Re: To go to University - For the CISSP etc. - Good idea/Bad idea???

[Derek Fountain <derekfountain () yahoo co uk>]

Adriel T. Desautels wrote:
> Getting a degree in Computer Science and similar areas of study is
> almost pointless because the knowledge that you collect will be dated
> by the time you graduate.  Can you argue that point? Can you tell me
> that its not true?

It's not true, not in the slightest.

I graduated in 1995, just as the WWW was beginning to gain traction. Let 
me have a think back to what I studied and what's still useful today.

Well, the underlying networking stuff hasn't changed a great deal. We 
looked in great depth at low level protocols, and IPv4 and ethernet are 
still largely as they were then. Higher level protocols have been added 
of course, and IPv6 wasn't on the radar back then, but the basics are 
still the same. Principles like latency are still relevant regardless of 
protocol.

Most of the programming is still relevant. All the very low level stuff 
is the same; binary and hex haven't changed any. Concepts such as memory 
management (heaps vs stacks, etc.) and algorithms are still the same. 
Garbage collection is the only major thing I can think of that's 
appeared since I studied these things. A modern buffer overflow in 'C' 
still looks very much like it did in 1992. SQL has improved a lot over 
the years, but is still fundamentally SELECTs and UPDATEs. Object 
orientation has moved on a long way, but they taught me enough of the 
basics to know I didn't like it, and I still don't.

The business stuff we covered is still relevant - clients, cost vs 
expenditure, hiring, etc. Given I've been running my own business since 
'96 I rather wish I'd paid more attention to this content. All the 
"information analysis" remains relevant: applied mathematics basically. 
Plus I got taught concepts like language grammar, data normalisation, 
requirements analysis, etc., which are still completely relevant.

In the interests of fair debate I'll consider what has changed. The 
"Computer Interaction" part of "Human Computer Interaction" got left 
behind pretty quickly as GUIs developed and the web became mainstream. 
The "Human" part is still the same though: the psychology of using 
complex machines hasn't changed a great deal. The operating system stuff 
dated very quickly. The UNIX material is probably still relevant, but 
not the DOS or VMS. Underlying principles of system programming, like 
IPC, locality of data, etc., remain useful, even though things have 
moved on.

I'd go as far as to say that the vast majority of what I studied is 
still useful. Had I chosen a course that taught me the intricacies of 
Wordperfect and only how to be a Pascal programmer it would undoubtedly 
been a waste of time. As it was, when I started out, I wanted to be an 
systems or application level programmer. My degree set me up for that 
very nicely, and things continued to work out well when I started to get 
interested in security.

So, on reflection, I'd say that your assertion that getting a degree in 
Computer Science is almost pointless because the knowledge dates too 
quickly is wrong.

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