11–20 of 152 posts
It's difficult to take this person's point seriously when he claims >Another way to explain the shallowness of Computer Science is that it's the only discipline that eschews paradox. Even mathematics has reams of unanswered questions and potential paradox in its core philosophy. In Computer Science, there's none. No unanswered questions? Rubbish, 'P=NP' anyone? Correctness of the assumption of the Church-Turing hypot…
How arrogant can you be? There's nothing for you to learn from 100 years of algorithms, complexity theory, language or operating systems design? Nothing?! All you need is code?
People will most certainly ask you why you studied Art History in college if it turns out that you came out the other end with no marketable skills, especially when articles about your woes show up in the New York Times as though your poor planning and choice of topic did not lead directly to your inability to find work.
His view seems blinkered, at best.
but, how much money is it worth? is it worth 20k? 50k? 200k?
on the flip side, not all of us are brilliant alpha programmers with entrepreneur-class egos. the labor-class parents of one of my best friends are incredibly proud of his BigCo software job, and BigCos don't hire without a degree. The cynic in me wants to call a [software] degree an average person's investment.
It was a great post right up until the part where he started talking about computer science. It left me with the feeling that either Zed did not study computer science, and is just talking out of his ass, or went through a very bad computer science program and has generalized that all of them must be that bad. How arrogant can you be? There's nothing for you to learn from 100 years of algorithms, complexity theory, l…
Personal data points, third party anecdotes even less so, are not a reliable way to extrapolate how CS (or any major) is taught outside of the MITs of the world. Your experiences, shockingly, are one among many, and remain yours.
That said ...
The culture thing is spot on. That is what getting an education is all about.
I think better advice for students choosing a program would be to go to University, spend a year studying as many different things as you can, including CS, to see what engages you. Learn how to code at the same time. You might be happier as a physicist who knows how to code than a computer scientist who wishes he knew more physics. There are plenty of coding jobs a CS grad can't do.
> is that it's the only discipline that eschews paradox.
> Even mathematics has reams of unanswered questions and
> potential paradox in its core philosophy. In Computer
> Science, there's none. It's assumed that all of it is
> pretty much solved and your job as an undergraduate is
> to just learn to get a job in this totally solved area
> of expertise.
Zed is confusing software engineering with computer science. CS is a branch of applied mathematics, and it's not different from mathematics. There are unsolved problems and plenty of areas that require further research.