#(the way it was devloped and meant to be approached) and youre like... thats... it...? thanks?

[sevenfactorial]

Theory-heavy programs are also still considered more prestigious in the academic world, which certainly doesn't help things. Departments definitely want plenty of practical research going on too, since that brings in much more grant money, but in terms of what to actually teach students? Theory is considered harder and has a longer history so: prestige.

(How much do companies care about that kind of prestige? Idk man. I didn't notice anything during my short job hunt, but I have a degree from an university with well regarded engineering and applied math programs. Even if I personally only did pure math there)

And if your mix is sufficiently toxic, you end up with a startlingly large portion of your students who don't understand theory or know much about practical development!! It's infuriating

(And I definitely feel for the professors forced to tip toe around proofs in what is obviously meant to be a theoretical class, but they're also not the ones possibly going into debt for this mess.)

Anyways, my question is: is this changing over time? I think there'll always be a disconnect since it's a field where you can get paid quite well straight out of undergrad or choose to do another 5+ years of grad school then get a less well paid academic job. But that's applicable to the rest of engineering too.

Note that we've only recently reached the point where you'd actually expect most CS professors to have CS degrees (speaking from the US anyways). CS programs weren't very common until... around the 80s? Also, I'm willing to bet the proliferation of grad programs in CS lagged behind undergrad programs (accounting for grads being a necessarily smaller group). All in all, this means a CS prof (or former one) older than ~60 is very likely to have a math or engineering PhD instead.

I expect the increasing proportion of professors having experienced a CS department themselves will help with the disconnect at least somewhat. You might have still chosen the grad school academia path, but you had plenty of friends who went straight into a development job (and grimaced every time you considered your grad student stipend vs the salary you definitely could have gotten)

I feel like computer science has one of the the largest gaps between its teachers and its student of any field I've seen. Like undergrad physics majors are basically baby physicists, they do heavy derivations and like math and want to understand the world from first principles. Undergrad mathematicians are learning to care about rigor and build things up from first principles. Undergrad engineers have the same kind of pragmatic focus on efficiency that seasoned engineers do.

CS professors are either mathematicians or hacker/engineer types, and undergrad CS majors largely seem to be codemonkeys in training who are scared of math. Like it is so bizarre to me that we have people doing foundational work in logic and proof theory teaching classes to people who get scared when they see an inequality and want to cash out and write Javascript for 6 figures. What even is this field?