I completely agree. There is certainly a place for CS as constituted, but it is pretty esoteric. A major in Business Technology that required fluency in at least one development platform and proven ability to do analysis, design and implementation of both a small business and and enterprise app coupled with lots of courses on learning domain cultures, project management, general business organization and technology connectivity might actually put some useful people into the workplace. And internship of some sort in actually businesses should be required for a degree.

Theoreticians and code monkeys really don't get paid very well, are easily swapped out parts and don't have nearly as much fun.

I like the gardening analogy. I compare it to learning creative writing in a foreign language or learning to improvise based on a heavy knowledge of theory in music.

Remember how when we first got into this a lot of the best software guys were musicians and philosophy majors?


>But that's not how things work in the real world. A VERY small percentage will ever design a CPU (and I'll argue most of them are Electrical Engineers, not CS graduates) nor will they be cryptologists.
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>A very high percentage of programmers know nothing about business and think business is there to serve the technology. They'll recommend the latest and greatest tech because that's what they want to play with, even though it's not the best solution. If you're going to do business programming, you'd better learn about how a business works.
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>IMO, Computer Science should not be a science. I also think the term Software Engineer is not accurate because we don't do Engineering. Nor do we do architecture. These are terms that have very specific definitions that the industry has borrowed and mangled to get them to fit. For the past year I've been doing a presentation called "Software Gardening" that says software development more closely resembles gardening than anything else and I've had many, many people come up to me afterward and say that my presentation is dead on.
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>>CS is a broad field. You don't need to know much about business if you're going to be a CPU designer at Intel or a cryptologist at the NSA. A lot of people would argue those sorts of things would the the "Science" part of "Computer Science". Business software is very much applied, rather than pure science.