

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

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roel_v
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
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_v
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.

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kelleyk
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.

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nhebb
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
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.

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shii
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/>

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pdovy
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.

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danneu
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.

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spullara
Github is the vocational school for programmers.

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

