University industry ready programmer - exiang/startup-resources GitHub Wiki

Many expect university to churn out industry ready graduates. With experience as a guest lecturer for Diploma and research officer for Degree in the past, pls allow me to share my views on this.

Diploma aim to produce industry ready graduate and this is totally perfect. Latest trendy tool will be prioritized and taught to diploma student within that short period of 2 years.

However, for Degree, it's more important to tech the fundamental concepts e.g. data structure, although it doest seems directly relevant with the industry today. People outside of academy think this should be change, bescause 'who else still code a link list from scrath, why not just use a library?!'; But I have different thought. The reason behind is so that the uni can produce graduate who are not a tool user, but strong in fundamental which is important and required to innovate and create better tool.

Hence the joke: "Diploma teach on things happening now, Degree teach on things happened in the past, while in Master & PHD you building things going to happen in future"

Dont get me wrong, this doesn't means degree graduate should not know about latest tool in market that not teach by the uni. Malaysia student generally lack of the self initiative to explore things outside classroom. Uni should encourage students to explore, but not teaching them these tools.

Industry would be too short sighted if they only think from their needs. If all they needs are just bunch of code moneky then that will eventually leads to a conclusion of: "Coder don't have to go to university". In fact, industry try to emulate the functions of university with programs like coding bootcamp, accelerator, co-working spaces and etc.

It's also true that most great programmers I know are already aswesome before they entered university. These people suffered from the university education system which is too rigid and traditional where the lecturer are given too much power. System like this will works only student are put under a good lecturer but they feel like hell under a stupid lecturer. I experienced both good and bad lecturer; The bad one irresponsibly just took a software user manual for course material while the good one continue influence me positively to influence others to date. My great programmer friends do appreciate the fundamental contents like data structure, algorithm, mathematic subject and etc, with the requirement that it has to be teach practically with linkage to real world scenario.

If university still has to be blame, that would be those bad apple lecturers getting too comfortable and eventually disconnected with the industry. You rarely see this happening in top research base university in the state. Malaysia government do aware of this and that's why higher education institute who focus more on research than teaching in Malaysia are the public university. You may still complaint about the quality of research result but that would be another topic then.

This discussion also linked to the forever problem of Malaysia Startup Ecosystem: lack of tech talent. Pushing all the responsiblity to education system will not solve this. Remember those great programmers I mentioned? They all have the DIY spirit built-in: they are able to self taught on things they do not understand and they are always hungry to learn new things on their own.

How can we create more people like this? Honestly I don't know. I only know what we should not do:

If covid19 lock you down at home for 4 weeks infront of computer but all you do is just complaining not enough programmers to work on your startup idea and not taking the initiative to learn coding online, then good luck!