How useful is what is taught in universities?

Question

IT education

I am studying in a city with a million inhabitants (not Moscow, not St. Petersburg). The university is considered technical, and at one time it was in the top 20 in Russia (I will not vouch for the objectivity of the top). Actually, the question stems from the fact that I don’t really know how to apply the knowledge gained.
When I entered it, I wanted to study to be a programmer. Now almost everything we go through is this: all possible IDEF, UML notations, all kinds of other block diagrams, etc., etc.
The fact is that, for example, here on Habré I have never seen applications what we learn so much.
Questions actually:
Have you applied in real work such things as these very IDEF and UML and the like, have you applied what you were taught at the university? How rewarding do you consider your pastime there? Perhaps you can throw articles (including English ones) with examples of the use of such technologies?
It is highly desirable to leave your work experience along with the answer: i.e. so that it can be correlated that this Google employee does not know more than one programming language, but constantly draws a block diagram according to guests. But this Yandex employee did not study at the university. This is especially important if you are a teacher!
I would also like a comment on the answer. That is, not just "absolutely useless", but for example "in general, I lost time, I did not need the knowledge gained there, because they were superficial / inaccurate / off topic / not relevant / not in demand" or, conversely, "I I consider higher education necessary (an important part! -> ) because in my current work I actively use mathematical analysis \ I comply with state standards (I work on XXX) \ my bosses require flowcharts for all processes \ there I learned how to draw up documents \ they taught me how to program "
Perhaps some seemingly useless knowledge is useful in other areas?
Looking forward to your appreciation of this!
Ps I will be glad to links to this topic

Answer 1

Answer 2

Tell me, what will be the step of evolution after "megatrupragrammer on Wordpress"?

Answer 3

The meaning of all this is this, if one day after 5 or 10 or 15, etc. years, you will solve some problem. And suddenly you will understand that this task can be done with the help of such and such things. Which you were told at the university n years ago. Of course, you will not remember exactly how to decide, everything will be forgotten. But you will at least know about the existence and know where and what to look for. Although it doesn't have to be specifically from the university, you could have been at a conference and seen a report or read an article, etc. Or maybe it will never come in handy at all, who knows.
Recently it was necessary to find out the volume of the barrel, but I remember from school that this can be done. Of course I don't remember the formula. But a couple of seconds of Google and the formula is found.
In any case, the more in your head of this, the better.

Answer 4

It all depends, of course, not on the university but on you. But I will say with absolute certainty that four years can be spent much more productively, the only thing for which we people without a tower are always spinning, like you don’t have a base of understanding of all processes, and so on. I know OOP, design patterns, etc., everything that is important today, I must know, but now you either take on this responsibility, decide what is important, or give it to our state, that is, to your university. As a result, I’ll say if you understand, for example, that it’s better to delve into the knowledge of native js than to learn jquery and various plugins, then self-education plus, for starters, working somewhere as a junior for two years will give a hundred times more really useful knowledge and experience than 4 years at a university .

Answer 5

Programming is not taught in Russian universities. At best, they teach some approaches to the design / documentation of the code, if you're lucky, they will tell you about several design patterns. But at the university they teach to "learn" - to independently find and assimilate new information. I consider this skill acquired in high school to be the most useful.
Flowcharts / UML are used to illustrate the architecture of various parts of the application - class maps, table relationships in DB, for at least somewhat large projects (> 10 people on staff) this is a very handy tool.
There was also a question about terver: during my studies at the university, most of my group was not particularly interested in this subject. Including two of my good friends. And a couple of years later, these same two friends started their own project and wanted to figure out something where this terver was needed (something like the optimal packet size for a torrent tracker), and they had to resort to my help. In general, terver and matstat are found in the most unexpected places, sometimes very suddenly. Well, do not forget that the most popular word over the past couple of years is Big Data (and it will be difficult to become an expert in this area without a good base on terver and matstat).
Of course, studying at a university is absolutely not necessary, you can learn anything yourself. Another thing is that after studying at a university, it is much easier to study on your own.

Answer 6

Are you going to graduate school in Mathematics/Phys/Technology? Do you develop science-intensive software, a la scilab, do you work for the defense industry? Then, higher mathematics will be 100% useful to you.
When designing an architecture, UML really comes in handy. Moreover, uml was taught to us by employees of one large company in our city X. This is me to the fact that this has a real application.
Regarding knowledge: matan is the best thing that happened to me at the university. Honestly. Wonderful teacher. She arranged additional couples for us on her DAY OFF, coming to the 1st couple. And all this so that we know at least a little matan.
But in fact, we were not taught to program. The 1st course was "leveling", and then they scored on us.
There was also a joke: the subject of "information security". the dude who told us came to exactly 3 pairs (lectures): the first, in the middle and the last. And this despite the fact that we also had to have practices. Sad.

Answer 7

If the goal is to become a programmer, then imho the ratio of the necessary training and the time spent at the university (4-5 years) is very inefficient.
Causes:
Notations IDEF, UML, etc. it is useful to know if you will be engaged in business analysis or design, but it is enough to understand the principles of one. The rest will be easy to understand by analogy.
The opinion of a person with two higher educations and more than 25 years of work in the industry.

Answer 8

in general:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gDDCzptivw&list=P...
past influence:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgtS84gOiLY&list=P...