Computer Science graduates have the highest unemployment rate

[Joeman]

I am inclined to agree with you. I think it's useful to have at least some knowledge of the algorithms and data structures that calling sort() on your generic collections is likely to employ as well.

Thankyou - finally someone knows what im talking about!!
However it seems that puts us firmly in the minority, as most on this forum seem content with only knowing high level stuff, and they wonder why their jobs are getting outsourced

[d000hg]

Oh look the Typo Police have arrived... Whats wrong? - poor little CompSci grad couldn't get a real job so you decided to join the typo police??
I bet business is booming if you're posting at 01:20am, and bet you're commanding a great day rate trawling the web spell checking other peoples posts... Now crawl back into your hole and come back when you have something useful to contribute to the thread... Until then, if all you have to offer is the age old comeback of "you made a typo", you're wasting your time... run along now old chap...

Somewhere in one of those threads you begged us to read, you made a big deal about people making personal insults against you. So much so you keep referring back to it. Didn't take long to show you up.

Thankyou - finally someone knows what im talking about!!
However it seems that puts us firmly in the minority, as most on this forum seem content with only knowing high level stuff, and they wonder why their jobs are getting outsourced

Why don't you give a concrete example where writing a WDSL web service benefits from knowing how a transistor works, if you want to turn this thread back to a serious bent?

[Regent]

that would be the postings youve not bothered to even read before calling me a "knob" right??

Given some consideration, I believe the best thing for you to do is to ignore the troll and stop feeding it.

HTH.

[doodab]

I think part of it is that the current generation doesn't have access to the same sort of machines we had. The early home computers inspired and required you learn about the hardware and basic data structures and algorithms in a certain level of detail which meant that a lot of people of my generation simply picked this stuff up from various sources as kids. There was no real need to teach it to us in school. These days kids are more likely to be coding up "apps" for their phone or facebook or whatever and while that isn't necessarily a bad thing they are going to be doing it using libraries and high level languages that isolate them from a lot of the nitty gritty of what makes a computer tick.

TBH I think the raspberry pi, although it's aims are laudable, is a little bit too sophisticated and might be a bit of a missed opportunity to get some of that low level stuff back on the menu. I wonder if someone might develop a simpler non-multi-tasking non-virtual-memory operating system / basic (or java or python or whatever) interpreter for it to boot in place of linux.

[d000hg]

I am inclined to agree with you. I think it's useful to have at least some knowledge of the algorithms and data structures that calling sort() on your generic collections is likely to employ as well.

It's a good job any half-decent CompSci course teaches this then.

On the other hand, when you learn programming in a non CS field such as maths or physics, they don't teach any of the theoretical underpinnings. So code written by such people - unless they took the time to self-teach themselves this stuff - is typically very bad. 2D loops, not using standard collections/algorithm language features, etc.

[doodab]

It's a good job any half-decent CompSci course teaches this then.

On the other hand, when you learn programming in a non CS field such as maths or physics, they don't teach any of the theoretical underpinnings. So code written by such people - unless they took the time to self-teach themselves this stuff - is typically very bad. 2D loops, not using standard collections/algorithm language features, etc.

Exactly, that's kind of the point. Computers are now ubiquitous and it's ridiculous to simply hope that everyone who programs them will have the benefit of a degree level computer science education. We need to get basic concepts and principles like computability, algorithmic complexity, basic data structures and the parts of a computer and the sorts of primitive operations it can perform into people's heads when they are young, as we (try to) do with other "everyday" things like maths and grammar.

[NotAllThere]

It used to be that the value of a degree was that it should a certain level of critical and analytical thinking. Not, as some employers want it, technical training.

I have a computer science and maths degree. For the CS part, in the first year, everyone had to do programming - using Modula 2, including algorithms, P, NP etc; and chip architecture, which included some assembler programming. Of all that I learned during my three years at university, I think there were only two things I learned that were useful in my later career.

1. Recursion
2. That it's impossible to write guaranteed error free code.