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Ask HN: Working as a software engineer for 5 years, I've forgotten all CS stuff

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Re: Ask HN: Working as a software engineer for 5 years, I've forgotten all CS stuff

#101

Post by BitwiseFool »

That matches my experience. In all honesty, as a programmer working on enterprise software development, I feel more like a mechanic than an engineer who designs machines. To stretch an analogy, I spent time learning all of the ins-and-outs of how a transmission works and how to make one from scratch. But in the real world the transmission was already made by someone decades ago and my job is to maintain it and swap out some parts when necessary.

I suppose this would be an issue if I were working at a startup or doing some greenfield development, but I suspect the majority of software developers/engineers are working on a codebase that is already established. And, the need for those from-scratch fundamentals is low to non-existent and naturally that knowledge atrophies.

Re: Ask HN: Working as a software engineer for 5 years, I've forgotten all CS stuff

#102

Post by scarface74 »

dilyevsky wrote: post #98
scarface74 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still don’t understand the disconnect that many posters on HN have from the real world. Most of the 2.7 million developers in the US are working at banks, insurance companies, etc writing boring line of business CRUD apps.

Maybe you should try EnterpriseNews then ;)

Just because you are in one sub field doesn’t mean you should lack a general understanding of the overall industry.

Re: Ask HN: Working as a software engineer for 5 years, I've forgotten all CS stuff

#103

Post by sanderjd »

The most important part of any foundational education like yours in computer science is to solve the problem of unknown unknowns. It isn't necessary to recall all the answers to questions, what is useful is to know what kinds of questions have already known answers (and by corollary, which ones don't), so that you can look them up when needed rather than trying to reinvent the world.

Re: Ask HN: Working as a software engineer for 5 years, I've forgotten all CS stuff

#104

Post by dilyevsky »

SoftTalker wrote: post #86
dilyevsky wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I maybe in minority here but I regularly use CS, networking, OS internals statistics, discrete math (I could go own) knowledge I was taught in school and I work in infrastructure. Ofc if you let that knowledge falter and forget all this stuff you’re never gonna use it bc you won’t even know when it was useful

I have a CS degree, and the main thing I developed that stuck with me is the ability to pick up most any programming language and separate the syntax from the fundamental concepts such as objects, functions, loops and flow of control, lists, arrays, other data structures, etc. Pretty much every class in my degree program used a different programming language. You had to develop the ability to learn a language and be…

That’s how you get all those apps that are dog slow bc developers didn’t know better and implemented everything with squared or worse complexity where it wasn’t necessary

Re: Ask HN: Working as a software engineer for 5 years, I've forgotten all CS stuff

#105

Post by Tomis02 »

It just means you've been doing jobs where CS is (apparently) unimportant. If you're ok with that type of job then by all means, continue, it pays the bills. The downside is that it might get mind-numbingly boring in the future. Pushing bits between API calls isn't exactly computer science.

Re: Ask HN: Working as a software engineer for 5 years, I've forgotten all CS stuff

#106

Post by bell-cot »

Perfectly normal, in a very wide range of fields. A friend of mine was a career Civil Engineer (& Professional Engineer, etc.). He ditched all his old textbooks & such when he retired - because he had neither looked at them in 30+ years, nor ever needed to.

Re: Ask HN: Working as a software engineer for 5 years, I've forgotten all CS stuff

#107

Post by tfsh »

ahati wrote: post #88

Forgetting fundamentals is not normal, at least that is what I thought. Responses in this post is changing my perception. No wonder, recruiting is hard. I have found a knowlge of OS, computer organizaton, digital logic, networking, compiler design are crucial. If you are into datascience or ML, math is absolutely essential. I don't know why so many people think forgetting fundamental is normal.

Your commennt exudes a particularly unpleasent pretentious tone.

The average software engineer does not need to remember compiler design, digital logic, esoteric datastructures etc to do their job well. If people are forgetting "fundementals" (of which I would not classify specialised subjects such as compiler design), then it's because they don't need it for the job they're doing.

Although I do agree that Computer Science theory is definitely important and knowing it is better than not. Sometimes a project your working on would benefit from knowledge of datastructures, cache locality, etc, and that makes the years of academia worth it.

Re: Ask HN: Working as a software engineer for 5 years, I've forgotten all CS stuff

#109

Post by tempxyz »

tfsh wrote: post #107
ahati wrote: post #88

Forgetting fundamentals is not normal, at least that is what I thought. Responses in this post is changing my perception. No wonder, recruiting is hard. I have found a knowlge of OS, computer organizaton, digital logic, networking, compiler design are crucial. If you are into datascience or ML, math is absolutely essential. I don't know why so many people think forgetting fundamental is normal.

Your commennt exudes a particularly unpleasent pretentious tone. The average software engineer does not need to remember compiler design, digital logic, esoteric datastructures etc to do their job well. If people are forgetting "fundementals" (of which I would not classify specialised subjects such as compiler design), then it's because they don't need it for the job they're doing. Although I do agree that Computer S…

So then, computer science puts you passed average.

Re: Ask HN: Working as a software engineer for 5 years, I've forgotten all CS stuff

#110

Post by wombat-man »

BitwiseFool wrote: post #101

That matches my experience. In all honesty, as a programmer working on enterprise software development, I feel more like a mechanic than an engineer who designs machines. To stretch an analogy, I spent time learning all of the ins-and-outs of how a transmission works and how to make one from scratch. But in the real world the transmission was already made by someone decades ago and my job is to maintain it and swap o…

Yeah, it can be a lot of fun to build a product up but it's also a shit ton of work and also whoever is in charge is, at best, faintly interested in best practices and desperately concerned with when the thing will be ready.

It does feel silly working on a big hulking code base but I have to appreciate the precision.

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