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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?

#181

Post by uhfraid »

Novosell wrote: post #6

I've been doing programming and sys admin as a hobby for a long time and only recently started my bachelors in compsci, and I'm sad to have waited so long as almost everything has been infested with ai to some degree.

Don’t be discouraged. The work that you enjoy doing is still here, and will still be here after you’ve graduated.

My best advice to you would be to learn CS the hard way (without AI).

Ignore the “AI learning tools” see on HN or mentioned by peers. Learning should be challenging so if it feels like a shortcut, it probably is. Don’t fall into that trap and you’ll be a more competent developer as a result, both with and without AI

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

#183

Post by koakuma-chan »

klibertp wrote: post #148
wreath wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 differe…

You're probably talking about cases when systems engineers develop apps. In my experience, when app developers develop apps, it's a mess.

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

#184

Post by crossroadsguy »

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…

> immediately open 10k jobs in India

As someone on the ground here and looking at this industry, from this industry, with an electronic (or whatever is the term for a powerful one) microscope, nope this ain’t happening. Not even close!

So maybe them openings are going to Eastern Europe?

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

#187

Post by [deleted] »

jazz9k wrote: post #112
roland35 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#188

Post by SilverElfin »

> What are the professors telling their students to explain why the course they enrolled in deserves the rigorous study?

CS is not the degree that needs this justification, even with AI. But most of humanities, which are not economically valuable, do. Students shouldn’t be going into debt for a false promise of being well rounded or whatever they tell kids these days.

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

#189

Post by wink »

jjav wrote: post #167
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.

Are for instance the Knuth books "behind current technology"? No. A CS degree is not about the javascript library du jour, it is about the fundamentals of computation which don't really change.

That's only true for some things.

If you provide a course on, say, Assembler and CPU architecture, you better have examples ready that are newer than Knuth's books. Your approach would be kinda ok if your program said: we'll ignore everything that is hardware and related ot the real world, but people take offense at claims like "there is only one cpu".

There's a difference between fundamentals and "details". Any given framework in one language is a uselesss detail, if you're teaching a course on programming language theory I would expect you'd at least have heard about most reasonably popular languages, even if they came out in the last 5 years - because people might be asking questions about their new favourite language versus what you are teaching.

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

#190

Post by rwmj »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #142
rwmj wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

What you're after is a technical college with vocational training. They are definitely important and have their place. Some students at university would be better off going to technical colleges. But technical colleges are not the same as what universities do.
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