I really respect your decision to drop out. I am a senior and I decided to take my last semester off and do a long internship. I am lucky to have found a good company, but that fight you had is still going on in my head. Most of the problems I solve at work are new to me, and nothing from my university is relevant, including the algorithms class. For instance, I have never used git in school. In fact, nobody has even mentioned it. Just think about it for a moment. How important is something like git or its equivalents, as compared to outdated theory bound knowledge?
Sounds like you guys should have gone to technical school or majored in CIS or something. Learning how to use version control is not in the scope of a Computer Science curriculum.
It would not kill anyone to offer one class, just 3 credits out of the 120 in an undergraduate career, about the practice of creating software. FWIW even my CS minor (30 credits) had such a course.
The course was structured around a single group project. We were assigned to a "customer" in the department, and we were responsible for soliciting (and formalizing) requirements, developing a design, implementing it, and testing it. Revision control was not optional, and we were taught how to use it. Our grade was based upon how well we completed the task, how well we presented ourselves to the instructor and "customer", and how we were assessed by our fellow teammates.
No one suffered any loss to their theoretical background, the universe didn't explode, and everyone left the class a better programmer than before. Since a CS degree is still, rightly or wrongly, considered the sole requirement for many programming jobs, I think it was time well spent.
One time I showed my 1st commercial web system to a teacher and he was so quick to say 'but this is not CS' it was sad.
I never said it was supposed to be CS, I just showed the system... His response had nothing to do with anything... His words were just a quick self-defense he seemed very used to use, in a pretty destructive way.
It took me some time to know University was doing no good to me, but now I'm past detox and I'm glad I dropped out.
I don't care if 'it is not CS', I learn whatever it takes to build awesome stuff.
Actually it should. Else those team projects would not make sense. I was asked to work in teams repeatedly, and I see this recurring in a lot of classes I stumble upon on the web. Try it yourself, pick a popular computer science class that gives the students the ability to work in teams and try to find a reference to version control.
This. There is a difference between learning to use today's cutting edge technology, and learning the principles that will enable you to build tomorrow's.
