The Computing and IT Curriculum, Why it's failed me and many others - Developers

[QUOTE=Cushie;41390048]Yeah its easy to get carried away. Speaking of Koda, I actually have an 8 year old half brother and they did a bit on Koda as well and he loved it. Its a neat way to learn basic logic structures without actually doing any coding. The thing is there are no proper technical or programming courses that cater to higher education, or if there are then they are only in certain places. The most you can find near me is rebranded media courses, which was 2 years of boring for someone like me who wanted to be doing really technical and challenging stuff and actually learning things, rather than writing about the history of animation or thinking of an idea for a game and drawing some objects for it or something. The fact that it was so unstimulating meant I really didnt have the will to go half the time since I just sat and did nothing, my attendance was piss poor and I could only bring myself to half heartedly rush the work a day or two before it was due in. I got awful grades (PPM), I know I could have pushed myself through it and done better but I have really bad problems with my attention span when I dont feel like I'm being properly challenged. As a result of that I got onto a bad degree. I guess landing an apprenticeship with Capgemini as a software engineer as the outcome made up for all of it, though. If anyone is looking for a long term apprenticeship where you start getting paid the equivalent of £7-8 an hour from the get go, get 3 months technical training in Telford with all accomodation, food, travel paid for(Programming, SQL etc), and get a full time job [B]and a degree[/B] at the end of it then you should definitely go for this. The only catch is that the whole thing lasts 5 years, and unless you have extenuating circumstances you are not allowed to leave without paying them back for the costs incurred on you (After all, the training alone must cost loads per person) If anyone has any questions or wants a full run down of the apprenticeship, the company and the work PM me. If you do want to apply for the apprenticeship and have a good demonstrable technical knowledge and have done programming before, then I can put a good word in with the apprenticeship manager and you will likely be marked down as a 'high priority candidate', meaning unless you wildly screw up the interview day (Which trust me, is extremely hard, its a very laid back environment), you get it. Obviously I can only do that for people who I know will definitely be able to do it and not screw up or fail, because in the end it reflects back onto me.[/QUOTE] Where do you go after the first 3 months?

[QUOTE=hogofwar;41390564]Where do you go after the first 3 months?[/QUOTE] Straight into the business. They have offices all over the country, I moved from Newcastle to Birmingham since I wanted to be based in the Aston office. They have offices in Aberdeen, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Inverness, Bristol, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Nairn, London, Newcastle, Swansea, Woking, Rotherham, Swindon. That being said, I don't know whether or not they only allow apprentices to be based in literally any office or only a select few. My intake seemed to all be based over Swansea, Manchester, Birmingham and London. Depending on your business unit, what you ask from your reviewer etc, you could be put on any project at any part of the country potentially for any length of time (Though after a certain amount of time you can ask to be moved off if you get sick of it) While away from your office on projects Monday-Friday they give you a daily hotel budget that they will pay for depending on the area, as well as £25 per night to spend on precooked food, and will pay for any travel. I got dropped straight onto a project in my office which I have been working on for 3 weeks, they throw you straight into relevant and important work rather than giving you menial tasks, obviously they don't expect you to do everything perfect and be like every other employee, but the work has been sufficiently challenging and I have learned a lot. I was doing some more complicated C# + database stuff, but the two other apprentices that I went through training with have never done C# before and they are just learning it on the job, being given support and examples from our mentor and they are doing fine. Working hours - They expect 7.5 hours per day (Excluding lunch), so 9:30 - 5:30, but there is nobody watching over your back or keeping a timesheet on you. If you aren't needed for an important meeting or have important work to get on with then its OK to leave earlier some days and make it up at home or stay later another day. I usually come into the office at 8-8:30, work over my lunch hour and leave at between 3:45 and 4:30. If you were working day in/out with a team and project manager then leaving early would probably have to be informally OK'd with them.

I've been programming since I was about 8 years old, and I'm currently going into my 3rd year of Computer Science (Software Engineering). I've kind of lost interest in coding since I started school, but I still have an interest in computers so I figured I might as well finish my last 2 years since I don't know what else to do. I don't really have any interest in anything else that my school offers except a business/commerce degree, so I decided to combine a business minor with my CS degree to open up more doors and see where it takes me. The problem I'm having is that I don't want a job where I program all day. I didn't take 4 years of school to sit on a computer and write code designed by someone else. I want to be designing systems, networks and make important decisions for technology related systems. I feel like taking a 2 year college program in IT or networking would probably get me a job I'm more interested in. TL;DR: Lost interest in coding, finishing my degree anyway and hoping for the best.

Studying "New Media and Communication Technology" at Howest University (lol) in Belgium. Lots of promises, many more disappointments. Of all my fellow students there are hardly a hand full that shown any interest in computing outside of the classrooms. In fact, most of them seem to have chosen to study it because they [i]spend most of their time behind a computer (aka: facebook + 9gag)[/i] and they have to study [i]something[/i]. The programming courses are plain disappointing. Even 3 years in they keep to basic CRUD-applications (in VB.NET or JAVA). No one is taught how their tools work (how does the GC work, why do we use it, ..). In fact the amount of times I heard "we won't go in to the details" or "you don't need to know [how that works]" is cringeworthy. We are taught basic electricity and electronics: purely "pass the exams, still have no idea wtf is happening". Someone (whom passed these two courses) forced a 5V ledstrip (with 2 banana clips) in to the mains -- go figure. The course papers we received were plagiarized from several other sources. The entire curriculum is managed by one man. He seems to have no idea of the market or the skills required to work in tech. Last year he forced Android tablets on all new students; they were never used. Halfway the year they jumped on the Win8Apps-bandwagon. He's also been snipping important skills and courses (electronics et all have already been reduced to next to nothing, introduction to networking has been removed and new students are thrown straight in to the jungle). Webdevelopment courses are a complete joke: combining PHP and MsSQL. The most disgusting combination of shitOOP and functional madness glued together with outdated operators and functions. Let's not get in to that. On a happier note: the networking/hardware courses are glorious. Tutors who their shit and love what they're teaching. Great buildup and a pretty complete curriculum. Now that Belgian higher education (college and uni) get their funds on the amount of students who pass their year (rather than how many students are taught), they've really been doing their best with trying to get students to complete the education. Not by looking in to the courses and correcting flaws or properly guiding students: but by making shit easier. But what angers me most is that those who keep on failing, show no interest and no intent of trying better keep getting chances; whereas proper students who do their best and know what they're doing are kept back. This is turning in to a directionless rant, so I'm going to stop here. Have a good day! o/

Isn't Howest a college rather than a university? Also, that last statement is not the case everywhere: where I'm studying (KULeuven if you're interested) the professors don't give a shit if you pass or not.

They are. But ever since they teamed up with UGent; they insist on calling themselves that. They also increased the tuition to match UGent's. They claim the quality of the education is comparable (right). Might as well call them Howest Kindergarten, because that's how we get treated there. [quote]where I'm studying[/quote] What are you studying?

Computer Science (Informatica in Dutch). I have however tried out a course at a college as well, and I can agree that the quality of the courses varies per university/college.

This thread is scaring me. I'm currently about to start my last year of "high school" and after that will go to university. The programs I'm thinking about there are teknisk fysik ("technical physics"), elektroteknik ("electronic technology") and datateknik ("computer technology"), and I haven't yet decided which one but they should all be similar. I kind of agree with Electroholic in a sense that I don't want to be someone who sits around all the time trying to understand someone else's "shitty code". I want to not purely be a programmer. I want to be a [b]developer[/b], someone making important design decisions and someone who innovates. Hell, now that I think about it, I necessarily don't have to become a developer. Maybe I'll try to be another kind of engineer.

I'm not sure if this was brought up earlier in this thread, but I remember seeing this on reddit earlier. I think it's a really good read for anyone who wants to be a programmer. [url]http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-programmer/[/url]

[QUOTE=Kybalt;41468241]I'm not sure if this was brought up earlier in this thread, but I remember seeing this on reddit earlier. I think it's a really good read for anyone who wants to be a programmer. [url]http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-programmer/[/url][/QUOTE] He forgot to put an example but pigbatformer will show us how to pull it off. [video=youtube;ULqAIbjCsXE]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULqAIbjCsXE[/video]

[QUOTE=OnDemand;41473234]He forgot to put an example but pigbatformer will show us how to pull it off. [video=youtube;ULqAIbjCsXE]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULqAIbjCsXE[/video][/QUOTE] When I went for an interview at my (soon to be) new company I didn't go in a suit... I asked beforehand and they said "We have no dress code" so I just showed up in something that looked reasonably smart. It was really awkward to begin with but after about five minutes I thought to myself: "If you're going to act like a nervous fuck what's the chances of them hiring you?" So I just grew a pair and tried to come across as confident. That's the only real advice I could give, be confident. If you feel things are getting a little awkward just think to yourself: "Would I hire me"

I've only taken two programming courses so far but I really enjoyed them. We had a good book and a very passionate teacher. The teacher would talk about something for a while and afterwards he'd set up challenges/exercises for us to apply what he talked about. I really like being challenged like that.

In upper secondary school I really wanted to make models and other graphical stuff for games. I noticed that I sucked at drawing stuff so I gave up on my dreams and learned Ada instead. Soon after I learned Ada I started learning lua on my own. Spent one year in the army and after that it felt like programming and scripting was the way to go. So I started studying game programming. I spent 3 years studying game programming at university. About half dropped (if not more). It went well and I think the courses were quite good. They focused on the correct stuff and I learned a lot from them. Was focusing on C++ but we also studied IA-32 Assembly, C, C#, java, python, lua, HLSL and SQL. I think education is a good way to find out where to start. Once you know where to start it's easy to explore more stuff on your own. If you explore stuff on your own (doing programming on your free time for example) you show that you got a genuine interest in the the topic. So what is the importance of a degree then? I think it's incredibly important (at least here in Sweden). It's hard as hell to get a proper job here. If you don't have proper education you will probably end up at McDonalds or as a janitor. Now when I think of it. One of my classmates finished by just knowing how to copy and paste stuff. What's the degree really worth if someone like that manages to make it through?

[QUOTE=_Kilburn;41208666]College is actually kinda decent here, the only thing that really pisses me off is the fact that most of our teachers are actually researchers, so they know a lot of shit but are terrible at explaining it. That and the fact that they keep trying to drag us into their circle. Seriously, two of them keep trying to get me to do a thesis once I get my master's degree simply because I'm a good student. All of our projects also have to be research-oriented, so most of the work comes from searching for research publications, understanding them, and implementing them. They just don't understand that some of us just don't want to become researchers.[/QUOTE] Yeah it's annoying, my professors kept pressuring me to do grad school too. However, researching papers, understanding them, and implementing them is a super valuable skill. Even if you don't want to be in academia that's great experience to have. [editline]28th July 2013[/editline] [QUOTE=thf;41453579]This thread is scaring me. I'm currently about to start my last year of "high school" and after that will go to university. The programs I'm thinking about there are teknisk fysik ("technical physics"), elektroteknik ("electronic technology") and datateknik ("computer technology"), and I haven't yet decided which one but they should all be similar. I kind of agree with Electroholic in a sense that I don't want to be someone who sits around all the time trying to understand someone else's "shitty code". I want to not purely be a programmer. I want to be a [b]developer[/b], someone making important design decisions and someone who innovates. Hell, now that I think about it, I necessarily don't have to become a developer. Maybe I'll try to be another kind of engineer.[/QUOTE] Electrical and computer engineering gets really cool at the high level. Neural networks, artificial intelligence, computer vision, machine learning, game-theory, etc. Does that sort of stuff interest you? Definitely not a cakewalk though.

[QUOTE=Tamschi;41193917]Other than that it seems fairly reasonable.[/QUOTE] [quote] DO NOT use tabs (unless your editor changes TABs to 4 SPACEs). Emacs and xemacs does this for you. [/quote]

They use Python, using spaces only seems to be the majority style and is "strongly recommended" in PEP8. (I prefer tabs though.)

[QUOTE=Calam1tous;41625800]Electrical and computer engineering gets really cool at the high level. Neural networks, artificial intelligence, computer vision, machine learning, game-theory, etc. Does that sort of stuff interest you? Definitely not a cakewalk though.[/QUOTE] Of course it interests me! That's probably why I want to get those educations.

[QUOTE=Loli;41492460]That's the only real advice I could give, be confident.[/QUOTE] Seriously, this is the best advice for any interview ever, if you pull it off well enough you could probably blag your way into almost any job :v: I know a few people from my course at uni who can't program for shit and still managed to pull it off and get paid, guaranteed 2 month internships. Computer science/ programming/ whatever you want to call it education is very, very poor in the UK. Until I finished college I had no idea that I would be where I am today studying a BSc in software engineering and doing really well at it (for someone with no programming background). My high school education put basically the entire class off computers as it was just powerpoint, publisher and word every fucking week. The double award ICT GCSE I took added access to that, but that was it (I almost considered going into a database design career as I quite liked it :v:). It took me going to college and doing a BTEC National Diploma for IT for Practitioners to actually see how easily I picked up programming. And the course didn't even focus on that! It was a small module each year of a 18 module course! Computer science in the UK really needs to be pushed a bit more, everyone can use Word, my fucking grandmother is getting the hang of it, the last keyboard she touched was a typewriter 50 years back. It's been interesting studying programming at uni, I've learned more there than both my entire high school education and college education ever taught me about a aspect of computers I barely knew existed until like, four years ago. And it's accessible, one of the course mates I live with has no background in computers at all and she is doing excellently due to how she thinks and not giving up (like half the course seems to have vanished because of people giving up). Our school system really needs to introduce students to this part of computers earlier, it would probably make people a lot less ignorant about them and provide us with programmers who actually do their jobs right in industry.

Very interesting read. As someone who works in a large company, although not an IT-related one, I can sympathize with your situation somewhat in that my workplace uses very old tech. It's frustrating, knowing that there are so much better tools out there.

So much hate for bronies in education, do they really act like that; cause I'm a brony yet still know my shit

This makes me worried about going to college and majoring in CS. I have no programming background and I've tried repeatedly to learn programming, but it is incredibly difficult on my own. I heard one of the most basic courses uses Visual Basic (which I hear is hated on a lot). I'm just kind of worried that I won't get the education I need in the future. I have the drive, I know how to keep my grades up and learn, and I have plenty of resources available at the college. Hopefully they'll teach me some C#/C++/Java or something. I've been trying to learn Python but every time I make decent progress I hit a wall and then I stop for weeks at a time. It's really difficult when I don't have someone explaining it to me. (I'm in the US, so it may be a bit different)

[QUOTE=DerpHurr;41713046]This makes me worried about going to college and majoring in CS. I have no programming background and I've tried repeatedly to learn programming, but it is incredibly difficult on my own. I heard one of the most basic courses uses Visual Basic (which I hear is hated on a lot). I'm just kind of worried that I won't get the education I need in the future. I have the drive, I know how to keep my grades up and learn, and I have plenty of resources available at the college. Hopefully they'll teach me some C#/C++/Java or something. I've been trying to learn Python but every time I make decent progress I hit a wall and then I stop for weeks at a time. It's really difficult when I don't have someone explaining it to me. (I'm in the US, so it may be a bit different)[/QUOTE] The language doesn't really matter, what you learn in one usually translates directly to another once you reach a certain level. Completely stopping once you run into a problem is more of an issue but understandable if you learn on your own. Try working on a different project while the first one is stalled, that way you still make progress and it's possible you accidentally find the solution to your initial problem.

[QUOTE=Tamschi;41713320]The language doesn't really matter, what you learn in one usually translates directly to another once you reach a certain level. Completely stopping once you run into a problem is more of an issue but understandable if you learn on your own. Try working on a different project while the first one is stalled, that way you still make progress and it's possible you accidentally find the solution to your initial problem.[/QUOTE] I'm considering picking up Python again. I was doing fine before and I was able to understand the language too. (well, what I had learned so far.) I really can't give up so easily either. I work much better in an academic environment and I'm very happy that I'm going to be dorming so I have access to the library and plenty of tutors. I think the first programming language I will be introduced to is Visual Basic, in a course called "Computer Science 1." I'm more worried about the math I have to take but at least I can get help if I need it. Also some advice that has helped me with math is to understand it rather than to memorize how a certain problem is solved. I like your advice because I'm going to need some side-projects if I want to find a job once I graduate.

Don't worry about learning Visual Basic. Anything is valid as a starting point. I started with Visual Basic myself.

I'm sure it's been said here before but the language you choose to start isn't that important. Once you get a hang of programming learning a new language is mostly learning a new syntax, but the thought process is still the same (not counting functional languages of course).

[QUOTE=MatheusMCardoso;41716499]Don't worry about learning Visual Basic. Anything is valid as a starting point. I started with Visual Basic myself.[/QUOTE] Honestly, it works well for teaching you the structure of a program and flow of a program. The main issues I have with it are how everything is a word, where I'm now so used to C style languages it's hard to get along with. But it works well if you can use it, my college course used it in a module for teaching event driven programming (VBA in Excel to be specific).

A few comments that i have seen come up here say that in the CS curriculum, a degree is a waste of time because you probably wont learn much in the beginning courses. In the real world rather than that of education, wouldn't it be easier to get a job with a degree? What I have been told is that most HR departments won't even look at an application or give promotions without a degree. If I am wrong, please tell me, because I will be looking at colleges and applying in the next few years, and I don't want it to be a waste of time.

[QUOTE=Ingeniosi;41782205]A few comments that i have seen come up here say that in the CS curriculum, a degree is a waste of time because you probably wont learn much in the beginning courses. In the real world rather than that of education, wouldn't it be easier to get a job with a degree? What I have been told is that most HR departments won't even look at an application or give promotions without a degree. If I am wrong, please tell me, because I will be looking at colleges and applying in the next few years, and I don't want it to be a waste of time.[/QUOTE] This is all probably very regional, but at least here having prior work experience is the most important thing. The issue is getting that first work experience, but if you're studying/already have a degree it's much easier to get a apprentice/trainee position and then keep building on that.

I think it's important to note that IT isn't just programming. In my university it works like this: first two years consist of general computing and IT courses and the second year consists of specialty courses that we can choose, such as software engineering, computer science, IT administration and others. Some first semester courses deal with subjects that are not directly related to IT. One of our lecturers said: "any specific skill students can learn by themselves, university is meant to give them a notion of what to learn".

Don't have any experience with higher education. I got my job through knowing people, basically. Used to repair computers for cheap and really good, rarely did I do complete reformat, people liked having their old stuff accessible. Actually, they always came to me exclusively after that. Never did I market myself, everything was happening through word of mouth. One reason, why I was good, was my hobby. Did reverse engineering for some time and could quickly find problems, a bit overkill tho. And so, through repairing comps, a rich guy went to make a boat factory in my village (a miracle and pure luck) and employed the workers from the city (for precision work etc.). Since that guy has lived there quite a while and fixed his computers (and set up his sat tv, lel), he liked what I did. So, he just called me, which was almost like this:"Got work, want it?" Got employed while being in 12th grade. And of course, I do self studying all the time, that shit is vital. Again, pure luck.