I find it fascinating that we've slipped into a world where we have completely forgotten that liberal arts universities are not and have never been trade schools. If you want to learn the basics of chemistry, you can learn that at a university. But as a rule they will not teach you tradecraft, you will not learn techniques specific to the manufacture of industrial quantities of chemical compounds, those you will need to learn on the job.
But when it comes to software engineering the gulf is even more severe and important. Firstly, computer science theory is extremely rarely applicable to software development, and is far less a suitable foundation for a typical career in industry than typical science degrees are. Secondly, the highly specialized knowledge and skills necessary to become even just a basically competent software developer are sufficiently large and requiring of expert instruction as to be comparable to many professional trades.
But there are a few problems here. For one it's just not practical for employers to attempt to use on the job training to force feed new hires that knowledge, as it would require education in lieu of productive work to the tune of maybe 2 entire developer-years, give or take. For another, it's also not practical to try to back feed a trade-school education into typical CS degree programs. For yet another, most attempts at trade-school software development educations are huge failures. Partly because almost no one with enough smarts and talent to actually become a good developer would attend a trade school, and partly because there's no agreed upon objective standard curriculum for development as a trade. Currently the best way to learn is through apprenticeship (decidedly hit or miss) or autodidactism (currently the most prominent method).
Of course another side effect of this is that because the most important education a developer receives is a subjective, informal, mostly undocumented one it is almost impossible to tell how good a developer or even whether they are fundamentally competent in the trade just by looking at their credentials.
For various reasons these conditions will continue to prevail for some time. Personally my bet is that humans will be living on Mars before these things are sorted out, but I could be wrong.
But when it comes to software engineering the gulf is even more severe and important. Firstly, computer science theory is extremely rarely applicable to software development, and is far less a suitable foundation for a typical career in industry than typical science degrees are. Secondly, the highly specialized knowledge and skills necessary to become even just a basically competent software developer are sufficiently large and requiring of expert instruction as to be comparable to many professional trades.
But there are a few problems here. For one it's just not practical for employers to attempt to use on the job training to force feed new hires that knowledge, as it would require education in lieu of productive work to the tune of maybe 2 entire developer-years, give or take. For another, it's also not practical to try to back feed a trade-school education into typical CS degree programs. For yet another, most attempts at trade-school software development educations are huge failures. Partly because almost no one with enough smarts and talent to actually become a good developer would attend a trade school, and partly because there's no agreed upon objective standard curriculum for development as a trade. Currently the best way to learn is through apprenticeship (decidedly hit or miss) or autodidactism (currently the most prominent method).
Of course another side effect of this is that because the most important education a developer receives is a subjective, informal, mostly undocumented one it is almost impossible to tell how good a developer or even whether they are fundamentally competent in the trade just by looking at their credentials.
For various reasons these conditions will continue to prevail for some time. Personally my bet is that humans will be living on Mars before these things are sorted out, but I could be wrong.