There was enough blatant self-interest here that I couldn't make it through to the end.
Nonetheless, your arguments collide. If the percentage of people who get employed by Goog and Ms is the same as of those MIT students not taking it, then your argument that this is advert of the course is fault. So, you cancel your own argument.
I think at best Greenspun's inclusion of those factoids was meant to imply some causation (that his class helps people get jobs). Maybe he was just name checking for the fun of it. Either way, I suspect most of the alums who took his class and then went on to get jobs at GOOG and MSFT would have been able to without it.
http://west.cmu.edu/prospective_students
I am an alum from this program, and it was the best learning experience I ever had in my life (seriously).
People don't learn in the same ways, at the same rate, at the same age, and waiting until they're adults just wastes years of neuroplasticity. On the other end, stopping after 4 years or some other arbitrary amount is just under-utilization of adult learning capacity.
"If the colleges were better, if they really had it, you would need to get the police at the gates to keep order in the inrushing multitude. See in college how we thwart the natural love of learning by leaving the natural method of teaching what each wishes to learn, and insisting that you shall learn what you have no taste or capacity for. The college, which should be a place of delightful labor, is made odious and unhealthy, and the young men are tempted to frivolous amusements to rally their jaded spirits. I would have the studies elective. Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure interest in knowledge. The wise instructor accomplishes this by opening to his pupils precisely the attractions the study has for himself. The marking is a system for schools, not for the college; for boys, not for men; and it is an ungracious work to put on a professor." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
At first, I was surprised to hear that MIT students were having trouble completing a program in Java, until I saw what was required and the time they'd have to complete it. I wasn't sure if I could do it in the time alloted, even without carrying a full courseload, and I knew java reasonably well at the time.
This post, along with Paul Graham's comments about Lisp, really changed the way I think about programming. Kind of like the JFK statement about seeing things as they never were, and asking yourself "why not?"
Why the hell should it take so long to go from an idea to an implementation. I was just accepting the achingly boring typing that Java had inflicted on my life as part of the cost of writing a program. Time to realize that I can't implement a chat server in half a day, and ask myself "why not?"
Anyway, I think that even the students who have to drop this course learn a valuable lesson, as long as they struggle with it for a while.
Sure CS grads can make fantastic engineers, but my point here is that the difference between CS and SE is not well understood in the industry.
