I'm probably projecting a baggage of dozens of conversations with people that unironically argue that a CS university should prepare you for working in industry as a programmer, but that's because I can't really discern the author's perspective on this from the text.

In either case,

to teach actual competence despite it

I think my point is that "competent programmer" as viewed by the industry is a vastly different thing than a "competent computer scientist" in a philosophical sense. Computer science really struggles with this because many things require both being a good engineer and a good scientist? For an analogy, an electric engineer and a physicist specialising in electrical circuits are two vastly different professions, and you don't need to know what an electron is to do the first. Whereas in computer science, like, you can't build a compiler without knowing your shit both around software engineering and theoretical concepts.

Let me also add that I think I never wrote a post where I would more like people to come and disagree with me. I might be very well talking some bullshit based on my vibes here, since all of this is basically vibes from mingling around with both industry and academia people...

The reality (in the US at least) is that a CS degree is sold as vocational program by the universities, and many jobs list a CS degree as a requirement or a desired skill. The author’s students paid almost $7000 for her course alone.

Well, it's very hard for me to have a discussion about philosophical merits of education when the context is the USA where education is so fundamentally fucked. It might as well be that the best course of action for the well-being of students is to make sure they at least get bang for their buck, but that's a systemic problem one level below what I'm talking about even. I don't want to discount this as a reality for actual people on the ground - I think then the correct position is not my waxing philosophical about contents of courses, but rather nailing everyone against free public education in the US government to a fucking wall.

and many jobs list a CS degree as a requirement or a desired skill

This is, I think, a symptom of this push-and-pull between industry and academia. The industry would want to have a CS degree mean that they're getting engineers ready to patch up their legacy code, because they would much rather have the state (or the students themselves in the USA case) pay for that training than having to train their employees themselves. But I suggest that the correct default response to industry's wants is "NO." unless they have some really good points. Google can pay for their employees to learn C++, but they won't pay a dime to teach you something they don't need for their profit margins. Which is precisely the point of public education, teaching you stuff because it's philosophically justified to have a population that knows things, not because they lead to $$$.

OK sorry this is rambly but I gotta get these programmer feelings off my chest.... If anything 4 hours is an understatement.

Back in university I once spent an entire week tracking down a latent bug in my program after the professor changed the project requirements a week before the due date. It was an accidental use of =instead of a copy in Java. We're talking every waking moment both in and out of class (I was not the best at debugging back then...).

Now in the working world there's bugs-- but they're not just my bugs anymore. Rather there's decades of bugs piled on top of bugs. Code has dozens of authors, most of whom quit long ago. The ones that remain often have no memory of the code.

Just last week I did a code review of a co-workers bugfix for a bug introduced in 2008. The fix was non-trivial due to:

1. The code being a tangled mass of overlapping state and (more importantly)
2. No one actually remembering anything about the code or where it is called or why it is there in the first place or what the implications of changing it are. Except that it's causing problems (An O(n^2) slowdown case harming production) now in 2024.
3. The original design doc was in the personal folder of the original author (no longer at the company), which was garbage collected years ago.

So reviewing the code involved comparing every iteration of the code, from the initial commit, up to where the bug was introduced, up to the state it was in today before my coworkers fix, and my coworkers fix. It turns out he got it wrong, and I can't exactly blame him because there is no right in this sort of environment. Fortunately the wrongness was caught by me and whatever meager unit-tests were written for it.

This all took maybe half a day for me, and a day for my coworker, for 1.5 days of work between the two of us. All to fix a condition which was accidentally negated from what it should have been.

And this is indeed what LLM for code enthusiasts miss.

Even if the LLM saves some time with writing boilerplate code, it'll inevitably mess up in subtle ways, or programmers will think the LLM can do more than they actually can. Either way they'll end up introducing subtle bugs; so you have a situation where someone saving 20 seconds here or there leads to hours of debugging effort, or worse, at an unpredictable point in the future.

At least with human written code you can go back and ask them what they were thinking, or read the design doc, or read comments and discussion. Even the most amateurish human author code has the spark of life to it. It was in essense a manifestation of someone's wish.

On the other hand with code that's just statistical noise there's no way to tell what it was trying to do in the first place. There is no will / soul / ego in the code, so there is no understanding, so there is no way to debug it short of reverting the whole change and starting over.

I wish it were always that easy, few things in legacy code maintenance brings me more joy than deleting a single line of code, the solution is sadly often more involved.

The reality is sometimes more like fighting a hydra spaghetti ball, where felling one bug, uncovers/spawns two more.