Where have the universities gone?

Where have the universities gone?

Posted Jul 26, 2007 4:29 UTC (Thu) by roelofs (subscriber, #2599)
In reply to: Where have the universities gone? by ms
Parent article: Where have the universities gone?

I fail to see how that has anything to do with C.

Perhaps you missed the first response to your comment: C is pretty much high-level assembly language. I further opinionized that assembler itself is a highly useful thing to know, and then connected that to a more fundamental understanding of the underlying hardware.

I can talk for hours about the different types of branch prediction, superscalar design, different tradeoffs in cache design etc etc etc.

That's wonderful, but it's also highly unusual, in my experience. Most CS grads (or whatever, but looking for a job that includes doing high-performance system programming) do not have that background--or, if they do, it's all theoretical, and they're unable to make the connection between the hardware concepts and actual code. It's lamentable, but I can't say I'm terribly surprised; others have written about it over the years, and I've personally witnessed an analogous phenomenon with EEs (i.e., graduating without ever experiencing a hands-on, Horowitz-and-Hill-style lab course).

The London Banks certainly don't care about knowledge of C and I can't think of many companies in London that really do...

Banks are a world unto themselves, so that doesn't surprise me. Other companies? That does, but perhaps London really is unusual in that respect. Silicon Valley jobs (beyond scripting/web development) tend to emphasize C/C++ and/or Java experience, with less-frequent mention of C# and other languages. (Of course, maybe we're the weird ones...)

Greg

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