CS Students vs. Mandatory General Ed
Description
A two-panel Wojak comic meme. The left panel features a "Trad Girl" Wojak with a graduation cap, representing a university, cheerfully announcing, "Students! It's the new semester! It's time for your 25th general education course and mandatory diversity Seminar!". The right panel shows a distraught, pleading Wojak character with an "I ❤️ CompSci" sticker, lamenting, "I'm giving you thousands of dollars please just teach me how to program...". This meme critiques the perceived bloat in university computer science curricula, where students feel forced to take numerous non-technical general education courses instead of focusing on the practical programming skills they believe are necessary for a software development career and for which they are paying substantial tuition
Comments
24Comment deleted
Universities call it a 'well-rounded education'; senior devs call it 'the reason our new hires can explain the history of art but can't resolve a merge conflict.'
My alma mater spent more time teaching Aristotle’s view on inheritance than the JVM’s - turns out only one of those is useful when prod’s polymorphism bug wakes you at 2 a.m
After 20 years in the industry, I've realized the most valuable thing my CS degree taught me was how to navigate bureaucratic systems and sit through meetings that could have been emails - skills that turned out to be surprisingly transferable to enterprise architecture committees
The eternal paradox: spending $200K on a CS degree where you'll take 'History of Basket Weaving' and 'Interpretive Dance 101' before finally getting to data structures in year three, while the bootcamp grad who paid $15K is already shipping production code and dealing with the real education - production incidents at 3 AM. Universities optimized for credential signaling; bootcamps optimized for time-to-first-merge-conflict. Both will leave you equally unprepared for the actual job of explaining to a PM why their 'simple feature' requires rewriting the entire authentication system
Like a bloated monolith: 90% gen-ed prerequisites, 10% actual code before you hit deploy
My CS degree felt like SOC2 for humans - plenty of mandatory modules, but I didn’t learn git bisect or writing tests until my first 2 a.m. incident
CS curriculum as microservices: 25 cross-cutting seminar services, no stable API for learn-to-code - yet BillingService runs five-nines with idempotent retries
Tbf compsci is probably the subject that needs the most diversity seminars Comment deleted
Why? Comment deleted
Cos programmers are designing software for people i guess Comment deleted
No Comment deleted
I just gonna take an Apple approach and limit the user in what he can do with my software, while delivering a solid product overall. I always just sit down and imagine what it has to look like, so that it is comfortable to use. Then I look at what I actually can do realistically, and aim for that goal. Usually everyone is happy. Comment deleted
Because it currently is one of the least diverse subjects Comment deleted
Which is fine... because that is a natural development aka, nobody was forced to do or not to do it. Comment deleted
I'm not saying women should be forced to do comp sci or any shit, I'm saying compsci ppl should learn to be less sexist (a part of the problem) and schools should at least try to reduce the stigma that tech is a mans job Comment deleted
Tech is the job of the person that likes tech. Whoever it may be. Dunno...I never seen someone say the opposite. And, furthermore, women are more likely to get a job, when people know that she is a woman. So, no negative impact for women there, but the contrary. (Please do not have me searcg the sources, but the experiment went like this: Have group of people apply with names and pictures, and then without names and pictures. Result: Names and pictures led to more women getting the positions. ) Comment deleted
the trouble is a) the idea that tech is a job for men, and b) the toxic environment that surrounds SOME tech. for example, join some chatroom for tech with a female profile pic and name, and men will be sliding in your dms Comment deleted
hell, i have a cat for my profile pic and i have got this Comment deleted
I am not sure what to tell you about that. I feel like there are SO many variables to that behaviour, that it is unreasonable to attribute it to EMT. It might be reasonable to attrobute it to men, BUT(!) it would probably also be reasonable to point out, that the male EMT group of people had a better behaviour than most other groups, be they predominantly male ot female. (If that was the case, which I think, might be true.) Comment deleted
idk what emt is Comment deleted
Engineering Mathematics Tech Comment deleted
No, u r saying that men should be forced to study diversity for their own money instead of compsci. Comment deleted
Yes. It needn't be more than like an hour a month Comment deleted
Diversity is overrated Comment deleted