The Gap Between Industry and CS Education

Abstract

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-day 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.)