This blog post regarding our book The Dark Side of Software Engineering is at the fringe of that
book’s subject matter. Most of the Dark Side matter in the book is on the subject of writing software and the bad things that happen during that process. This blog post, on the other hand, is about the teaching of computer science, as currently practiced in academe. Still, in my view at least, this is a legitimate dark side computing topic, because I think that what we learned in our CS courses -- that is, the inadequacy of what we learned -- could be seen as representing another dark side of our field.
Did we ever use what we learned in school?
Many years ago I graduated in Computer Science from a university in Germany. Looking back at the coursework of that school, I notice that I really only used in my professional career a ridiculously small fraction of the stuff I learned at that time:
I have never again implemented a compiler for an LR(1) language from scratch. Neither have I used the pattern recognition algorithms which were considered “advanced” at that time. I have not had to work on projects that were so close to the hardware that I had to worry about things like carry bit, trigger impulse, and shift registers. I certainly have never had to find out the minimum number of transistors necessary to implement a given Boolean function (in chip design). I remember Turing Machines, fast growing functions, and the fact that the differential equation of the strings of a guitar can be solved by separating the variables, but this material, like that I mention above, has certainly never been used in practice. I could continue, but I think you get the idea.
It's hard to quantify how much I have used out of all the stuff I learned in required CS courses, but it is a tiny fraction. It seems that the most important thing I took from my CS studies was my diploma. When I became aware of that, I felt, let’s say, a “bit disturbed.” A quick review among a few colleagues and friends revealed that their experience has not been much better than mine. Virtually none of the persons I asked used more than, say, a quarter of the stuff learned during his or her computing studies -- and most of them used much less than 10%.
Even more surprising: Although many colleagues are passing through a similar experience, there is no loud cry of “ALARM.” I wonder, what’s going wrong here? Why it is virtually impossible to define a curriculum that can be re-used in practice to a high extent -- say at least 50% or more? And why there is no broad discussion of this problem?
Why does the CS degree have any value at all?
Let’s have a look at this pedagogy/curriculum problem from the point of view of future employers of CS students -- companies that hire computing professionals.
I suppose that these companies know that the persons who graduate from a CS degree program will use only an insignificantly small fraction of the stuff they have learned there. Despite this, having graduated a CS program gives the candidate a competitive advantage over other candidates who have no such degree. I wonder why.
Why do companies prefer candidates who have a degree? What is the advantage of having graduated in CS -- since most of the knowledge learned there won’t be relevant in practice?
A personal anecdote
I don't want to close this section without sharing a personal experience that contributed a good deal to the motivation for writing this article.
When I was an undergraduate CS student in Germany, we had to take and pass a lecture with the innocent title “Logic.” You might think that therein we learned to draw “logical” conclusions. This, however, was far from the truth.
In this lecture we learned that there are some problems that have a solution and for which you can (mathematically) prove that the solution is valid (“solved problems”). For other (unsolved and open) problems, no such proof exists -- at least not yet. However, there is a third class of problems for which you can prove that proof for the solution will never ever exist. The famous problem of “squaring the circle” is an introductory example to this class of problems: there is a mathematical proof that no one will ever come up with a solution.
A great deal of the lecture covered this “interesting” third class of problems. For example, these problems can be ordered according to their difficulty. All of them are unsolvable, of course, but some of them are more difficult -- more “unsolvable” -- than others. If this concept sounds strange to you at the first glance: Don't worry, you can get used to it in time.
These proofs that a problem will never have a proof are anything but easy. How will you prove such a thing? Perhaps in 300 years a genius will come along with a completely new idea, finds a solution, and can prove it. Despite the difficulty of these proofs in the third class, they are possible, and we learned quite a few of them.
As the lecture advanced, the professor did not give us any more specific proofs for certain problems, but broadened the view and showed us methods for constructing “proofs of non-existing proofs” in general -- we went to the next level of abstraction.
The feeling when I passed the exam was beyond words -- like crossing the Antarctic. If you survive this, you won't catch a cold in windy Chicago any more. Unfortunately, not all of us survived. Of the three hundred students who tried the exam, fifteen of us passed. Those who failed this obligatory exam could repeat the test a couple of times. However, quite a few of my colleagues finally had to give up and leave the university because they simply could not get their brains around this stuff.
The anecdote is based on the specific situation in my school at the time when I was a student, so it certainly cannot be generalized. Some teachers with good reputations in their research fields had very few restrictions regarding the curriculum -- so they taught us whatever they considered really essential in life.
It was a bizarre lecture. However, let's step back and look at the problem from some distance: Given the fact that the students don't use in real life almost anything they learned at university, does it really matter if the students spend their time for one single extraordinarily difficult lecture or for ten lectures with moderate difficulty? Either way, at the end they will have spent a couple of years and will take nothing with them but their graduation document, so this bizarre lecture only highlights the general and widespread problem by driving it to the extreme.
What's your experience?
This blog post is largely based on my personal experience and opinions. I did not conduct a study of this topic, nor do I have special knowledge of curriculum design.
However, the fact that I and many of my colleagues cannot use anything of what we learned at university disturbs me. So, I invite the reader to share his or her own experiences and opinions on this topic.
The Dark Side of Mathematics Pedagogy
Let’s stretch this whole matter of the dark side’s relationship to pedagogy even further than my co-author of the Dark Side book, Johann Rost, has done above.
Until Johann wrote his article, I had no idea how he felt about his computer science education. But what makes this addendum of mine at least mildly interesting is that I, independently, felt the same way about my education. Except that mine was in Mathematics!
Here’s my experience.
My undergraduate college was a very small one, with very few choices. I majored in Math there, and felt somewhat good about that (although I was never quite sure what profession one could go into with a Math degree). I was a big fish in that small pond, graduating Summa Cum Laude and wondering if I was sufficiently prepared and/or bright enough for the graduate school I had chosen to attend.
I went on to graduate school in Mathematics, choosing the University of Wisconsin as the place to do so because it had an excellent reputation in the Math field. But there was something important that I didn’t know at the time. Academically, Math divides itself into two fields -- Pure Math, for people who love Math for Math’s sake, and Applied Math, for people who want to use Math to solve problems in other fields. I quickly discovered that Pure Math wasn’t the field I wanted to go into.
Time passed, and so did I, but without the distinction I was used to in my smaller college. I decided I wasn’t cut out for the PhD I originally thought I was studying for and found a job in industry, in the suddenly burgeoning computing field into which I found I fit comfortably immediately. There is an old joke that all programmers believe they’re the world’s best (I strongly believe that’s why Open Source programmers trumpet that viewpoint about their own work so frequently), and I can certainly relate to that, since I immediately thought I was a considerably-above-average programmer! (That reminds me of another joke, in which the residents of the fictional town of Lake Woebegone, Wisconsin, believe all of their children are above average!)
In any case, when I joined industry (where I became part of the also-burgeoning space industry), I quickly found that my education (in Pure Math, you recall) had not in the slightest prepared me for the work I was going to be doing. Actually, that’s not quite true. I had taken the only two courses Wisconsin had in working with computers (this was 1952, and the whole computing thing and the whole space thing were both brand new), and those were superb preparation for the work I was to do. But none of my Math applied. At all. 0%.
Which is kind of weird. Because my job assignment was in Master Dimensions, where we mathematicians (!) used our skill to define the aircraft our company was building in mathematical terms. We measured things to a ten-thousandth of an inch, so that when the airplanes flew the pieces would fit together so well that no excess air turbulence would cause bad things to happen. We Master Dimensions folks felt exceedingly useful (although knowing what tolerances we were working to, we were always dismayed when we observed shop floor workers banging on pieces to make them fit together -- we knew, in our hearts, that they would slip together astonishingly well without banging!
Now the kind of Math we were working with here was 3-dimensional geometry. And if you know Math curricula at all, you’re no doubt aware that that’s a subject that almost no one teaches. And certainly not a school that focuses on pure math.
The more I thought about it, the more I realized that my Math studies had prepared me for almost nothing I was doing on the job, even though I was, nominally, a Mathematician! I began to realize that what my college education had been good for was a ticket of achievement, called a degree, that showed I was bright enough to learn new things, perhaps even Master Dimensions work! It turns out that I wasn’t all that good at Master Dimensions work, either, and I quickly changed fields to go full time into software work, where of course I immediately became the world’s best programmer (like all of my colleagues).
So there you are. Putting Johann’s two cents’ worth with mine, one could begin to wonder about the value of a college education. I’m not saying, and I don’t think Johann is saying, that the education -- or the degree -- wasn’t worthwhile. It’s just that I have the suspicion that it could have been so much more valuable if the academics who taught my courses had (a) known I was going to be an applied mathematician, and (b) had any idea what real-world problems actually looked like.
All of this makes me wonder if the feeling that your education didn’t properly prepare you for your professional work is universal. Perhaps it’s not CS education, or math education, that’s the problem here. Perhaps it’s academe in general. Perhaps there’s just a huge gap between the academic view and the professional view in all (or nearly all) disciplines? That makes it all the more important that you communicate with us. Did your education, no matter what its flavor/major, serve you well in being job-ready? We’d love to hear from you.
