The need for good vocational schools for programmers

http://programmingzen.com/2011/07/09/the-need-for-good-vocational-schools-for-programmers

by lmea • 15 years ago

16 12 15 years ago

fleitz• 15 years ago

So much of good programming can't be taught. In real world programming there are so many variables, you can't really teach when it's a good time not to unit test because you need to get something out the door. Or how to pad a dev schedule post rush to add all the tests you didn't do to get it out the door. Or how to migrate from one DB (eg. MySQL to Postgres) to another while keeping the whole system live.

eru• 15 years ago

That's why vocational training should (and often does) include lots of working as an apprentice.

spullara• 15 years ago

Github is the vocational school for programmers.

shii• 15 years ago

This is what Turing College[1] apparently aims to fulfill. I'm a bit wary since they are yet to be accredited, a process which needs at least 1 student to have graduated from their program. They are enrolling their first class ever so it should be interesting how it all turns out.

[1] http://turingcollege.org/

kelleyk• 15 years ago

I think that even the "brand-name" CS schools have this problem. Most of our students aren't /really/ going to be practicing computer science (heck, I don't, in industry... not in the purest sense); many of them will be writing software for a company. (Well, or they'll go work in finance, which is a whole different topic.)

While I definitely agree that (as with pretty much any complex skill) the only way to learn is by doing, over and over again, our undergraduates frequently go out into the world having only taken one or two classes that include any sort of nontrivial software development.

Now, these students are largely smart people, and they figure it out---but after two or three years in the workforce. I've heard this from other people, too, who have way more experience with the subject by virtue of having been around longer.

It's sort of an identity crisis thing: are we trying to produce computer scientists, or are we trying to produce software engineers? Neither is a wrong answer; they're just very different goals.

nhebb• 15 years ago

My son is 15 and is interested in Full Sail or Digipen, which are geared toward game programming. My concern is that a vocational school may be good for immediate job placement but it could be a hindrance later on and limit his career prospects. I just can't see forking out $80k to train my kid to be a cube farmer.

bartonfink• 15 years ago

I know very little about Full Sail's programming degrees, but I have a very good friend who graduated salutatorian from one of their film programs a couple of years ago. He directed shorts, music videos, etc. so he has something of a portfolio, yet Full Sail wasn't able to offer him any help once he graduated and stopped paying tuition. He lives in NYC, and yet according to him they weren't even able to set him up with informational interviews with contacts in the film industry. Some of that is the economy (he graduated in '09 when nobody was hiring), but he didn't even get any contact information for alumni once he got out. All he got was a second bachelor's degree and the debt to go with it.

He believes, and I agree with him, that Full Sail's industry contacts are limited because of their location in Orlando, and that since they are aggressively "for profit", their incentives to fix that are limited. They cater primarily to young people who don't know any better and who won't ask too many probing ?'s about job placement, etc. I don't see these problems as unique to film.

As I said, I know nothing of their programming offerings, but from what I've seen of their film offerings, I think your son should pass on Full Sail. I'd highly recommend that you tell your son to enroll somewhere accredited get a real CS degree. A CS degree offers at least a minimal credential towards other work in the field. A game programming degree isn't going to get you very far at all outside of game programming.

roel_v2• 15 years ago

Already exists in Europe, the 'hogeschool' in Belgium & the Netherlands and the 'fachhochschule' in Germany. I attended one and I would not advise anyone to do so; you're better off with a proper CS degree. I wouldn't (easily) hire anyone who did the studies I did.

It's funny in a way, I met a lot of people in the 'underground' scene in the mid to late 1990's, and by the time they were 18-20 many of them started off at CS programmes but many couldn't keep up and dropped 'down' to the fore-mentioned vocational schools. Many of them spend 14 hours a day in front of their computers but all their 'interest' and 'passion' didn't make them great programmers. Yes they had the patience to poke at a stack overflow until they could get the offset to the payload of their shellcode in eax, but that didn't make them (us) great programmers, despite what we thought back then. I'm really torn on the issue - many of them have great careers in IT and programming now, but they're mostly not great programmers. I don't like the current rhetoric of 'don't go to university, you'll be better off with an apprenticeship/vocational school' - experience shows it's simply not true. Maybe I'm just getting old.

stdbrouw• 15 years ago

That's a little bit unfair. The reason 'hogeschool' studies aren't as good as a proper CS degree has very little to do with vocational studies being inherently inferior to a more theoretically grounded education, it has to do with the fact that these vocational schools are known for being easier than their university counterparts, which attracts a certain audience, which leads to the courses getting dumbed down. Probably similar to how community colleges work in the United States.

The core problem is that vocational studies are considered to be inferior, which is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

It's like how, in Belgium, to get the best language education in high school, you'd choose advanced classes in maths, not language, because pupils who pick a maths focus are considered to be better students all-round and thus get tougher material in anything from geography to French.

roel_v2• 15 years ago

Right, but the same thing will happen to vocational schools. It's not like a vocational school is like a proper CS degree but with different courses, equally hard. So the vocational school needs to cater to an audience that, let me say this in the nicest way possible, is not very much interested in fine intellectual nuances.

Now it depends on how one defines 'inferior', but vocational training is inherently 'easier' than an academic approach; vocational training is about telling people how to solve certain problems, showing the the steps to take to tackle a specific situation. The Wikipedia article on 'vocational training' says more or less that, although I just learned that it's called 'procedural knowledge' there, which is a nice euphemism.

To me, this is the antithesis of the problem-solving nature of programming. I guess one can call widget-plumbing 'programming', but I wouldn't (and don't) hire people who install and maybe, with much effort and pain, customize Wordpress plugins and call themselves 'programmers'. Nothing wrong with Wordpress, but we shouldn't strive for a situation where that is the pinnacle of a programmer's expertise.

pdovy• 15 years ago

Universities can and should do more to provide CS students exposure to real software development, but I'm not sure that a vocation school is really the way to go.

In my mind the greatest benefit of a strong CS degree is that it gives you a broad knowledge base to draw on that lets you easily pick up new technologies and concepts. The exposure to particular programming languages or technologies is less important, in large part because our industry moves at a fast enough pace that focused knowledge can quickly become outdated.

All that aside, the best "hands-on" experience you can get is actually working in the industry. I'd much rather see existing CS programs step up their efforts to place students in good internship and co-op experiences than add more software engineering courses.

danneu• 15 years ago

The problem with vocational schools is that, from listening to people that've attended vocational schools, the modern vocational school industry feels more like those courses you took in your hometown community college the summer of your sophomore year in university.

Then again, I'm a university senior that's a bit disillusioned by the upper education system. I pine for a respectable education that isn't full of $1,400 menial courses like History and Government. I'm also a self-taught programmer that scavengers for free time to pursue my programming projects and education, struggling mostly with a free time deficit caused by said university courses.

The need for good vocational schools for programmers

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