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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?

#121

Post by titanomachy »

palata wrote: post #44
titanomachy wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no reason to believe that you aren't motivated mostly by curiosity and interest, but the mass of CS undergrads are primarily driven by economic incentives.

Feels like CS used to be for nerds who wanted to understand how computers work, and then it became much more popular because there were good career opportunities. Maybe with AI it will go back to "CS for nerds", and those nerds will be the ones landing the jobs that require actual understanding? Genuinely wondering.

Maybe, but it'll probably be a subtle shift rather than all-or-nothing. Like people will be 20% more nerdy on average or something.

Note that the kids going into top CS schools were never exactly dumb jocks, they still have to be smart and good at math in addition to being (possibly) money-motivated. I think people with brains that can do CS well tend to also find it at least somewhat interesting.

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

#122

Post by titanomachy »

giardini wrote: post #118
titanomachy wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 to…

If you think that CS grads can't match pre-meds in sociopathic backstabbing, I'm guessing you've never worked at Meta or Amazon.

But I do agree that CS students are quite cooperative compared to premeds.

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

#123

Post by BoneShard »

Andr2Andr wrote: post #46

What I see in a German university - no change for undergraduate CS degree, which still has 50% maths annd theoretical CS and is not affected by LLMs. But in a Master’s degree they offer really lots of ML courses - from basics to CV to hardware aware. Exams in those are written on paper without any aids.

I had something similar (a lot of math and theoretical classes for the first two or three years), and I remember I was pissed off - I only wanted to write C programs! :D But 20 years later, I really appreciate my CS education. It has all paid off: calculus, statistics, probability theory, theory of computation, discrete math, data structures and algorithms, foundations of NNs, etc. Then later, foundational classes for compilers, OSes, multiprocessor programming, networking, distributed systems, and database theory - I've used it all during different stages of my career.

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

#124

Post by arvid-lind »

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…

I've been using Claude Code since last summer and had no idea about the learning mode. Between the old features i've missed and all the new features to learn weekly, if not daily, I'm starting to accept I'll never catch up.

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

#125

Post by kmac_ »

rdtsc wrote: post #42

CS may stop being a clear way to a high paying job. “Learn to code and then Google will surely hire you and pay you $250k right off the bat” path may be gone. It may become something like physics or math where only people really motivated or interested in fundamentals regardless of landing at a MAANG job in the end will apply. So I why is your nephew in CS? Did he want to be there because he likes computing or was he…

I'm sitting right now in Central/Eastern Europe, and unfortunately, I don't see those 10k jobs. Quite the opposite, a lot of senior, really capable devs have an "open to work" badge on LinkedIn. Salaries went down, and including inflation, it's even harsher. Also, sentiment towards CS careers changed dramatically ("sprint monkeys," etc.) and they are considered as non-prospective and boring.

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

#126

Post by cyber_kinetist »

rwmj wrote: post #37
someguyiguess wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, college CS programs have always been decades behind in my experience. Maybe schools like Stanford and MIT are different but the majority of CS programs are not teaching tech that is actually used in the business world.

Which is a good thing. They should be teaching the cornerstone principles, not offering vocational courses.

I think having one or two "software engineering" courses where it's project-based really helps. You get to actually learn how to use Git, work in a team, and architect and finish a project on time - which is going to be valuable no matter if you're seeking a software engineering job afterwards or stay in academia.

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

#127

Post by BoneShard »

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…

How will the grads pass an lc interview if they don't do classical programming (or do I misunderstand what it means)? But it also raises another questions - what is the future for leetcoding?

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

#128

Post by mindcrime »

alistairSH wrote: post #76
cmiles74 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean yeah, I agree, but is it that hard to keep relevant technology in the mix? I'm not saying everything has to be cutting edge!

Sure, but are C++ or Java really that outdated. AFAIK that’s what most schools teach. Maybe with some JavaScript as well. It’s not lime they’re teaching Fortran or COBOL. And with the advent of AI coding, I’d hope they can spend more time on system design, as that’s where I’ve found new grads are generally lacking.

> Sure, but are C++ or Java really that outdated.

In what sense is either "outdated" at all?? Especially Java. Anybody who's paying attention to Java since about Java 11 would know that Java is very much a modern language at this point. I don't write much C++ myself these days so I haven't kept up with that as much, but my subjective perception is that C++ is also modernizing quickly over the last decade or so.

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

#129

Post by readthenotes1 »

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…

Someone told me that once a good idea came about it took about 5 years to process it into a book and then it took another 5 years to be accepted by people teaching outside of consultancies.

Of course, by then, it was antiquated.

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

#130

Post by tayo42 »

jtbetz22 wrote: post #4

I am not in a CS program myself, but I guest lecture for CS students at CMU about 2x/year, and I'm in a regular happy hour that includes CS professors from other high-tier CS schools. Two points of anecdata from that experience: - The students believe that the path to a role in big tech has evaporated. They do not see Google, Meta, Amazon, etc, recruiting on campus. Jane Street and Two Sigma are sucking up all the ta…

> but do not have a gauge for what kinds of problems make for an appropriately difficult assignment in the modern era.

I have no idea what is complicated anymore. You can build a 3d game engine in a weekend or two with Ai.

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