ACM TechNews

Who Killed the Software Engineer? (Hint: It Happened in College)

IT Management (01/21/08) Maguire, James

New York University computer science professor Robert Dewar co-authored an article in which he laments the state of U.S. CS graduates, whose programming skills he believes are woefully inadequate due to CS programs' lack of rigor and low emphasis on problem solving and in-depth thinking. The widely read article provoked much debate on the state of computer science education. In an interview, Dewar detailed some of the article's findings. He says that in their eagerness to boost CS enrollment, universities are essentially eviscerating their programs. The dot-com crash and the media's focus on outsourcing, which have combined to make a CS career unappetizing for students and their parents, are chiefly to blame for the decline in enrollment. Dewar says the schools' response has been to simplify CS curriculums in an attempt to boost their appeal by playing up their "fun" aspects and jettisoning elements viewed as tedious or too challenging. The result is software engineers who cannot compete on a global level, he contends. Dewar says universities erred in adopting Java as the most widely used introductory programming language in a bid to increase CS programs' popularity, when in fact Java, by its ease of use, skips or conceals many important aspects that people need to learn in order to become solid programmers. "If people come out of school and they know Java and Web programming, and they know how to put things together from libraries, that's just the kind of skills that are not going to be [in] demand," the NYU professor warns.

http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/career/article.php/3722876

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