This article is a response to a post ««, or rather, not even on the article itself, but on part of the comments to it and the ideas that were voiced in them.
I will now express, probably, a very unpopular point of view here on Habré, but I cannot help expressing it. I agree with the author of the article, and I think that in many respects he is right. But I have a number of questions and objections to the approach “to be an ordinary developer, you don’t need to study at a university, this is the level of a vocational school”, which is promoted by many here.
At first
... firstly, let's assume that this is true, a university is fundamental knowledge to do science and solve complex non-standard problems, and everyone else needs a vocational school / technical school, where they will be taught the basics of technology and popular tools. But ... there is one BUT ... More precisely, even 3 "BUT":
- attitude towards people without VO in society: if you have only a secondary or secondary specialized education, then you are a sucker, and probably also an alcoholic and a drug addict. All sorts of folk sayings about “didn’t study - so turn around, <cut by censorship> worker” came from there.
(image search results for "poultry bird" seem to hint)
Nonsense, in fact, but given that many 17-year-olds choose their path at this age under strong pressure from parents and relatives of the Soviet and post-Soviet hardening, this is relevant.
— For employers to successfully solve their business problems, a person from a vocational school / technical school is enough, but at the same time they require a diploma of higher education. Especially if it is not a purely IT office, but something related (such as an engineering firm, a government agency, etc.) Yes, there is progress, many adequate and progressive IT companies do not require, but when in your small town especially there are no adequate and progressive companies, or it is not so easy to get into them, then in order to get at least somewhere and gain initial experience, a diploma may be needed.
- Problems with the tractor arising from the previous paragraph. You want to go to work in another country, you already have an offer from an employer who is ready to take you on a good salary (and your applied knowledge from vocational schools is enough for him), but the migration legislation of many countries (such as the European blue card system) is very strong complicates this path for people without a diploma of higher education.
What we have as a result: education from a vocational school / technical school is enough for work, but a diploma of HE is still needed for life. At the same time, applied and practical knowledge will not be given to you at the university, as is well described in this article, and at vocational schools you will not be given a university diploma. Vicious circle.
Secondly…
Moving on, point two, explaining where the problems of point one come from.
“Applied and practical knowledge will be taught to you at a vocational school/technical school, and at a university you will have a fundamental basis for complex and non-standard tasks” - this is in an ideal world, but, alas, we live in a non-ideal one. How many vocational schools or technical schools do you know where they really train, for example, front-end, back-end or mobile developers from scratch, giving them all the knowledge that is relevant and in demand in our time? So that the output would turn out to be such a strong June, ready to work in real projects? Maybe, of course, there are, but probably very few, I don’t know any. This function is performed very well by the courses of various educational centers in cooperation with leading technology companies, but those that are free, with a scholarship and subsequent employment, are often very difficult to get and the number of places there is very limited, and the rest can be very expensive.
But with vocational schools and colleges, alas, everything is bad. Maybe this is a consequence of the general degradation of the education system in the country (doubtful reforms, low salaries, corruption, etc.) and problems in the economy and industry (failing factories and reduced production), but the fact is that in the end, vocational schools and technical schools in our time are those who passed the exam very badly, children from dysfunctional families, etc., and the education there is at the appropriate level, and as a result, employers do not see much value in graduates of vocational schools and technical schools (well, except for purely working specialties), but at the same time they believe that if a person graduated from a university (especially at least somewhat decent), then he is still not completely a fool, and he knows something. Therefore, both students and employers still hope that after graduation, the graduate will have relevant and in-demand knowledge, but the university does not perform this function, which was what that article was about.
Well, thirdly.
But is a university really supposed to provide only fundamental knowledge, while being divorced from practice?
And let's look at non-IT specialists. For example, engineers, pipeline specialists (I really became interested, and I talked with my younger sister, who recently graduated from a university in this specialty and began her career at NIPI). Pipeline specialists should be able to do very specific things after training: design oil and gas pipelines 🙂 And therefore they are given not only fundamental knowledge, such as hydraulics, strength of materials, heat engineering, physics and chemistry of liquids and gases, but also applied ones: the use of specific methods for calculating parameters and pressure characteristics of pipes, calculation and selection of thermal insulation, methods for pumping oils of different viscosities and different types of gases, arrangement and types of different compressor stations, pumps, gate valves, valves and sensors, typical pipeline designs for various applications, methods for increasing throughput, design of a design documentation (with practical exercises in some CADs), etc. And in the end, their main work tasks will not be the invention of new types of pipes and pumps, but the selection and integration of ready-made components, and the calculation of the characteristics of all this in order to meet the technical task, ensure customer satisfaction, reliability, safety and cost-effectiveness of all this. Doesn't it remind you of anything? If you look into other specialties, such as the electric power industry, communication systems and television and radio broadcasting, and even industrial electronics, everything will be the same there: basic theoretical knowledge + applied practical knowledge. But it is precisely about the IT area that for some reason they say “no one at the university will give you the necessary for practice, go to vocational schools.” And the answer is simple...
Rewind time a few decades ago, years in the 50s and 60s and look at the IT industry. The computer then was nothing more than a "big calculator" and was used mainly by scientists, engineers and the military for mathematical calculations. The programmer then had to know mathematics well, since either he himself was a part-time mathematician, or he simply had to understand well what kind of formulas and squiggles mathematicians brought him, on the basis of which he needed to write a calculation program. He should have had a good and deep knowledge of standard algorithms, including rather low-level ones - because there are either no standard libraries at all, or there are, but very scanty ones, you have to write everything yourself. He should also be an electronics and electrical engineer at the same time - because most likely not only the development, but also the maintenance of the machine will fall on his shoulders, and often you have to figure it out, the program is buggy due to a bug in the code, or due to the fact that somewhere then the contact went away (remember where the word “bug” came from, yeah).
And now put it on the curricula of universities and get an almost complete hit: a significant amount of mathematics in its various types (most of which a developer will most likely not need in real life), a bunch of non-IT “applied disciplines” of various subject areas (depending on from the specialty), “general engineering” disciplines (in the educational standard it is written “engineer”, so there must be!), all sorts of “theoretically the foundations of something there”, etc. Unless, instead of assembler, Algol and Forth, they will talk about C and Python, instead of organizing data structures on a magnetic tape, they will talk about some relational DBMS, and instead of transferring over the current loop, they will talk about TCP / IP.
And everything else has hardly changed, despite the fact that, on the contrary, the IT industry itself, technologies, and most importantly, approaches to software development and design have changed significantly over the years. And here it will be further how lucky if you have progressive teachers with real experience in modern industrial software development - they will already “on their own” give you really relevant and necessary knowledge, and if not, then no, alas.
In fact, there are also some positive developments, for example, the specialty "Software Engineering" that appeared some time ago - the curriculum there was chosen quite competently. But a student, at the age of 17, choosing where and how to study, together with his parents (who may be very far from IT), alas, cannot understand all this ...
What is the conclusion? And there will be no conclusion. But, I foresee there will again be a heated discussion in the comments, where without it 🙂
Source: habr.com