This work by Jason M. Adams is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
Header image credit seakwenby.
Twitter button by Randa Clay Design.
The spammers have been working hard to infiltrate Facebook. I just got this (below) today, and it tripped my mental spam alarm. These sorts of messages were commonplace on Friendster. I would get messages from girls with near-pornographic profile pictures wanting to chat or asking me inane questions like which was the better hair color. This is more insidious.
Insidious Facebook spam.
And for the record, I went to USC 2 ½ years ago.
I attended some of the final presentations of an undergrad class on Game Programming today with a friend. We went in expecting something more like a poster session, where people are arrayed around a room showing their work off to a few people who managed to crowd around them. The poster session is ideal for brief browsing, because you can skip anything you’re not interested in. Instead, it was a series of power point presentations followed by an on-screen demo.
Just what value is there in getting a degree in Computer Science (CS)? Are new graduates competent programmers? Is that the purpose of a CS degree? Should companies be spending money to train new hires out of college in the programming languages and practices that they use?
Robert Dewar is a professor emeritus at NYU in computer science, and he believes that the status of software engineers in America is in danger due to general incompetence of new graduates. The long and the short of it is that after the dot-com bubble burst, and computer science enrollment at universities plummeted, schools restructured their programs to be more fun. Essentially, they were dumbed down. Specifically, the focus has shifted away from math and the theory of computation. Students are not taught a wide range of programming practices, but instead are trained to rely on large software libraries in a sort of “cookbook” approach. That is, students can assemble a solution to a known problem (in Java), but they are woefully undertrained for solving actual problems in the wild with “more practical” programming skills.
