> By reputation it produced some excellent developers
It goes both ways, excellent developers, quite often people who would also have excelled in a computer science program (but failed because bad grades in foreign languages prevented them to get admitted, etc.)
But you also have those that struggle to adopt something other than the Visual Basic they learned in their apprenticeship.
> The Anglophone thing of having developers do a 3-year degree in Computer Science (an almost entirely unrelated discipline from Software Development) is ridiculous in comparison.
Is that different from Germany? Most devs have completed some kind of university degree (or "Hochschule").
If I think of the quality of Software-Engineering instructions I have seen in universities they were always so outdated, that I wonder whether its actually something that can be studied in such an institution in a way that makes sense.
He taught a C++ course which basically was C (with printf and scanf having been replaced by std::cin and std::cout). Of course it was outdated material and if someone had cared enough they could have created new material, but at what pace and at what frequency?
It makes much more sense to teach concepts, that that's what computer science curricula do, then add some engineering concepts in the mix (requirements engineering, validation / verification) and you have someone who can pick up tech on the job quickly.
I didn't do an undergraduate degree - I taught myself to code and then just got a job as a developer, and moved on up the ranks. Effectively a DIY apprenticeship, I guess. This used to be a lot more common than it is now.
The same outdated academic thing is true in other disciplines where the cutting-edge is being developed in industry rather than academia. And yes, teach concepts, but that doesn't produce graduates who are able to start writing decent code the day after they graduate.
It goes both ways, excellent developers, quite often people who would also have excelled in a computer science program (but failed because bad grades in foreign languages prevented them to get admitted, etc.)
But you also have those that struggle to adopt something other than the Visual Basic they learned in their apprenticeship.
> The Anglophone thing of having developers do a 3-year degree in Computer Science (an almost entirely unrelated discipline from Software Development) is ridiculous in comparison.
Is that different from Germany? Most devs have completed some kind of university degree (or "Hochschule").
If I think of the quality of Software-Engineering instructions I have seen in universities they were always so outdated, that I wonder whether its actually something that can be studied in such an institution in a way that makes sense.
For example I had a lecturer who was ADAMANT that in every software-engineering organisation, Nassi-Schneidermann Diagrams were drawn prior to implementation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassi–Shneiderman_diagram ).
He taught a C++ course which basically was C (with printf and scanf having been replaced by std::cin and std::cout). Of course it was outdated material and if someone had cared enough they could have created new material, but at what pace and at what frequency?
It makes much more sense to teach concepts, that that's what computer science curricula do, then add some engineering concepts in the mix (requirements engineering, validation / verification) and you have someone who can pick up tech on the job quickly.