Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Go To University, Not For CS

sheddingbikes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 152 posts

Re: Go To University, Not For CS

#61

Post by elblanco »

devon_r_t wrote: post #25
Emore wrote: post #8

I must thoroughly disagree. First off, I agree on the importance of culture. But equating a CS degree with coding is just plain wrong; Dijkstra has a nice quote on this. CS is and should be applied mathematics, and what more timeless topic is there than math? Secondly, there are some serious doubts whether university teaches you to think independently. As a counter argument, read "The Disadvantage of an Elite Educati…

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…

Most decent schools should teach CS as an applied math course. In fact most undergrad CS majors should graduate not too many credits shy from an undergrad Math degree (or at least a minor).

The problem is that student demand isn't for CS. Student demand is for Information Systems and Software Engineering. Schools either respond to that demand and turn their CS programs into glorified trade schools, or they keep CS as an applied mathematics program like it's supposed to be and risk angering new grads (e.g. "I didn't learn anything useful in my CS program!")

Re: Go To University, Not For CS

#62

Post by mechanical_fish »

thecombjelly wrote: post #45

I agree. I went through my junior year of a CS degree and dropped out because it wasn't worth it. If I was to do it over again, I would definitely have chosen a different degree. I'm 100% certain that doing a different degree, I would have turned out a better programmer and better at something else. CS (or any programming degrees) are not as intellectually challenging as they should be. If you want to learn how to pr…

I got a degree in physics which I regret not at all. I recommend the hard sciences: Physics, biology, or chemistry. Or a similarly 'hard' engineering degree: EE, ChemE, MechE, or whatever the engineering equivalent of biology is. ;) (The name for that is still being invented. "Biomedical engineering" is one term you'll hear.)

Take plenty of lab courses; try to get some summer science internships involving programming -- science labs need programmers, so that should not be hard to find.

I'd get a minor in CS, maybe. But, frankly, if I went back to school today I might still prefer to take courses in art and design -- a subject that would sure be handy for my career -- or statistics, and teach myself the CS in the evenings.

Re: Go To University, Not For CS

#64

Post by hga »

b3b0p wrote: post #35

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 a…

I agree it's depressing, but if your goal is to continue "programming" past age 35-40 I'm not sure you can make the case for others. See my other posting discussing autodidacticism.

However, there is one caveat: if you go into embedded or get a serious security clearance and stick to government work that required it, you can with much less difficultly continue programming. In the former case the field appears to respect gray hairs, in the latter, it's pretty hard to get the first job (they can't have you working on classified stuff until you get your clearance and you can't apply for or hold one without a job requiring it) so once you have your "tickets" you're in very good shape.

Re: Go To University, Not For CS

#65

Post by amohr »

If all you really want to do is code, my guess is all the art history and romantic literature classes in the world won't result in a necessarily cultured person. Culture doesn't just come from exposure, it comes from receptiveness.

As Dorothy Parker said "You can lead a whore to culture, but you can't make her think"

I think this post would be much more accurate if Zed had chosen a more fitting marquis word. There's tons of things that you learn in college but wouldn't pick up going straight to work. What I think has been most useful, for me, that I would not have picked up on my own is writing for different audiences.

In high school, you most likely wrote like a high school student: (generally speaking) unrefined, undirected, and usually lacking a clearly defined audience. When you get to college, you get used to the academic environment - you learn to communicate an idea efficiently to someone who isn't an english teacher. It's where you learn that all those "rules" they taught you aren't as steadfast as they would have liked you to believe. It is ok to start sentences with "And" or "But" and end with a preposition.

Re: Go To University, Not For CS

#66

Post by jrockway »

tl wrote: post #44
jrockway wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'd say nearly every company whose focus isn't software (they employ more programmers than software companies and they use the degree as a screening tool).

All I know is that we pay near the top of the industry, and we can't find any programmers. If there were some massive influx of programmers, then a degree might be a good weed-out tool. But the reality is that most people we interview barely get past "write a function to reverse a string", and beggars can't be choosers. Have you written a computer program on your own before? You're hired.

(I am exaggerating a little, but there is a shortage of programmers.)

Re: Go To University, Not For CS

#67

Post by younata »

hga wrote: post #52
markbao wrote: post #46

> You my friend, are an idiot. I hate to tell this to you, but your lack of education makes you that way. Your failure to expose yourself to literature, art, poetry, science (real science, the icky kind) has made you stupid. Another data point against you is that you learned to code and you are questioning whether you can get something out of a university education. How arrogant can you be? There's nothing for you to…

Hmmm, an interesting point. I'll note that my high school in the late '70s had only one term of the calculus at the end, and the fact that the teacher refused to teach, full stop, wasn't caught by something inconvenient like the independently administered AP tests. My school system had dropped its honors program because it was "discriminatory", but somehow nowadays they offer 12 AP courses including Calculus AB, the…

I'm currently coming out of high school (11 days until graduation), and, I haven't learned much. 6 AP courses are offered at my school, none of them are pushed on you until after you sign up for the class and decide that wasn't a good idea. I haven't ever done "real science". AP Physics B (non calculus) is the only ap science course offered, and it still was just "here's a lecture about physics, do your homework, few labs".

Re: Go To University, Not For CS

#68

Post by hga »

madmanslitany wrote: post #58
hga wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps ... but that's not been my experience. A previous HN discussion where there was not merely no agreement but no strong opinions on what school ranked as #5 suggested to me that there's really something to this. At the very least they deserve their pedestal. On the question of whether it's not worth going to a school that ranks below them, I'm not so sure.

Dude, the normal career path of pretty much everyone is over by 35-40. Lawyers that haven't made partner, traders that haven't made been made head of their desk, engineers in general that haven't made it to management, teachers that haven't moved into administration. It's not like they take all the programmers over 40 out behind the cubicle farm and shoot them or something. I also feel compelled to point out that "pr…

That's not been my observation for engineers outside of software (there's some truth to it, certainly GM plays that game) and certainly not for teachers. Nor is it true for scientists. Don't know about mathematicians. Certainly not true for doctors.

They may not "shoot them or something" but they do stop hiring them. I have some interesting personal anecdotal experience here:

I look much younger than I am (at 49, until a few months ago when I started getting a few gray hairs, I was routinely mistaken for an early '20s college student (this is a family trait, no one thinks my 77 year old father is beyond his early '60s)), so it's trivial for me to not let on to my age until I slip and e.g. mention working on PDP-11s (had one interviewer exclaim "How old are you?!?!!!" that time :-).

Starting about when I turned 35 I found it increasingly difficult to find work in the D.C. area ... until in the middle of one job search I scrubbed my resume of all the info that signaled my age, most especially when I attended college. Bam, it was like night and day, in that job search and in future ones.

Anyway, I believe that the nature of the field of software development rewards experience in terms of quality ... but we all know that most suits are interested in playing as little as possible, even if this results in technical debt or outright project failure that kills the company (one problem is that non-programmers just don't understand the field and its constraints and so on).

To finish, I'm not dismissing all but the top 4 schools, I'm saying that if your goal is to continue programming past age 35-40 attending any other is going to put one more obstacle in your path and by no means will attending 1 of these 4 make it easy anyway. Since you don't believe in that goal I'm not addressing you or your career or whatever.

Re: Go To University, Not For CS

#69

Post by stipes »

I'll throw in my voice that a "regular" University can still have a good CS program. I am at a large state university. My theoretical courses have been, by and large, quite good.

Our introductory course is based on SICP and Scheme (with a little Python at the end). Our second course is roughly about OO, taught with Java (but without letting us use most of the libraries at all).

The design of our program is that you choose an emphasis (I'm in network security; there's also networks, graphics, AI, etc., and yes, software engineering). All emphases have theoretical elements, at least to some degree.

I have also had great experiences doing research with professors, who are very open to undergraduates.

Re: Go To University, Not For CS

#70

Post by hga »

younata wrote: post #67
hga wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmmm, an interesting point. I'll note that my high school in the late '70s had only one term of the calculus at the end, and the fact that the teacher refused to teach, full stop, wasn't caught by something inconvenient like the independently administered AP tests. My school system had dropped its honors program because it was "discriminatory", but somehow nowadays they offer 12 AP courses including Calculus AB, the…

I'm currently coming out of high school (11 days until graduation), and, I haven't learned much. 6 AP courses are offered at my school, none of them are pushed on you until after you sign up for the class and decide that wasn't a good idea. I haven't ever done "real science". AP Physics B (non calculus) is the only ap science course offered, and it still was just "here's a lecture about physics, do your homework, few…

Sigh, algebra based non calculus physics is cargo cult science much in the original sense that Feynman started the meme. No one outside of education does it this way, or as I like to put it, there's a reason Newton invented the integral calculus to develop classical mechanics and why Edison couldn't compete with Tesla (self-taught Edison didn't have the math to do polyphase AC, which was the only practical approach back then).

Anyway, I feel your pain, I came out of my high school not having learned hardly as much as I wanted to or needed. At least I had some good to great math teachers until my senior year (that was a literal life saver along with a summer school course on a UNIX V6 machine). Senior year was a total loss with no insurance, or "It's a bad sign when JROTC is by far your most interesting and useful class."

How well have you learned your math? That's a key foundation.

Post reply on HN