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Ask HN: What is it like being in a CS major program these days?

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Re: Ask HN: What is it like being in a CS major program these days?

#111

Post by boogieknite »

rachel-ftw wrote: post #86
Kelteseth wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just that. As a 31 year old developer even I feel like acquiring new skills is now harder than ever. Having Claude come up with good solutions to problems feels fast, but I don't learn anything by doing so. Like it took me weeks to understand what good and what bad CMake code looks like. This made me the Cmake guy at work. The learning curve delayed the port from qmake to CMake quite a bit, but I learned a new sk…

Claude has a teacher mode where it will ask you questions. I’m picking up game dev in my spare time. I’m not letting Claude write any of the code. We talk through the next task, I take a run at it, then when I’m stuck I got back and talk through where the problems are. It’s slower than just letting Claude do it, obviously. Plus you do need to be a bit disciplined - Claude will gladly do it for you when you start gett…

thanks for the heads up. wasnt aware of teacher mode but always phrase prompts to "teach me" as a shortcut to get claude to explain everything its offering and prevent from just implementing code

Re: Ask HN: What is it like being in a CS major program these days?

#112

Post by jazz9k »

roland35 wrote: post #89
titanomachy wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What did they change to? Pre-med?

Business majors typically. I remember seeing a small graffiti in my engineering lecture hall that said something along the lines of "limit gpa -> 0: major= business administration"

Exactly this. Business or Econ majors.

Re: Ask HN: What is it like being in a CS major program these days?

#113

Post by [deleted] »

petterroea wrote: post #41
jazz9k wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was in college in the early 2000s, it was the same. Most professors were at least a decade behind current technology.

Something tells me it was always like that. My university professors were teaching things nobody wanted to learn, and people were practically begging to be taught more up-to-date hireable skills. Every time there was project work, we would be recommended using Swing or similar because that is what professors knew, but everyone used React because nobody hires Swing developers. Someone once said "Our SQL professor's SQ…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What is it like being in a CS major program these days?

#114

Post by bdangubic »

compounding_it wrote: post #110
bdangubic wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the Democrats were smart (they are not) they could landslide next election (and 5 more) by running a simple campaign, “Americans First,” the core of which would be to slap 1000% tax of any job which is outsources. Your company wants to hire someone from X, for every dollar paid in salary you have to pay $100 to the IRS.

The funny thing is that this same 60LPA person will happily take a 300k job (assuming parity) with a 50% tax cut because the standard of living is still quite high in maybe Atlanta or Pennsylvania compared to Hyderabad or Bangalore. In the above scenario the federal government is collecting zero taxes for the employees and the shareholders are getting richer. By cutting H1Bs the Americans are actually losing money by…

> …something people just seem to miss

this is because “people” have stopped thinking for themselves are overwhelmed by “social” and all the rest of the “media” pushing whatever narrative the ruling party wants them to hear. they see “oh look, we have a problem with H1B which will be solved by $100k payment” - boom - “America First /s”

I work on a project where 40+% of staff is off-shore, surely it is much worse in many other places

Re: Ask HN: What is it like being in a CS major program these days?

#115

Post by budman1 »

gchallen wrote: post #63

I teach computing at the University of Illinois. I'm spending a lot of time thinking about how to adapt my own courses and our degree programs. I'm actually at a workshop about incorporating AI into computing education, so this was a timely post to find this morning. We don't have a coherent message yet. Currently there's a significant mismatch between what we're teaching and the reality of the computing profession o…

the slow speed of adoption in education has a positive face; that is it filters out some of the hype.

the first derivative is smoother.

not always a bad thing.

Re: Ask HN: What is it like being in a CS major program these days?

#116

Post by giardini »

rachel-ftw wrote: post #86
Kelteseth wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just that. As a 31 year old developer even I feel like acquiring new skills is now harder than ever. Having Claude come up with good solutions to problems feels fast, but I don't learn anything by doing so. Like it took me weeks to understand what good and what bad CMake code looks like. This made me the Cmake guy at work. The learning curve delayed the port from qmake to CMake quite a bit, but I learned a new sk…

Claude has a teacher mode where it will ask you questions. I’m picking up game dev in my spare time. I’m not letting Claude write any of the code. We talk through the next task, I take a run at it, then when I’m stuck I got back and talk through where the problems are. It’s slower than just letting Claude do it, obviously. Plus you do need to be a bit disciplined - Claude will gladly do it for you when you start gett…

Are you speaking of Claude's "learning mode" which switches it to a Socratic dialogue mode?

https://www.tomsguide.com/ai/claudes-new-learning-modes-take...

Re: Ask HN: What is it like being in a CS major program these days?

#117

Post by _se »

red-iron-pine wrote: post #95
_se wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Typing code has never been the difficult part of quant finance.

alcohol tolerance, patience, and willingness to work 80 hours a week are probably more important.

Definitely the first two, but the latter is not particularly common at most firms. It's hard to put in the type of thought that you need when you're working that much. It's not slinging power points.

55-60 is much more common.

Re: Ask HN: What is it like being in a CS major program these days?

#118

Post by giardini »

titanomachy wrote: post #26
jazz9k wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ones I knew that were only driven by money all dropped out or changed majors.

What did they change to? Pre-med?

titanopathy asks"What did they change to? Pre-med?"

Such innocents could never compete in premed, which is replete with sociopaths/psychopaths willing to sabotage each others for a seat in med school. [We should consider a secret government program to siphon off toxic pre-med students to business/military/intelligence programs for which they are much more suitable]. Our medical biosphere is much less than healthy today thanks to these demon seed "flowering" into practice.

That, along with removing caps on medical school residencies:

https://www.openhealthpolicy.com/p/medical-residency-slots-c...

Re: Ask HN: What is it like being in a CS major program these days?

#119

Post by deadbabe »

koonsolo wrote: post #106
deadbabe wrote: post #90

Any CS course that does not teach students “the hard way” is doing them a disservice, and represents everything wrong with the industry. Learning CS is not about learning how to get a big tech job at a fancy company, it’s about igniting the passion for computing that so many of these job applicants today seem to lack whereas 20 years ago it seemed anyone applying for a CS job was a nerd who wouldn’t shut up about com…

My ideal curriculum would be to go through the entire evolution of computing, and at the final years you end up in modern computing. In the end we kind of went over all those topics, but it would have been a very straight forward curriculum. You start at basic electricity and the Turing machine, in the middle somewhere you learn about neural networks (I learned that around 2000, and it was old technology then). When…

Yea I think a general history of computing that teaches from first principles would be great. Could help students realize neural networks and transformers aren’t really new concepts just needed the data and hardware to catch up. Can dispell a lot of myths and magical thinking about AI.

Re: Ask HN: What is it like being in a CS major program these days?

#120

Post by Divisibly3 »

super256 wrote: post #36
Xelbair wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish it was decade for me, in early 2010s they were still teaching 90s approach to handling complex projects(upfront design, with custom DSL for each project and fully modelled by BA without any contact with actual users, with domain experts being siloed away - and all of that connected to codegen tools for xml from the 90s)

I had to deal with Java codegens from UML specs in 2021. So, nothing has changed! :')

Still there, cs bachelor
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