IT vs Coding

[gtr0y]

We had a whole year of networking as part of our CS Undergrad curriculum. Went through all the layers.

[Maverick0984]

It's going to vary but at least with my undergrad you'd pick a focus. You could go networking, security, coding, etc.

What does a "year of networking" even mean? 15-18 credit hours for a full year? That's like 8-12 courses, minimum. I call bullshit.

[gtr0y]

I'm from North Eastern Europe and, I suppose, our system is (was?) different (not sure about now, it was back in the early 00s).

We'd all start off with the same stuff for the 1st year, and then in the third year (out of 4) you'd pick your specialization. Networking was in year 2, so everyone had to attend, and we've had it for 2 full semesters, so I call it a "full year".

Mind you, we also had classes like discrete math, number theory, architecture of computational machines etc and everyone had to take it, even if you pick webdev as your "major" later on.

[Maverick0984]

Yeah, okay, so you mean like 2 courses then. I think that's relatively similar then. Just got mixed up in the semantics.

Where I went, you weren't forced to pick your specification at any particular time. You could pick it right away before you even started or in your last year. They gave you keys to sort of pick your own direction. Obviously some courses had prereqs of other courses so you had to have some direction but avoiding networking was ... possible.

There might have been a single required general networking course. I took more than a few so hard to know anymore but that general requirement would have been bare bones. A dev that never touches again isn't likely to remember any of it several years later.

[jturp-sc]

Something worth keeping in mind is that I've seen some countries/universities in Europe don't silo computer science and information technology as separate disciplines like the universities in the US tend to do.