Lately, I was going through the blog of a math professor I took at a community college back when I was in high school. Having gone the path I did in life, I took a look at what his credentials were, and found that he completed a computer science degree back sometime in the 1970s. He had a curmudgeonly and standoffish personality, and his IT skills were nonexistent back when I took him.
It’s fascinating to see the perspectives on computing and how many of the things I learned in my undergraduate were still being taught way back to the 1950s. It also seems like the computer science degree was more intertwined with its electrical engineering fraternal twin.
Although the title of this post is inherently provocative, I’m curious to hear from those of you who did computer science, electrical engineering, or similar technical degrees in decades past. Are there topics or subjects that have phased out over the years that you think leave younger programmers/engineers ill-equipped in the modern day? What common practices were you happy to see thrown in the dumpster and kicked away forever?
The community also seems like it was significantly smaller back then and more interconnected. Was nepotism as prevalent in the technology industry then as it is today?
This is just the start of a discussion, please feel free to share your thoughts!
I think I got my CS degree too early, i.e. before the web was a thing. Basically, things have changed so much from the late 80s to now that everything except the basics are all out of date. I was in the school of Math as opposed to Engineering, so we were coding in Pascal and doing simulations and stuff. I think it would have been better to learn C, though obviously that’s in hindsight. I did take a class in DBMS which served me well some 20 years later when I became a database manager/developer because that language did not change too much. OOP I had to learn from scratch and it was a bit mind blowing.
I’ve been using Android Studio and Visual Studio code and it’s annoying that stuff is constantly getting updated, but also amazing that these IDEs take care of so much of that stuff for you. Even when I started coding Android about 9-10 years ago you had to manually download and install all these stupid packages. Now the IDE just announces it’s doing it and you go get a cup of coffee and wait for it to finish.