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Ask HN: CS degrees, do they matter again?

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Re: Ask HN: CS degrees, do they matter again?

#131
I have absolutely zero interest in a CS degree, i never even really wanted a career in software at all, but i did an apprenticeship which placed me at a Fortune 500 and i rolled that into my current gig, so nearing 5 years of serious software engineering experience, but I'm still pretty well convinced i won't find another job without a degree (even though my company just interviewed 2 degree-less people for a role at the same level as mine, and my coworkers never even believe me when i say i didn't to to college lol).

If you have the motivation and the funds, i don't think it can hurt. As for me, I'll take solace in knowing i can scrape by on Upwork and my below average Chicago rent if i get fired lol. I may have the funds but i without question do not have the motivation.

Re: Ask HN: CS degrees, do they matter again?

#132
Strong yes. AI is the ultimate generalist, but it's not a specialist unless the operator is a specialist. It'll output the average of what it's trained on. It may know the new stuff, but unless someone programs it to return the new data, it'll return some old outdated stack.

You also have to know your terms to communicate properly with it. Like my favorite these days is asking it to decompose a conditional. You never needed this term when you were coding, but when AI writes the code, you'll say things like this all the time. I'm still quoting books from 1999 to vibe coders and vibe coding tools, the foundations matter.

Eventually the seniors will retire and they need to hire the juniors. Or someone hires Devin for a job and realizes Devin needs a buddy.

The other major trend nobody is talking about is that people are dropping out of college because they expect AI to take jobs. A friend teaches game dev and says about 1 in 7 are attending. For game dev. That's the most interesting lecture you can get into. How are the other fields faring? College is also being filled up with idiots who use ChatGPT and probably won't understand what they learned. There's going to be a huge gap in demand one day and demand will surge like it did in 2016.

If anything, it's a bad time for boot camps because AI can pass all the interviews easily.

Re: Ask HN: CS degrees, do they matter again?

#133
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't regret getting a degree fwiw. My degree was 100% focused on math and comp.sci. (not in North America where they force you to take other subjects). If you have 20 years of experience I wonder if there are options for you to have that recognized towards a degree or even to get accepted into a Masters program (where presumably you'd have to make up some required courses but still).

I definitely don't have 20 years of experience. I did learn some HTML when I was 14 and made a geocities page though. It had animated GIFs and everything. I even made some stuff with Macromedia Flash ;).

Wow lol are you me? Flash 5 was my jam back when i was 12.

Also i noticed your tube related username (i assume). I used to manage a guitar shop and done a little work on tube gear but mostly stuck to pedals and stuff (much safer)

Re: Ask HN: CS degrees, do they matter again?

#134
Do it if you want to, and can afford it now without putting undue financial burden on yourself. But you have already said you've done the boot camp mill, maybe educating yourself isn't the path forward?

Keep in mind that there's not an insignificant amount of hiring managers like myself who don't care, and actively will toss your resume in the trash if the only thing on it is a CS degree. I generally have found CS degree holders to be poorer devs in general, less inventive, more interested in dogma than development.

For what it's worth I also have a network of excellent junior and mid-level engineers who haven't been able to land a gig in the tech world for years at this point, and are moving on to other things one way or another. Right now this is a very "you REALLY want to be here" market.

Re: Ask HN: CS degrees, do they matter again?

#135
post #129

I'll say yes. I am the only one in the company that has a degree (MSc compsci). I know stuff the others never heard of. Your exposure to obscure things in uni are really worth the time for deeper topics. I focused on machine learning and had classes like operations research, non-linear optimization or complexity theory & approximation algorithms and I kid you not, I could make use of these things quite a lot to find…

Skip the easy stuff and spend your energy on the hard stuff is excellent advice for anyone doing a cs degree. The easy stuff you can google. The hard stuff is what will mold your mind into a sharp tool and you will never get the same chance to spend your time on it as you do in uni.

100%! I learned so much at a really high rate, I'll never ever have the time and focus to do that again, most probably. It felt really good to dig deep

Re: Ask HN: CS degrees, do they matter again?

#136
Yes, companies do value CS degrees. They are not obsolete. The era when jobs were handed out without proof of qualifications has passed. Nowadays, companies seek evidence that you are a valuable asset, and a respected Computer Science degree is often highly regarded.

Re: Ask HN: CS degrees, do they matter again?

#137
post #111

As someone who has interviewed candidates for a FANG company in the distant past I can't say that degrees matter, but I can say that people I interviewed with degrees generally did better. There's a hidden bias in that this is only people who got through recruiters and recruiters are their own filter. Strong referrals usually guaranteed a phone screens. I think previous experience at a major competitor in the same ti…

> Many of the best co-workers that I remember had physics degrees. In fact, it was so pronounced I personally consider a physics degree to be a top tier signal of programming ability, but that's my own personal prejudice. In my experience those with math degrees too. Maybe the structured methods of analysis and problem solving.

In my experience, math majors can do some pretty incredible acrobatics (in a good way), but their documentation, systemic performance awareness, and overall design sense often lag behind. These are things they usually pick up outside of the degree, and they have to break some bad habits learned during it (e.g., single-character-variable soup).

I agree with a sibling comment that physicists often seem to make the best coders, for some reason.

My hypothesis: it's because physicists are rigorously trained to model real-world systems directly. What would be considered an "advanced" modeling problem to most would be an intro problem to a physics student.

Math is absolutely related, but I think the secret ingredient is "mathematical maturity" — the ability to fluidly jump between layers of abstraction. Mathematicians are good at this too, but physicists go a step further: they are trained to ground their abstractions in concrete physical phenomena.

Mathematicians ground systems in axioms, sure. But physicists have to tether models back to reality — to processes and measurements — which turns out to be exactly the skill set that makes for good programmers and system designers.

Huge generalization, obviously.

But personally, I've noticed my own programming ability increases the more physics I learn. Physics gives you a systematic framework to reason about complexity — and physicists get the luxury of a "relatively simple" universe compared to fields like chemistry or biology. They're working with rich systems described by just a few tightly-coupled parameters. And the kicker: a lot of those systems are 100% repeatable, every time.

That kind of structure — and the habit of respecting it — is priceless for engineering.

Re: Ask HN: CS degrees, do they matter again?

#138

It's complicated. I work at a "target" software company (competes with FAANG on prestige, but not literally FAANG). I interview candidates for senior+ roles, approximately one per week. By the time a candidate gets to me, I read their resume only for icebreakers/small-talk, and I couldn't care less what their resume says otherwise. But, I also happen to know that our internal recruiters, who are the first line of scr…

Sounds like the lesson here is to bypass the recruiter huh?

HR sucking is how consulting firms get in and rent-seek

Re: Ask HN: CS degrees, do they matter again?

#139

It's complicated. I work at a "target" software company (competes with FAANG on prestige, but not literally FAANG). I interview candidates for senior+ roles, approximately one per week. By the time a candidate gets to me, I read their resume only for icebreakers/small-talk, and I couldn't care less what their resume says otherwise. But, I also happen to know that our internal recruiters, who are the first line of scr…

Sounds like the lesson here is to bypass the recruiter huh?

This is ALWAYS the lesson

Re: Ask HN: CS degrees, do they matter again?

#140
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you may be undervaluing effort and payoff of CS fundamentals, as well as overestimating payoff of the paper from an online degree. (Caveat: If you'll be emigrating in the future a degree can make a difference for visas if recognized ) If you do it and actually apply yourself (as opposed to optimizing for points/effort) I guess you'll be on the up regardless of which (:

I wasn't undervaluing it. I was just answering the question. I've spent a lot of time on CS fundamentals. I can't say I've used a binary search tree in my every day work. If I anticipate this type of question in an interview, I'll need to go back and review. Thats all I meant.

They aren't talking about leetcode: https://teachyourselfcs.com/
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