But nobody seems to trust any formally specified education, hence practices like whiteboarding as part of job interviews.
How do we know a software engineer is competent? We can’t tell, and damned if we trust that msc he holds.
Computer science, while fundamental, is very little of help in the emergent large scale problems which ”software engineering” tries to tackle.
The key problem is converting capital investment to a working software with given requirements and this is quite unpredictable.
We don’t know how to effectively train software engineers so that software projects would be predictable.
We don’t know how to train software engineers so that employers would trust their degrees as a strong signal of competence.
If there is a university program that, for example FAANGM (or what ever letters forms the pinnacle of markets) companies respect as a clear signal of obvious competence as a software engineer I would like to know what that is.
That says more about the industry than the quality of formal education. After all, it's the very same industry that's hailing mediocre robots as replacements of human software engineers. Even the article has this to say:
> As a mid-late career coder, I’ve come to appreciate mediocrity.
Then there's also the embracement of anti-intellectualism. "But I don't want to spend time learning X!" is a surprisingly common comment on, er, Hacker News.
So yeah, no surprise that formal education is looked down on. Doesn't make it right though.
I don't think two wrongs make a right, tho. Looking down at formal education is not the same as embracing anti-intellectualism. And while I admit the software industry is absolutely full of bullshit anti-intellectualism, I also don't believe formal education is or should be the standard for the education, formalism is not automatically better than alternative means of learning.
The problem of anti-intellectualism in SE is just the consequence of the field being more "democratized". Or, to put in other words, the mass is stupid and the mass-man is stupidier and primitive.
How do we know a software engineer is competent? We can’t tell, and damned if we trust that msc he holds.
Computer science, while fundamental, is very little of help in the emergent large scale problems which ”software engineering” tries to tackle.
The key problem is converting capital investment to a working software with given requirements and this is quite unpredictable.
We don’t know how to effectively train software engineers so that software projects would be predictable.
We don’t know how to train software engineers so that employers would trust their degrees as a strong signal of competence.
If there is a university program that, for example FAANGM (or what ever letters forms the pinnacle of markets) companies respect as a clear signal of obvious competence as a software engineer I would like to know what that is.