer-science