CS professor: campus is not the best place to learn software engineering
lemire · x · 2026-09-09
Professor Daniel Lemire argues software engineering education largely fails practitioners, siding with Bryan Caplan's The Case Against Education. He cites David Parnas (1998): most developers ignore academic research because it doesn't address their problems — unchanged since. Key points: employers still run hard technical tests on elite grads (a telling signal); Quebec schools still teach UML as the de facto standard, and a project he joined wasted months on UML diagrams; CS fundamentals are useful but campuses are bad at sorting what matters. Since 2024, AIs are fantastic tutors — ask one about finite fields or cryptography. He's not anti-college: a great school is still a path to Microsoft or Google.
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