Reads okay until you realize it's an advertisement for Greenspun's class. His proof of how well it works is that most people who take it like it (not surprising, given its reputation as too much work unless you know you like it) and that most people who take it work at Microsoft and Google (he fails to note just how many MIT grads do the same thing without his course).
There was enough blatant self-interest here that I couldn't make it through to the end.
Maybe. It also borrows alot from "Teaching Software Engineering" (linked to in the article). However, I think it is very useful and has legitimacy because it's backed by experience. It's not the typical spew from 90% of the blogs out there.
Greenspun's class goes back as much the online communities started to become reality. It's among the first, if not the first in academia, for engineering internet applications in a time nobody even considered collaboration and online communities worth.
One thing it doesn't need is advertisment!
Nonetheless, your arguments collide. If the percentage of people who get employed by Goog and Ms is the same as of those MIT students not taking it, then your argument that this is advert of the course is fault. So, you cancel your own argument.
Obviously Greenspun's a webapp veteran. That doesn't mean his class doesn't need advertisement. As I alluded to in the previous post, it's not particularly popular at MIT. And to my knowledge, it's not a class like SICP that's been taken up at universities around the world.
I think at best Greenspun's inclusion of those factoids was meant to imply some causation (that his class helps people get jobs). Maybe he was just name checking for the fun of it. Either way, I suspect most of the alums who took his class and then went on to get jobs at GOOG and MSFT would have been able to without it.
You're right, 6.001 is a required course within the major. I'm not citing its internal popularity, really (although folks love the class). A number of other universities have similar courses offered, whereas I haven't heard of any other 6.171-like classes.
There was enough blatant self-interest here that I couldn't make it through to the end.