[ILUG] Whatever happened to real computer scientists?

[Ewan Oughton]

Speaking as a recent graduate, there was little or no hardware taught in 
my course - I had to wire up an LCD to a Soekris box as part of my final 
year project, and I had to teach myself soldering and how to read a 
circuit diagram - and even then I only got it working with the help of 
some of my fellow ILUGers. As for Linux / systems admin experience, unless 
you joined the computer society(SkyNet) and became an admin, there was no 
systems administration taught in the course. At least they didn't make us 
stick to Java - we did C, C++, PHP, Lisp(scheme, I think, was back in 1st 
year), some very basic assembler (I came away from this module with a 
liking for self-modifying code... most people hated it), and, wait for it, 
Cobol, and yes, Java.



Regards



Ewan


Ewan Oughton B.Sc. Comp Sys
DB / AnonFTP / Orac Root Admin SkyNet


On Mon, 17 Apr 2006, Conall O'Brien wrote:

> On Sun, Apr 16, 2006 at 11:31:36AM IST, Ian O'Connell
> <ianoc at maths.tcd.ie> incoherently babbled:
>
>> Hrmm rather similar to what i was taught , and given the fact a mate
>> of mine in 4th year cs has some form of an intro to dns course ,I'd be
>> of the opinion its quite true :)
>
> To be fair, it wasn't an intro to DNS, it was an intro to TCP/IP. The
> 3 or 4 DNS lectures were a joke. Anyone with some understanding of DNS,
> either practically or theoretically would have noticed the
> mistakes being taught.
>
>
> Personally, I've noticed a some changes in the people doing CS over the
> last few years.
>
>
> People I know who graduated from CS a few years ago are generally quite
> adaptable, with an ability to tinker with hardware, code and various O/S
> equally. Hence I know quite a few admins, consultants and experienced
> coders.
>
>
> Nowadays, people studying CS (my course at least) try to only program
> in Java (since they encountered it first) and the majority of them
> want to be graphics designers, but end up doing web development, DB
> or Windows coding, just like the industry wants...
>
>
> To my knowledge, there are 3 other people (which is less than 10% of the
> class) in my class with any experience as a sysadmin, even just doing
> oddball nixers as mentioned in the OP...
>
>
> Now, back to what I'm supposed to be doing...
>
> -- 
>
> Conall O'Brien
>
> http://www.conall.net
>
> GPG Key: http://www.conall.net/gpg/
>
> How many software engineers does it take to change a lightbulb?
> It can't be done; it's a hardware problem.
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