Comment by seanmcdirmid
19 hours ago
Isn't OS still required for a CS degree? Didn’t we all write our own kernel and virtual memory system in MIPs assembly code? We’ve been here before, I’m sure a lot of future AI coders will be forced to learn the abstraction stack like we did in a formal CS program.
As the field of "computing" develops more and more high level abstractions, that necessarily reduces the amount of time that can be spend on lower-level stuff. These days I think it's typical to have one or two courses that cover OS/embedded/assembly/compiler type of topics, but that's the bare minimum for awareness, not near enough for actual learning. On the spectrum from low-level to high-level, CS sits just below SE. Computer engineering is the field/degree that gives people actual skills in OS-level programming.
The courses might have assembly and stuff on paper (in many places not even that) but in most cases you write very simple toy programs, nothing like real-world stuff, reading compiler output or writing larger asm programs.
You can’t expect much from a one semester or two quarters. They are giving you exposure, not fluency.
No.
I've seen "software engineering" degrees where they teach some high level coding and how to manage tickets and this sort of stuff.
0 mathematics, 0 algorithms, 0 formal languages.
Universities are pumping out "professionals" like crazy, plus nowadays they are replacing courses with new courses about AI (which might be machine learning in the best case or just prompting in the worst case).
The result is that you need to go and ask what courses where in a degree, and even then it's not really a guarantee of anything (I've met master student with bachelor in computer science who were completely unable to find the smallest number in an array).
Yeah, it was, 15 years ago when I was in school.
And yet: I have not written assembly since school except for one Advent of Code challenge, and I expect it would take me quite a while to pick up a productive level of facility with it.