Some say universities should provide a base, others – applied technologies. Who is right – it is not clear

The IT industry has revealed the crisis of modern higher education the most. She needs a lot of staff – more and more every day – and classical universities in many places do not keep pace with the market, neither in quantity nor in quality.

This gives rise to controversy – whether it is necessary to go to university for five years or a year in special courses will suffice. Or maybe study a couple of books on your own and get an internship somewhere for free. If you choose a university, then what to expect from it – what will be made of you a ready-made specialist, or will they provide a base, with which you then yourself have to think about what to do. Should teachers be theorists or practitioners?

There are many questions – no clear answers. The guys who had seen all kinds of things in their universities, and thought about them, helped me to think about this.

Alexander batyshkaLenin (Novosibirsk, 4th year student at NSTU) and Ivan Amareis (Chelyabinsk, graduated from SUSU)

Do you need a base or modern technologies?

AlexanderA: If you look at the program of university courses in programming, there will be a huge amount of everything. Here is a list of languages ​​that were in my specialty, and it is already quite big: C, C ++, C #, Java, JavaScript, PHP, Perl, GPSS, Racket, Prolog, Haskell, Python and most likely I missed something. In terms of technologies – from compiler construction to parallel programming, real-time systems.

I often see full stacks like me getting criticized for being a little bit of everything. It seems to me somewhat ridiculous, because the roots of this lie in universities.

Ivan: You rarely hear anything good about the knowledge that is given in the university, especially regarding IT – they say, with its pace of development, everything that can be taught becomes outdated even before it gets into textbooks. And I am ready to agree that technologies really quickly replace each other, but their foundations remain unchanged.

Operating systems, compilers and interpreters, machine codes and assemblers, data structures, databases, the basics of network services – how much of this list has changed a lot over the past ten years?

Maybe I was lucky with the university, but they told me about all this there. Plus a certain amount of mathematics – matan, Matlab, and a little dynamic programming with all sorts of simplex methods.

All this is used by programmers. Moreover, 80% of programming is in using all this goodness correctly and effectively.

Alexander: Yes, of course, there is a lot of fundamental things in universities and, in fact, any developer should to some extent be able to solve any problem – but there are still market needs that could be taken into account and the program could be focused on them, and not on the desire to cover some kind of abstract circle of requests.

And I’m not even talking about the global market. In Novosibirsk, for example, there is a company that needs a bunch of system programmers to write drivers, operating systems and software for switches, but the university will release those who have studied WinAPI.

Ivan: All specific technologies are wrapped around the base. For the frontend – I’m currently working on it mainly – these are browser APIs, a build system, a couple of hype libraries – nothing fundamentally complicated if the base is mastered well.

Anyway, I believe that the best way to master any technology is to understand exactly how it works. And you understand – this is when at least theoretically you can do it yourself. If you can write React, there will be no questions about why keys are needed, why it is better not to use callbacks and why the hell is setState asynchronous.

Obviously, this requires a good knowledge of the tools below. For a react it is JS and DOM, for JS – C and Java, to understand C it is desirable to already have an idea of ​​the processor device.


Are teachers important?

Ivan: Oddly enough, but at least in some universities, future programmers are taught precisely these low and medium levels, which will not become obsolete for decades, and often just by the “do it yourself” method. Throw in the basic structures and algorithms for data processing in the discipline of the same name, make a simple compiler for a C-like language – and for a snack, you can also burn down a processor emulator as a thesis.

All this is flavored with a thin layer of more or less relevant high-level technologies and teachers usually do not mind too much using some C # instead of pluses or python instead of matlab.

Alexander: As for teachers, here, as in any population, there are enough good and bad people. There are those who are tired, there are unfair ones, there are those who are still burning with their work. There are those who seem to be offended by their students for being demanding.

I would not say that I felt anger or hatred towards any of them. We have a teacher in mathematical logic, so as long as we study, so much he is clapped standing at the end of the pair. From the applause that is heard on three floors, one can understand that today he gave another brilliant lecture. You probably even studied from his textbooks.


Are you looking for off-profile items?

Alexander: I noticed that conversations about IT education mostly revolve around specialized subjects. I can understand this, but I cannot imagine a university without everything else.

I will never forget my studies in physics and electrical engineering. I put my heart and soul into an essay on the use of cellular automata for the benefit of physics – I even had to translate two articles related to them. The physicist accepted the job and gave the mark, but when he saw that the others had passed, he doubled it.

In the first or second year, we had a course in philosophy and I wrote an article on the topic “Philosophy of Freedom” and in a collection that was indexed by the RSCI. I probably wrote it for about four months, it was cool. There was a criticism of Sartre’s existentialism from the point of view of Marxism.

Ivan: In my case, the only thing that confirmed some gloomy stereotypes was a complete vacuum regarding exits to the outside world. We just sat in class and did not think about, for example, getting grants for ourselves or participating in conferences – a maximum of a couple of people went to the Olympiads. Although now I understand – all this would greatly help me.

One time I accidentally entered a .NET development competition from a local big company. And the task was such that I immediately understood how to solve it, but .NET then knew poorly and did not figure out how to write the implementation.

But in the end it motivated me to pay more attention to what was happening around me. That is, learning is one thing, when some disparate things are laid out on the shelves, and another is real projects, when you yourself need to assemble something whole. To do this, you need not be afraid and learn something new yourself.

This immediately opens your eyes to the educational process – you begin to understand where the knowledge is useful and where is optional.


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