A failing of society. Around here, non-trad students with no degrees get paid to go to a State University. I first found out about this when a 30 year old father of two children was going to class full time and working part-time told me the state was paying him just enough to keep going to school and keep his home.

If you were that concerned about if you'll get a job immediately after school, why not pick a degree with a proven track record of job availability?

That's sad for a "University" to have such low quality database classes. In my first semester we didn't even touch SQL until we spent two weeks starting with Set Theory and working into other concepts of how databases work. By second semester we were learning how to profile queries to make decisions on how and when to create indexes, then covered how we could have better designed the database.

I wandered into my professor's room one day to ask him about his thoughts about World of Wacraft's database. He told me one of his students helped design that custom database and he started going over a lot of the kinds of issues huge high transaction databases can have. He was used to teaching graduate students who specialized in databases.

Over all, I probably learned more out of class talking with my teachers about what we learned in class.

I could see 100s, but not 200s. 100s had a quite a bit of team work, but 200s had even more team work. I didn't go to college to gain knowledge, I went to get educated. As a teacher so eloquently put it, anyone with internet access has access to more knowledge than they know what to do with.

It looks like it's a wrapping library that makes it easier to use OpenSSL more safely by limiting which features you can use and how they're used.

The second thing is to replace them or get upgradable devices. but but but but... excuses.

Whoosh. I fixed your analogy because it was horrible. Maybe I should have used strikethrough, but there is no documentation on how to use strikethrough with slashdot and they don't use any markup tags from the commonly used.

This is /., not a mailing list. Just click the parent button to see the original.

Or being interested in them. The GP was arguing that netmasks are not something CS may know. I was getting after that CS should know a lot of everything, including routing. How could someone who understands how routing works not understand netmasks?

Your analogy is almost as bad as the articles.

The mechanic may not know how to build an engine, but he damn better understand the ideas behind how they work and be able to do basic maintenence.

We have a few Software Engineers in their 60s and 70s. Some of them didn't know what SFTP is, but when it comes to what they're good at, they're awesome. They're still useful and they make decent bank. Our average software engineer is around 35.

With a CS degree, you should know damn near everything. My cousin had a CS degree and based on required classes, he had to know how to write compilers, kernels, network stacks, design CPUs, 3D game engines. He did not have a lot of practical work in any of those, but he had to learn the theory, data structures, and understand how and why the were designed the way they were, then implement simple versions of what he learned.

He came from a Uni that is a world leader in Bio Engineering, and CS was considered a harder subject because CS is very hard. If it's not hard, you're not doing CS.

Fixed.

I've had that happen before. Getting my leg to relax took a little while.

You also assume a certain amount standard knowledge and understanding among the peers in order to have a "shared mental context". Depending with whom I am talking, I may need to dumb down my vocabulary or complexity of ideas. If I toss out the phrase "scalable lockless eventually-consistent datastructure", it is going to WHOOSH over 99% of the people I talk to. Now I need to spend several days trying to get someone up to speed with the concept, but they probably won't fully understand a lot of what I'm talking about for months or ever. They're not less smart than me, they just don't have the obsession required to maintain the attention to detail required to understand some advanced topics.

I know 1, maybe 2, people at work I can talk with at full capacity, and we can tear through ideas quickly. We don't "brogram", but we do go to each other with a well thought out issues and present pros, cons, and random thoughts. I work with many bright programmers who do a great job, but most of them are "normal" intelligent people. Not nearly as obsessed as a small handful of us. There is a huge gap between an intelligent person who can program and a probably equally intelligent person who has been programming since a young child and can tell you almost exactly what is going on under the hood networks, CPUs, thread schedulers, memory allocators, garbage collectors.

I've done my fair share of nonintuitive optimizations that result in slower micro-benchmarks, but faster macro-benchmarks. Maybe using a struct instead of an object shows as being slower in a micro-benchmark because you're copying around more data, but the macro-benchmark shows up faster because the random memory access caused by objects is thrashing the cache and the struct has better locality with fewer evictions.

Maybe your simple lock looks to be faster, but has horrible scaling under high contention.
Maybe allocating objects looks plenty fast, but putting pressure on the garbage collector is invoking many stop worlds which is hampering your thread scaling
Maybe your SQL query optimizer is showing you that a column is causing a scan, so you want to index it, but if you rearranged your query, you could do without the index all together.

Of course most of their programs work just fine and don't need these levels of understanding, but there is a reason why my programs seem to just work so well. They're quite thought out, from top to bottom.

That could be said of anyone. Add some optional easier starting classes. I guess I assumed the boys knew more because they started self learning at a young age. Many high end Universities have something like 50%-80% drop out rates in their CS 101 classes because it is so hard, with no option to minor in CS. Considered one of the hardest courses, worse than many other STEM fields.