From: kambic@iccgcc.decnet.ab.com (Bonus, Iniquus, Celer - Delegitus Duo)
Newsgroups: comp.edu,comp.software-eng
Subject: Re: HOW Should academics teach SE????
Date: 8 Apr 92 15:50:41 EST

In article <rvatoINNkor@agate.berkeley.edu>, bh@anarres.CS.Berkeley.EDU (Brian Harvey) writes:
> sjring@mitre.org (Steve Ring) writes:
>>My feelings are that Schools teach students how to code, but in the
>>real world, coding is  is 20% of what it takes to get a product out the
>>door. Up front design is 30% and  testing (unit, integration, system)
>>is 50%. So basically, students go to school to learn  20% of what is
>>expected of them.  In addition, there are NO answers in the back of the
>>book. The answers have to come from their head. Oh yeah, how good are
>>their writing skills and how much of this is learned in school? How
>>many functional/  design/  interface specs do they write?   Are courses
>>in Technical writing given by people who can write (clear and consise)
>>technically  (and not necessarily scholarly works for  PhD thesis or
>>technical publications)? 
> 
> We've seen lots of articles in this thread, most of them saying "here is
> what people REALLY need to know," and most of them contradicting each
> other.  This one is pretty reasonable, but so were (imho) some of the
> others that had different points of view.
> 
> Isn't this really an argument for a good old-fashioned liberal education?
> The reason different people say different things about "the real world" is
> that we're all in different jobs, and face different challenges.  No training
> will be exactly right for every situation.  The best we can hope for is that
> students will learn the vocabulary of the field and, more important, the
> flexibility to be able to learn the details of a job on the job.
> 
> So, for example, of course students should learn to write!  But not because
> there just happens to be a specific need for (English) writing in software
> engineering and not in some other profession.  People should learn to write
> because it's a valuable skill for everyone.  Students should learn to read,
> too -- and that doesn't just mean knowing the letter shapes, it means reading
> difficult texts and extracting the meaning.  Software engineers probably
> don't have to read Heidegger too often in their work, but if you read
> Heidegger in college, that's probably good practice for reading machine specs,
> which are just about as opaque.  :-)
> 
> I'm not saying there shouldn't also be an attempt to prepare students for the
> more particular skills they'll need on the job.  But I do think that we'll
> never have a perfect match no matter how hard we try, so we'd better also
> prepare them to learn to fill in the gaps on their own.

I like this.  I have for quite a while now espoused the heresy that we need
more generalists in the world rather than more specialists.  This is often
disagreed with most strongly.  I agree with much of what is said above, except
you should Joyce also (func. spec for a wake).  We need people who are adapted
to and expect change, ambiguity, etc., and can deal with it.  As Frank Herbert
said one time, one of the main survival traits is the ability to swim.

George Kambic
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Newsgroups: comp.edu