Peter Norvig and the Computer Science Curriculum
Seibel: Speaking of things that aren’t taught as much, you’ve been both an academic and in industry; do you feel like academic computer science and industrial programming meet in the right place?
Norvig: It’s a big question. I don’t think there’s a lot of waste in computer science curriculum. I think that it’s mostly very good stuff to know. I think going to school is useful, but it’s not everything that you need to be successful in the industry or to build systems. I do think that curriculum in many schools has been slow to adapt. There are a number of places where that comes into play: working in a team is not taught so much in school. This idea of being able to put the pieces together is not really taught there, but somehow the kids pick it up anyway, so maybe that’s OK. At Google we’re certainly interested in this large-scale cloud computing, parallel computing, and so forth. That’s not taught so much, although I think there’s a lot of interest in it. So I think they lag behind a little bit, but I think it’s still useful.
Coders at Work – Page 296 – Peter Norvig