I completely understand university teaching algorithms over real dev stuff.
Algorithms are hard, and take serious work, they're basically math. University seems like the idea place to learn A* search or quicksort, I can't imagine figuring that out without a lot of effort and time spent just focusing on that.
What I don't understand is why programmers themselves focus on algorithms over stuff like "Vague heuristics to guess if this JS framework you tear your hair out in a month".
That kind of this isn't really hard and doesn't require any heavy discipline and focus, it's just something you pick up when you've tried a few different systems and notice stuff like "Oh look, that linter caught this bug for me" and "Hey look, there's not much autoformat support for Mako, maybe I'll just use Jinja2 like everyone else".
Instead they tell us to do stuff like code katas and endlessly polish our coding and algorithm skills rather than practice working on big stuff and managing complexity.
Maybe it's because algorithms are the hard part, and being really good at that is needed to work on the real cutting edge stuff.
I suspect as with most things in education, they focus on small self contained problems because it's easier to teach and easier to grade. These toy problems end up being all students know and therefore are what employers select on.
Algorithms are hard, and take serious work, they're basically math. University seems like the idea place to learn A* search or quicksort, I can't imagine figuring that out without a lot of effort and time spent just focusing on that.
What I don't understand is why programmers themselves focus on algorithms over stuff like "Vague heuristics to guess if this JS framework you tear your hair out in a month".
That kind of this isn't really hard and doesn't require any heavy discipline and focus, it's just something you pick up when you've tried a few different systems and notice stuff like "Oh look, that linter caught this bug for me" and "Hey look, there's not much autoformat support for Mako, maybe I'll just use Jinja2 like everyone else".
Instead they tell us to do stuff like code katas and endlessly polish our coding and algorithm skills rather than practice working on big stuff and managing complexity.
Maybe it's because algorithms are the hard part, and being really good at that is needed to work on the real cutting edge stuff.