[flagged]
Ask HN: What is it like being in a CS major program these days?
141–150 of 221 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is it like being in a CS major program these days?
#142Earlier 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.
You think most people spend tens of thousands of dollars on college and expect not to be employable?
Re: Ask HN: What is it like being in a CS major program these days?
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which is a good thing. They should be teaching the cornerstone principles, not offering vocational courses.
my old CS prof at my uni used to say when this question came up "do you sign up for an astronomy course and expect they teach you how to build a telescope?" It's always puzzled me why people sign up for an academic education that has 'science' literally in the name and then complain when they get a theoretical education. It's not a tool workshop
Because they haven’t overcome their addiction to food and shelter and they need to make money to support their addictions?
Re: Ask HN: What is it like being in a CS major program these days?
#144I 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…
When I was in college in the early 2000s, it was the same. Most professors were at least a decade behind current technology.
> a decade behind current technology.
And how about computer science?
CS is not a degree in web programming framework or DNN modeling framework du jour. Algorithms, data structures, linear algebra, and programming fundamentals do evolve, but gradually.
None of the languages I use at work existed when I was an undergraduate. Very nearly all the data structures and algorithms I use at work did.
Re: Ask HN: What is it like being in a CS major program these days?
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
FAANG employees here are cheap to hire. They work very hard to remain rich or become rich from nothing (50-60LPA will basically make you rich in 5-6 years if you save and invest well). Leetcode grind and competitive problem solving is Indian childhood bread and butter these days. And given how much househelp exists in India this kind of model is perfectly suited to be outsourced to young and middle aged Indians who h…
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.
So are you saying that no multinational company ca have employees overseas?
This is really a poorly thought out proposal.
Re: Ask HN: What is it like being in a CS major program these days?
#146Earlier 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.
This is a false view. Most developers have always just been “dark matter developers” who only saw it as a way to put food on their tables.
https://www.hanselman.com/blog/dark-matter-developers-the-un...
Almost every single developer I’ve met since 1996 talked about other hobbies they had outside of computers and didn’t think about coding outside if work.
Re: Ask HN: What is it like being in a CS major program these days?
#147I'm a CS professor. We are starting to stand up AI programs and degrees as early as next year. It could be that the AI programs completely subsume a lot of what CS does, or maybe they coexist and CS becomes actually more about actual computer science and engineering practice rather than the job training program it was for big tech for the last couple decades. Enrollment is dipping but it's still very high. That may be more of a function of the current political environment than anything else.
For my classes I've moved to a multimodal testing regime - oral, practical, take-home, in-class, tests to get a varied picture. Everything they submit is version controlled, and the solution is worth nothing without a sufficient version control history.
They're allowed to use AI in their homework and take-home exams (I don't get paid enough manage a surveillance state to make sure they never use it), but they have to explain it, and extend it without AI in person. Those who use AI completely fail at this point, those who worked on their own pass easily. By the second time they have to perform these in-class practical exams they do much better.
As for the curriculum, we are accredited so we cannot change the curriculum much without losing that accreditation. I think that's a lot of the reason for standing up a new program, but the current curriculum will likely have to be adjusted. I see classes like Programming Languages changing significantly in the future.
Re: Ask HN: What is it like being in a CS major program these days?
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
Drivers, kernels, firmwares, low-level networking, the likes. Some higher-level infrastructure, like compilers, interpreters, runtime systems (Qt/Glib-like code). I'm not sure where the question comes from? The divide between systems and app programming is almost as old as coding itself; it's not some distinction without difference - it's the difference between writing a TypeScript microservice for handling CRUD on s…
I dont think parent was questioning it, sounded they were more curious but thanks for explaining because i wasnt sure myself. Re: safe from LLMs, id imagine the level of rigor in sys engineering is higher so maybe people are more wary of LLM produced code?
I'm not sure. You'd have to define "level of rigor". TypeScript has a vastly more expressive type system than C, for example, so given their respective prevalence in their domains, you could easily say that coding apps nowadays is actually more rigorous. There's Rust, but somehow people write lots of apps in it. And so on.
I don't think systems programming is inherently harder than writing apps. You deal with different sets of problems (users stubbornly misusing your UI vs. hardware vendors notoriously lying in the manuals; hundreds of dependencies vs. endemic NIH syndrome; etc.), but coding is, for the most part, the same thing everywhere. IME, the "level of rigor" (as in "kinds and pervasiveness of actions taken to ensure correctness") depends much more on actual people or organizations than on the domain.
Re: Ask HN: What is it like being in a CS major program these days?
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
my old CS prof at my uni used to say when this question came up "do you sign up for an astronomy course and expect they teach you how to build a telescope?" It's always puzzled me why people sign up for an academic education that has 'science' literally in the name and then complain when they get a theoretical education. It's not a tool workshop
Because they haven’t overcome their addiction to food and shelter and they need to make money to support their addictions?
universities aren't job centers either. They don't supply you with food and shelter, you pay them money and they give you the education you want. Which can mean making a lot of money if you happen to pick something private businesses value but it can also mean reading Ulysses or The Old Testament or number theory all day.
Higher education is entirely up to you, it's not a company pre-training. If you want that there are literal vocational programs that are not computer science.
Re: Ask HN: What is it like being in a CS major program these days?
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This is a false view. Most developers have always just been “dark matter developers” who only saw it as a way to put food on their tables. https://www.hanselman.com/blog/dark-matter-developers-the-un... Almost every single developer I’ve met since 1996 talked about other hobbies they had outside of computers and didn’t think about coding outside if work.
> Most developers have always just been “dark matter developers” who only saw it as a way to put food on their tables.
Is that what the article you share says? I read: "Where are the dark matter developers? Probably getting work done." It calls "dark matter developers" the ones that are not vocal on the internet. Doesn't say anything about how nerdy they are...
> Almost every single developer I’ve met since 1996 talked about other hobbies
Are you a developer yourself? And do you consider yourself a nerd? I am, and I do. And I actually have other hobbies. And I know a lot of developers who studied computer science because they were interested in computers (and not because they thought it would pay well).