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.
Maybe I’m an oddball, but I’d rather hire a new grad with sound fundamentals, but learned on an older tech stack, then somebody with all the buzzwords but no fundamentals. And I’ve always found summer internships to be good way to find out. Even better if the candidate is willing to work part-time through their senior year.
Ask HN: What is it like being in a CS major program these days?
51–60 of 221 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is it like being in a CS major program these days?
#52"The professors use AI themselves and expect their students to use it, but do not have a gauge for what kinds of problems make for an appropriately difficult assignment in the modern era." I'm a prof, recently retired but still teaching part-time. This is exactly the problem. AI is here, people use it, so it would be stupid (plus impossible) not to let students use it. However, you want your students to still learn s…
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…
You can download every book or tutorial ever made in our history.
We have access to vast knowledge.
Re: Ask HN: What is it like being in a CS major program these days?
#53Earlier 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.
When I was in CS, we were taught theory. If you wanted to be caught up with the current tech, you'd teach yourself.
The CS theory (i.e. maths based) side of it really has stuck with me - only other thing being vi controls being hardwired in my brain even though I went on to become more of an emacs fan...
Re: Ask HN: What is it like being in a CS major program these days?
#54I am a teen who is hopefully going to go to college (Preferably CS), My reason is and was that I really love tinkering with computers and code related automation/scripts (more importantly thinking about scripts) And to be honest, my intention with going to college is hopefully to rip off any use of AI that I do or have a more learning experience because right now I am bounded severely with time but my curiosity still…
The thing is, to be useful next to an AI, you have to become really good at software (note that I said "software", not "coding"; it includes architecture). And to be optimistic: one advantage of students today is that AI can help them learn. Back in the days it was a lot harder to find help, then StackOverflow helped a lot, and I'm sure AI helps even more now.
Re: Ask HN: What is it like being in a CS major program these days?
#55"The professors use AI themselves and expect their students to use it, but do not have a gauge for what kinds of problems make for an appropriately difficult assignment in the modern era." I'm a prof, recently retired but still teaching part-time. This is exactly the problem. AI is here, people use it, so it would be stupid (plus impossible) not to let students use it. However, you want your students to still learn s…
It's been plenty of years since my college days, but even back then professors had to deal with plagiarism and cheating. The class was split into a lecture + a lab. In the lab, you used school computers with only intranet access (old solaris machines, iirc) and tests were all in-class, pen-and-paper.
Of course, they weren't really interested at all in training people to be "developers", they were training computer scientists. C++ was the most modern language to be taught because "web technologies" changed too quickly for a four-year degree to be possible, they argued.
Times have changed quite a bit.
Re: Ask HN: What is it like being in a CS major program these days?
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They do not see Google, Meta, Amazon, etc, recruiting on campus Really? As in FAANG has stopped recruiting graduates?
They still probably do, but mainly in India.
I’m just surprised it took them this long to outsource.
The risk of course is people start their own companies learning from big tech and Indians get more UPI like tech.
Re: Ask HN: What is it like being in a CS major program these days?
#57I completed a Bachelor CS degree in 1995. I think that's a "CS major program".
It was very theoretical, in that the languages we learnt were too old, too new, and not industry-led. So, Eiffel for OO, Cobol(!), and some proper maths thrown in.
It got me a solid 25 years of work.
After about a five year gap in software development as a job, I am now doing a Masters of Computer Science at the same place (by name alone, maybe) and the tech they teach is ten years old.
I'm not averse to this so far. I finish in a year, and I'll know if it was a waste of time to get back into the industry then.
However, I have done six of the twelve subjects and they ALL filled gaps in my understanding from both my original Bachelor and my work experience. I am a better programmer now.
I am currently in an interview process where I surprised myself with my own knowledge. YMMV of course.
Re: Ask HN: What is it like being in a CS major program these days?
#58But never the less the usage of LLMs in order to finish homework/be done with tests in a matter of minutes has widely spread. On the other hand the idea of cheating and it's drawbacks have stayed the same - (not em dash, chill) That is robbing yourself of applicable knowledge.
The current idea and motive behind CS majors is dragging us first through ANSI C so we can learn to program.
I have a suspicion that the methodology of ascertaining knowledge has become stricter on programming laboratories compared to before. We are required to create an initial program for a specific lesson and we essentially have a sizable test every week, which consists of adding onto our code. The amount of points we gain is heavily time dependent and in order to finish code quickly we need to understand it already.
Some claim they are able to use chatgpt on those lessons and in my opinion they are digging their own grave because we have very strict rules on passing and rumors day not a lot passed the subject in the last year, a third supposedly.
Some people are already predicting our replacement, but you just have to know that's utter bullshit.
That's why I stopped using AI for exercises because I realized I might fail if I do the initial exercises with usage of LLMs, because I will get slower if I continue to so.
To summarize the CS majors are starting to produce people with no real desire to learn programming and to survive we need to repeat last year's exercises in order to get accustomed to reading poorly written exercises. A lot of tests can be easily cheated off which affects negatively real world experience.
Re: Ask HN: What is it like being in a CS major program these days?
#59I 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.
Very little coverage of tcp/ip in any of the courses. Language of choice in CompSci was Java at the time, which was reasonable as OOP was the rage.
Some compsci lecturers were very much of the opinion that computers got in the way of teaching Computer Science.
Re: Ask HN: What is it like being in a CS major program these days?
#60CS 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…
> Learn to code and then Google will surely hire you and pay you $250k right off the bat Weird. In EU, 99% of graduates didn’t (don’t) have that in mind… A fresh graduate in CS typically earns less than 40-50K (even less depending on the country). So USA is now like the EU?