Modern computer science education is bad. Not only is it outdated, but even the stuff they teach does not cover first principle thinking. And I am not talking about a certain type of institution; most of the problems discussed in this article apply to almost all of the institutions and even bootcamps. This article consists of rants and maybe possible solutions that can be applied to practice, but all of these are just my views. I will try to add references to all external sources I can find so that you can delve further into the topic of education and learning.
But first, let's focus on addressing the issue, as no problem is worth researching if we don't acknowledge the existence of one. I have spent my recent few months hiring people for tech roles, and without any surprise, they are not industry-ready even after we decided that we are ready to train inexperienced candidates. This is nothing new. At the current market conditions, even the people who deserve to get a job are facing resume rejections. It is way harder to get into the tech industry now than it was, say, a decade ago. This can be blamed on market conditions, an overflow of tech candidates, AI, and whatnot. But we are not here to rant on the system because, whether we want to or not, we are a part of it. We are here to know how to become the best. But we can't easily because modern education is failing us.
The first problem is their degree itself. Most of them report about how their CS major includes a whole tonne of non-tech stuff and just diagrams and equations instead of teaching them how to build stuff. While the syllabus does look good on paper, it depends on how institutions follow and teach them, which is still up to them. And unsurprisingly, most of them fail to do so.
Recently there is a rise of institutions which enroll the growing amount of interested students into their degree programs, and get accredited weird government benchmarks and sell dreams to vulnerable people. Most people I know have never learnt anything important from their college anyways.
Nevertheless, this is also the case with famous and overall reputable institutions with their useless assignments and subject placements. Like, for example the missing semester of MIT have stuff like version control and Bash? I wonder why they didn't teach them in the curriculum itself. I get it. Computer science is a theoretical subject, and software engineering is a whole different field. But still that does not explain why first-principle thinking is not applied to most approaches. Maybe it's just me who believes that going right into the project and dirtying your hands is a good idea? I am not the first one. Read the page; understand why those things are not incorporated in most schools (except some, which is amazing, btw).
From the transistor has a very novel approach to CS, and I like it. First-principle thinking is not only about understanding the inner workings of things, but it's also about why the thing exists there in the first place. You may know what an assembler is, but you will be shocked how many people don't know where it fits in or why it's even important, for example. This is a shitstorm.
