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Go To University, Not For CS

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Re: Go To University, Not For CS

#31

Post by jrockway »

dustingetz wrote: post #14

i agree, culture is important. 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.

What BigCos don't hire without degrees? I know people at Google and Microsoft without a degree. I work for a giant corporation, without a degree.

Re: Go To University, Not For CS

#32

Post by [deleted] »

hga wrote: post #22
wheels wrote: post #12

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…

The termination with extreme prejudice of 6.001 suggests that some people mostly agree ( http://www.wisdomandwonder.com/link/2110/why-mit-switched-fr... ). Certainly there's an ever increasing role for people pasting together big libraries and frameworks without a deep understanding of what goes on behind the curtains....

[deleted]

Re: Go To University, Not For CS

#33

Post by scott_s »

acangiano wrote: post #20

> 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. 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…

There is more to Computer Science than Math. Previous posts on the topic:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=968013

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=690798

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1131606

Re: Go To University, Not For CS

#34

Post by devonrt »

hga wrote: post #30
devon_r_t wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where did you get your CS degree? Or more importantly, which institutions do you know of that actually teach CS as applied mathematics and aren't just "Java Schools?" I went to roughly a school with what was and still is an incredibly mediocre CS department and, as far as I can tell, this is the case more times than it isn't. I spent time working on a Pure Mathematics degree but eventually switched to CS and I still…

Did your CS program require a discrete mathematics course?

Yes, and it was my favorite part of the program!

(Sorry about the multiple login, I mistakenly logged in with clickpass last time)

Re: Go To University, Not For CS

#35

Post by b3b0p »

Don't go to a school that teaches programming.

There are many fine schools besides MIT, CMU, Caltech, etc. Saying you should disregard CS as your major because you aren't able to attend one of the elite schools is downright depressing. There are many great schools for an undergraduate that have an excellent CS curriculum.

Any programming at the schools I attended were optional 0 credit labs. And except for the CS 1 and 2 intro classes, there was no designated programming language, you could use any language you wanted. Some chose Ruby, Python, or Java while some others chose C or C++. They were more concerned about your ability to design and implement a proper working solution to the problem given.

Re: Go To University, Not For CS

#36

Post by rbranson »

robryan wrote: post #24
acangiano wrote: post #20

> 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. 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…

It's not like software engineering doesn't have unsolved problems either, like why is it still so hard to produce bug free software, why programmer productivity has only gone up a small amount despite 30 years of language advances and why most software still has to be mostly custom. The dream from the earlier days of software engineering where we were eventually meant to have components that could easily be mixed and…

I don't think we'll ever get around having to build software with code and highly trained developers. The world is still very much custom engineered, from architecture to civil engineering, electrical to mechanical engineering, even mass produced items have relatively few interchangeable parts.

Re: Go To University, Not For CS

#37

Post by hga »

jrockway wrote: post #31
dustingetz wrote: post #14

i agree, culture is important. 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.

What BigCos don't hire without degrees? I know people at Google and Microsoft without a degree. I work for a giant corporation, without a degree.

Lucent in theory didn't, although that was a result of their union contracts which required people not covered by them to have college degrees.

This seriously screwed over the undegreed Ascend employees after the acquisition; anything that might bring them to the attention of the union like putting them in for a promotion risked a grievance (or whatever) filing that Lucent would lose.

Companies that do contracting work for the Federal government generally need to hire people with degrees, and that's probably generally to universally true for consulting companies in general, where they're selling appearances to get their foot into the door.

Re: Go To University, Not For CS

#38

Post by sliverstorm »

jrockway wrote: post #31
dustingetz wrote: post #14

i agree, culture is important. 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.

What BigCos don't hire without degrees? I know people at Google and Microsoft without a degree. I work for a giant corporation, without a degree.

That brings up the question; when did they get into the industry? Back when there was no such thing as a Computer Science degree, you of course didn't need one to get a job as a programmer

I'm sure there are some people still who get into Google and Microsoft with no work experience or degree, but I suspect that number was higher when these things were new and all. I also suspect a good number of the people you were thinking of when you made that post had good work experience to help them land the job.

Re: Go To University, Not For CS

#39

Post by lucifer »

Meaningful answers to questions such as "Should I study CS?" are critically informed by the questioner.

Obviously, if you want to make a living in IT and already know how to code, heck, get to work and make money instead of giving it to some corporation masquerading as an "institution of higher learning".

But if your ambition in life includes 'solving the tough problems in computer science', then by all means, pick a top notch school and be diligent in sucking brain content from peers and faculty. Its is not a trivial intellectual domain, and the "primitiveness" of the discipline is actually indicative of how early in the game this thing is.

So , wanna to be the Plato of Computer Science? Either way, you'll need to get that "computer science" education. From the ground up.

Re: Go To University, Not For CS

#40

Post by tessro »

hga wrote: post #22
wheels wrote: post #12

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…

The termination with extreme prejudice of 6.001 suggests that some people mostly agree ( http://www.wisdomandwonder.com/link/2110/why-mit-switched-fr... ). Certainly there's an ever increasing role for people pasting together big libraries and frameworks without a deep understanding of what goes on behind the curtains....

In any successful field of engineering, the job growth explosion will be among the assembly-line workers. Cars and aircraft, now solar panels and semiconductors. Extrapolating from that to say that an engineering education is worthless is a huge extension of reasoning. Those assembly-line jobs only exist because of years of research by well-educated engineers.

If your school's Computer Science curriculum is a series of courses on the LAMP stack, that's one thing. But in the fields like algorithms, distributed computing, machine learning and information extraction, to name just a few, there is plenty of room to build a career around a degree.

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