Computer grads are useless.

[Platypus]

You know, practicing for the season of good will and all that bollocks.

Yep, I enjoy that kind of stuff to.

Unusual for Spod's spelling to be so lax

Have a DHP, Spod.

[NotAllThere]

I meant the subject. Just trying the humour thing out again. You know, practicing for the season of good will and all that bollocks.

Well, it made me laugh. Gibbon impressively - and I mean that - laying out his manly, contractor in the wilds, where the rubber hits the road, he-man computing skills, but shows his more sensitive, "there's more to life than a technical manual", appreciative, erudite side.

Dismissed with a single word.

[darmstadt]

"there's more to life than a technical manual".

One of the most irritating things I find with people in computing is this, doesn't anyone RTFM anymore? I remember one job I had I wrote a very comprehensive manual about the system, in fact our documentation had to be spot on as it was real time systems and commands had to be entered directly on the minute, but still used to get phone calls about how to do various tasks. I used to reply with 'read page 36 paragraph 3, you will find it there' type of comment. I even put a huge RTFM poster up on the wall.

[scooterscot]

No wonder CompSci grads are unemployed ? The Register

The sheer ignorance of newbie CS grads still manages to astound me. If you’re one reading this, you’re actually above average.

And I'm just an engineer who fixes hairdryers...

[NorthWestPerm2Contr]

When I did my degree, 20 years ago, we covered, off the top of my head,

Programming - modula-2, polymorphism, abstract data types
Programming the M68000
Hardware architecture
Software architecture
Algorithm design
Computability - Lamdba calculus, halting problem,
Functional languages - Miranda
Compiler writing - yacc, lexx, and then writing a simple on in C
Formal systems - provability, predicate logic, communicating sequential processes
.
.
.

Very little of which is relevant to what I do now - but was a very good grounding to begin doing it.

What's in a computer science course nowadays?

I graduated in 2005 (Uni of Manchester), in first year we did:

ARM - writing assembly code
JAVA - loads and load of it
Wishy washy computer and professional stuff
Discrete Mathematics - Absolutely solid
Networking principles
Artificial Intelligence
Cant rememeber the rest

In second year we did half a module on each of C/C++ and loads more Java. So in total about 5% of CS was low level stuff.

I think it's good to know about it so you appreciate it, but practically speaking it has been of no use whatsoever. 2 years of Java was useful though as I have done C# programming and didn't need any introduction to OOP.