Comment by p_l

Comment by p_l 6 days ago

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Pretty much every class that focused on "on the job skills" when I went to university (2008-2014) either at my university or from looking at coursework available elsewhere (I might have considered jumping universities for non-educational reasons) was either outdated or useless within few years. If I were to redo it I'd prefer to have even more "esoteric" tech involved and more theory and fundamentals.

And not because they were outdated and useless when the course started, though some did have issues. I think the least outdated "on the job applicable" material is Java fundamentals, and that's because you can still write Java 6 basic stuff in current JDK - a lot of the interesting and powerful stuff we learnt is no longer available in JDK though.

OTOH, fundamental principles - algorithms, including set logic in RDBMSes, low-level programming (which to annoyance of some was done in SPARC assembly or random assembly designed just for given assignment), robotics using programming stack and parts that were never seen outside university, various in-depth studies on different theoretical or scientific areas - all of that is material I use to this day in many different jobs when it allows me to understand and reason in ways I couldn't before I joined university - and I already "knew" how to program then.

BTW, within the 5 years I spent at university, "javascript on the server" turned from niche use cases within some stacks, usually running Mozilla Rhino, into complete new ecosystem that was surviving its first big fork and was becoming used in big projects, Android went from one phone "who knows" to pretty mature platform holding half the world with 64bit CPUs, tablets and first wearables, similar evolution for iOS, in fact arguably over my entire university time we had explosion of "you can now make mobile apps easier" to "mobile app developer is lucrative" all the way to "you're probably not going to make much money as solo developer anymore".