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COMP_SIGH
March 31, 2023
April 05, 2023
April 08, 2023
I was looking up stuff
by the authors of
Mehran Sahami did some work on revising
Stanford's "Computer Science" SYSTEM_ERROR
curriculum, and as you might expect,
he's a booster for Computer Science
academic programs. This talk on the
subject is less than impressive... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UuqkXK1xy0
"The World Needs More Wizards and Witches" (2012)
by Mehram Sahami, at TedX Gunn High School With "TedX", the X
somehow seems to stand
for "mediocrity".
There are lessons for
us all here, though,
primarily "don't
dilute your brand".
He presents some charts labeled things like
"Understanding Supply Versus Demand", where
he's looking at numbers of graduates in a field
and numbers of jobs in the field. He regards
it as a Bad Thing there are people doing computer
jobs that don't bother with CS degrees:
"The number of jobs projected to
exist is three times the number
of graduates." (You have to wonder about
the data, too: What's a
"The majority of people who are Mathematics job, what's a
doing jobs in computing were not Physics job? How do you
trained in computing. And we do the classification?)
wonder why our credit card
numbers get stolen when we make
online transactions."
This presumption that Computer Science geeks
are more competent programmers and sysadmins
than people from other fields-- and that it's
only those *outsiders* who are creating It would be
security leaks-- is not actually established interesting if you
by any data he presents. *could* establish
it-- do security
There's a style of argument that mistakes correlate
*starts* with data, but does with academic
without it at key points along backgrounds?
the way, hoping you won't notice.
The interesting thing to me here is
that this data shows that few
employers really care if you've got Jumping to another field:
a degree that says "Computer anecdotally I can tell you
Science" on it. People in the that physicists working
industry do not automatically accord as engineers had a poor
CS geeks with respect, and there reputation among the other
might be reasons for this. engineers at the nuclear
facility I was working at
in the early 1980s.
Training doesn't necessarily
improve performance, it While I was there, there were
depends on whether the indeed some serious mistakes
training is relevant for made by a guy with a physics
what you need to do. background, that I'd attribute
to a kind of arrogance-- physics
people have the deep deep
If one of the main things you conviction that they're so smart
learn is to take pride in your they can just wing it, and do
background, that can actually be just as well as experienced
counterproductive: engineering engineers.
requires a kind of humility-- or
you might say "paranoia": a E.g. I heard an electrical
recognition of how easy it is to engineer complaining about
screw things up. them building a system with
twisted pair cabling rather
(That's what "murphy's law" than coaxial cables: "Noise
tries to remind you about.) immunity isn't something you
build in later, you know."
Computer Science as a discipline
is united in it's convinction To be fair, I've also heard
that they know what you need to of some mistakes made by
know, and they feel no need to people with engineering
prove that they're correct about backgrounds-- e.g. getting
this. an order wrong for custom
bolts made of somewhat
exotic materials, wasting
quite a bit of money.
That kind of thing doesn't
take arrogance, just weird
mental glitches that we're
all prone to.
Sahami suggests that the reason the CS field
became less popular was the reputation of
the field, where everyone is supposed to be This sneer reminds of
pulling all-nighters, staying up on Diet the old hackers
Coke and Doritos. vs. designers split...
He then seques into talking about his new CS
curriculum at Stanford, talking about how it places
emphasis on getting across The Power of Computing,
because programming is just a means to an end.
(How knowing this is supposed to
keep you off the Diet Coke escapes me.)
But anyway, "computing is something for everyone";
he argues for a "big tent" of Computer Science;
We need to understand "what computing is about"...
He then points to a doubling of the numbers of new CS majors,
and tries to act like his new curriculum deserves the credit
for this-- it's hard to see how this can really be:
the phenomena is more widespread than just at Stanford.
(As he comments: "this is now becoming a national phenomena.")
Again, the data gets sketchy later in the story...
If you were interested in this subject, wouldn't you try
to get your students to tell you what got them
interested in the degree? Give the new recruits some
surverys, ask if they're aware of the new curriculum and
how they heard about it...
Also, this talk was in 2012, three years after the new
curriculum... how are the trends fairing now, ten years later?
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