[dead]
Ask HN: What is it like being in a CS major program these days?
81–90 of 221 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is it like being in a CS major program these days?
#82Re: Ask HN: What is it like being in a CS major program these days?
#83I 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…
Interesting that the algorithmic finance firms are still recruiting. Perhaps they still need a pipeline of rigorous thinkers, or are unwilling to cede significant influence over P+L to llms.
Typing code has never been the difficult part of quant finance.
Re: Ask HN: What is it like being in a CS major program these days?
#84I 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…
> Jane Street and Two Sigma are sucking up all the talent. This is the most made up thing I've ever seen on hn. Those firms hire probably 10 new grads a year (maybe combined!). Unless you're saying the collective talent graduating "high-tier CS programs" numbers in the 10s, this is literally impossible.
Way, way more than 10, but I agree with you that they are not taking even 1% of tech talent per year.
Re: Ask HN: What is it like being in a CS major program these days?
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
They still probably do, but mainly in India.
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.
Re: Ask HN: What is it like being in a CS major program these days?
#86"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…
Claude has a teacher mode where it will ask you questions.
I’m picking up game dev in my spare time. I’m not letting Claude write any of the code. We talk through the next task, I take a run at it, then when I’m stuck I got back and talk through where the problems are.
It’s slower than just letting Claude do it, obviously. Plus you do need to be a bit disciplined - Claude will gladly do it for you when you start getting tired. I am picking it up through, and not getting bogged down in the beginner ‘impossible feeling bugs you can’t figure out bc you’re learning and don’t fully understand everything yet’ stage.
Re: Ask HN: What is it like being in a CS major program these days?
#87I 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…
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.
The best CS programs teach a lot of tech that is not used in the business world. The they're often too theoretically or too experimental.
Re: Ask HN: What is it like being in a CS major program these days?
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the UK I did comp-sci from 2000, did a couple of extra modules. One was from engineering and covered communication theory -- nyquist etc. Another from was the English Department of all places and covered XML and data. 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 opinio…
I did my CS undergrad in China but was already in the UK early 2000s. I was also abit surprised there's little mention of TCP/IP which is kinda considered classics if there's anything taught in CS at all. Java was definitly the new dominating force in industry and academia at that time. However it depends on the resources the univ got. In some places there were other less Comp sci / software engineering focused degre…
It's difficult to remember clearly from 25 years ago, the OSI model was certainly covered, and I clearly remember datagram programming, but nothing in terms of say network routing protocols.
The engineering course covered token ring. Remember in 2000, and certainly a few years before (when I suspect half the courses were created as lecturers often go years between updating them), Ethernet and IP were not the only kid on the block. Netbios/ipx was still in widespread use, Token ring (which I do remember being covered, as I'd encountered ipx and ip over serial and ethernet, but never token ring) was still being developed. HTTP was only 9 years old.
Re: Ask HN: What is it like being in a CS major program these days?
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
The ones I knew that were only driven by money all dropped out or changed majors.
What did they change to? Pre-med?
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"
Re: Ask HN: What is it like being in a CS major program these days?
#90Any CS course that does not teach students “the hard way” is doing them a disservice, and represents everything wrong with the industry.
Learning CS is not about learning how to get a big tech job at a fancy company, it’s about igniting the passion for computing that so many of these job applicants today seem to lack whereas 20 years ago it seemed anyone applying for a CS job was a nerd who wouldn’t shut up about computers.
For some, learning CS is also learning that this field might not be for you, and that’s okay. Just bow out and pursue something more tolerable instead of profilerating shitty low effort, low passion software in our world.
I feel it is essential that a CS curriculum be timeless in the way physics or math is. So yea, I would expect that if I went back to my university and saw what my old professors were teaching, it would still be the same theoretical, algorithmic, hand coded work in low level languages or assembly. I would be very disappointed if they were just teaching students how to prompt stuff with AI.
Mind you, as a student at the time I did not understand why we were doing all that old stuff instead of learning the cool modern things, but I understand why now, and I wish the professors would have explained that a bit clearer so students don’t feel misguided.