Ask HN: What's missing in a CS degree? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What's missing in a CS degree?

#61

Post by djb_hackernews » Tue, Jun 01, 2010, 3:55 PM UTC

patio11 wrote: post #5

I think my CS degree was very valuable (regular expressions! hash tables! discrete math! cache cache cache!), although I'd encourage absolutely everybody to pick up two degrees as long as you're there. You might as well get a jump start on domain knowledge. Weaknesses of a CS degree: 1) At the point of graduating college, it is likely that your experience working with teams in a production-like environment will be mi…

web programming in a CS program?

I think you are falling in to a trap a lot of people fall in to. There are a ton of cliche comparisons I could make, but I'll spare you.

If you want web programming, you should just get yourself enrolled in a technical school that will teach you all of that in 2 years.

Re: Ask HN: What's missing in a CS degree?

#62

Post by djb_hackernews » Tue, Jun 01, 2010, 3:58 PM UTC

dagw wrote: post #43

malcolmwhy wrote: post #16

I graduated last may as a computer science major and realized the holes in my skills were everywhere. I found that my theory was much better than my actual ability to code. It seems that schools should teach their students one oop language for three years and then start showing them what other options are out there. I found myself in the working world convinced I knew how to code in java, c++, python and php, w/o the…

Isn't this true of all degrees? I have a friend who got a MSc in financial mathematics, and she said she was quite surprised to learn that all the quant math she had studied for her degree was basically scoffed at as "academic" once she got her first job. The same is in fact basically true for just about everybody I know, no matter what the field. If you went to university expecting vocational training then you where…

Cool. I've been checking out Financial Math masters programs. Any info about where your friend went and how she felt about it would be appreciated!

Re: Ask HN: What's missing in a CS degree?

#63

Post by savant » Wed, Jun 02, 2010, 5:07 AM UTC

djb_hackernews wrote: post #61

patio11 wrote: post #5

I think my CS degree was very valuable (regular expressions! hash tables! discrete math! cache cache cache!), although I'd encourage absolutely everybody to pick up two degrees as long as you're there. You might as well get a jump start on domain knowledge. Weaknesses of a CS degree: 1) At the point of graduating college, it is likely that your experience working with teams in a production-like environment will be mi…

web programming in a CS program? I think you are falling in to a trap a lot of people fall in to. There are a ton of cliche comparisons I could make, but I'll spare you. If you want web programming, you should just get yourself enrolled in a technical school that will teach you all of that in 2 years.

The fact remains that it is much easier to:

- Perform Unit/Functional/User Test

- Use version control

- Be exposed to a variety of both tools (editors/ides) and services (github.com, getexceptional.com)

- Work in a distributed manner

- Get real world feedback on your application from people other than the Professor

- Work with more than the String class of your language

- Collaborate on related, but not dependent, code in the same codebase

- Learn different patterns (Observer, Singleton, etc)

- Develop the way you would in the real world (Scrum? Waterfall? You name it. No real cowboy coding)

when doing web development than doing most "Random Number generator" or "Porpuquine" projects assigned in CS to show recursion or proper OOP.

I'm probably biased though, as I'm a web developer who went through the Java bullshit and didn't learn a damned thing until I actually tried to make a web application that someone other than my Professor of Data Structures and Algorithms II was testing/grading/using.

ADDENDUM: As for the CS portion of the degree, learning all the aforementioned skills will hopefully allow you to more easily grasp things like the difference between PSPACE and NP-Hard problems, Genetic Algorithms, AI, etc. I'd hope to god that someone designing AI would at least use version control on their application. It would be a nightmare to find a bug that sliced a person in half when they are in surgery without a tool like "git bisect" :)

Re: Ask HN: What's missing in a CS degree?

#64

Post by tptacek » Thu, Jun 03, 2010, 7:46 PM UTC

djb_hackernews wrote: post #61

patio11 wrote: post #5

I think my CS degree was very valuable (regular expressions! hash tables! discrete math! cache cache cache!), although I'd encourage absolutely everybody to pick up two degrees as long as you're there. You might as well get a jump start on domain knowledge. Weaknesses of a CS degree: 1) At the point of graduating college, it is likely that your experience working with teams in a production-like environment will be mi…

web programming in a CS program? I think you are falling in to a trap a lot of people fall in to. There are a ton of cliche comparisons I could make, but I'll spare you. If you want web programming, you should just get yourself enrolled in a technical school that will teach you all of that in 2 years.

Yes. Much better that students should learn AWT or how to write console apps that prompt for user input, so they can better learn how to think about recursion.