Average programmers trained by university

Years ago back at the university, there wasn’t a single technical unit or lesson I could enjoy. The teaching materials were far away from good and so were the teaching methods. Writing SQL queries on paper doesn’t help you become a good database engineer. Every here and there, I had to argue with professors of Computer Science or Electrical Engineering(some overlaps) about such these.

There was a professor nice, young, kind and listening. And I was once arguing about something. I was arguing that such these won’t train good programmers. He argued that the university wants to train a great number of programmers not good ones. The university wants quantity not quality. Fortunately, he was one among few professors honest and up front about shortcomings of this education system for CS. A while later, I dropped out since I’ve always wished I had done it earlier. Or even better, not enrolling in CS in uni at all.

Now many years has passed. And a new technology incorrectly known as “AI” has risen and shaken not just CS but the entire world. An aquintance of mine has bought few high performance AMD GPUs to run open source LLMs locally and use them as much as he can(and as long as he can pay the electricity bill!). He is an extraordinary programmer and researcher among top 1%. And he is happy he no longer needs to hire average programmers to do his “secondary tasks”. He argues that a top GPU is like $1500 and these dense open source models write code better than 90% of the programmers. However, he only pays the cost once and after that he has free labor. I could not argue with him except for the number to be inaccurate.

Writing code is not extraordinary as it was 10-20 years ago. What now matter are designing a system, and writing high quality code. And a vast majority of programmers are unable to achieve these.

A colleague of mine was arguing that people losing their jobs in not fair and that the society must think of something for these people. And I strongly believe half of the guilt is on our educational system.

PS: I was attending a university in Iran. There are for sure better universities in this country and also worse ones. However, this image shows how the traditional educational system works for CS. In some universities educators, being professors or TAs, try their best to make the situation better. But a Persian proverb says the house is built wrongly from the first brick!