Industry practitioners and CS educators seem to operate in different worlds
these days. My fellow industry leaders often have surprising ideas about what all
can be covered in a 4-year degree program. We are seemingly unaware of the
huge challenge in making novices into algorithmic thinkers and programmers,
to say nothing of imparting mastery in the ever-expanding array of computing
sub-disciplines. At the same time, the day-to-date operations in industry have a
very different set of core skills and tools than what is traditionally presented in a
CS curriculum. Communication skills, experimentation, reasoning, code
comprehension, caching, threading, and concurrency models are a huge
fraction of the toolkit for a software practitioner. Hashing is essential.
Constants matter. Implementing data structures really doesn’t. In practical
terms, almost nobody should be using a linked list anymore. This talk will
surface what I see as the disconnects on both sides, and suggestions for what we
can do about it. (I will also probably be wrong, since I can only speak from my
perspective and experience - but that’s where important dialogues start.)