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Go To University, Not For CS

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Re: Go To University, Not For CS

#141

Post by tsally »

ErrantX wrote: post #113
coned88 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm really not sure what you mean. I have a CS degree from a ~50th ranked US University. It is not considered a math degree, but instead a CS degree from an engineering department. My education was engineering focused. My degree says I am a graduate from the Engineering school. I can write assembly, program a fpga, write OO programs, OS drivers and System calls. Shoot, I even wrote My own file system. I learned java…

That sounds exactly like the sort of degree I mean. It's not all that common though, in my experience, to find a CS degree with that sort of curriculum. Do you just cross me off the list because I have a CS degree. That's silly :) You may have noted from my post that I do hire CS majors. but do they understand the inner workings of a computer? Do they understand complexity, even the basic data structures. Yes, usuall…

The problem is that the majority of CS is taught as a pure subject with a smattering of applied theory.

Curriculum wise UIUC actually does an excellent job of addressing this issue. I imagine other schools are similar. We basically have our three core theoretical courses and everything else involves programming. Every course that isn't a theory course involves several significant programming assignments. For example, in our networking course the final programming assignment (in C) is to implement TCP over UDP. We have a seperate course called Programming Studio that is required. The entire course just focuses on learning programming well. And students can opt to do a large software engineering project instead of a thesis their senior year (the vast majority do software engineering, not a thesis).

I think all these measures help, but despite the heavy emphasis on programming, a lot of graduates are still horrible programmers. I think the root cause is that we are still learning how to teach programming well; we've had a much larger head start on learning to teach mathematics.

Re: Go To University, Not For CS

#142

Post by stcredzero »

In Computer Science, you only get an expansion of the envelope when some corporation makes a new toy everyone goes crazy over, not realizing it's just like that other toy someone else came up with 10 or 20 years ago.

This is an unintended admission by Zed that he's working off of 2nd or 3rd hand knowledge.

Re: Go To University, Not For CS

#143

Post by gcheong »

I really appreciated my CS education after reading the following from Apple's core data documentation:

"There are many situations where you may need to find existing objects (objects already saved in a store) for a set of discrete input values. A simple solution is to create a loop, then for each value in turn execute a fetch to determine whether there is a matching persisted object and so on. This pattern does not scale well. If you profile your application with this pattern, you typically find the fetch to be one of the more expensive operations in the loop (compared to just iterating over a collection of items). Even worse, this pattern turns an O(n) problem into an O(n^2) problem."

Re: Go To University, Not For CS

#144

Post by masomenos »

gcheong wrote: post #143

I really appreciated my CS education after reading the following from Apple's core data documentation: "There are many situations where you may need to find existing objects (objects already saved in a store) for a set of discrete input values. A simple solution is to create a loop, then for each value in turn execute a fetch to determine whether there is a matching persisted object and so on. This pattern does not s…

to play devil's advocate, what you'd need to know to parse that paragraph was covered by my CS 102 class. So you'd only need to have taken a couple classes, rather than majored in the subject.

Re: Go To University, Not For CS

#145

Post by sreque »

ErrantX wrote: post #94
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…

Well, I agree with his first part; and here is why. I've employed a goodly few programmers - invariably the least good are CS majors, the best are usually engineers or physicists. The reason is that CS is a theoretical degree, and far too many people do it assuming they will become a "programmer of value", rather than a potentially important CS researcher. I've had applicants bore be with details of compiler theory t…

Every engineer or physicist programmer I've met has been really good at taking math in their domain and converting it to code a compiler can understand, but none of them know how to design software or would be capable of writing larger-scale software systems. That's ok. Most of the code they'll be writing will be < 100k lines of code, and you'd be amazed at how much hackery you can survive, especially if you're reasonably smart, at that size of program. Just don't ever ask me or any other competent software engineer to ever have to maintain or extend that system! Let the physicist who wrote it do it.

Re: Go To University, Not For CS

#146

Post by hga »

steveklabnik wrote: post #56

I think lots of readers here are getting confused with the two kinds of "computer science." We all know CS as a theoretical discipline, close to math. But most American universities, it would seem, don't teach that. This is what Zed is talking about, the "computer science" that makes up one of these degrees. Maybe, I'm just overly bitter, but he's absolutely right about the current state of undergraduate level curric…

I think a lot of this has to do with where the school's CS department came from. For those few that started in the Math Department they tend to stay close to the math. For the engineering based ones (e.g MIT's EECS) engineering is always the prime focus and CS theory is at minimum a means to that end and for the serious CS types they can concentrate in it but they'll still in theory be good engineers. (When most of a school's students are engineers it just tends to rub off anyway, even on the theoretical physics types, it's hard to escape without groking a fair amount about engineering which many realize will be useful in the real world.)

Also, the ABET accreditation requirements require serious teaching of engineering whereas you could skate on serious math outside of the one specifically required half-year discrete math course plus one other serious one (no doubt most if not all require single variable calculus).

Re: Go To University, Not For CS

#147

Post by stcredzero »

StudyAnimal wrote: post #85
meric wrote: post #51

I agree with this article about CS to some extent but I don't fully agree. I already knew how to program in Java (poorly) before going to university to study a double degree in Commerce and Software Engineering (which is just CS + 1 more year). So you have someone who's a proto-programmer - learning programming but not quite getting there yet. I don't go to any of the few places like 'MIT'. We have `learned` python,…

"Funny... I was just having a discussion with my lecturer the other day... He was complaining the university's courses were too `theory` and didn't help students get jobs... especially compared to competing universities. I was telling him the point of university isn't to get students jobs but to teach them how to think. If students wanted a place to teach them so they can get jobs they'd just go to technical colleges…

academia sees their "failure" to churn out programmers for industry as a crisis...They want to increase their rolls basically, and they saw how switching from CS to learn java style trade schools during the internet boom helped do that.

There's a disconnect in the market here. Numbers like enrollment and hiring of recent grads are easy to measure and make for fine report fodder on academic committee meetings, but give a completely inadequate picture of the quality of education. Hiring is a bad metric -- too much of hiring is through buzzword matching, which is horrible. Then again, HR hasn't any reason to get better, if the pool of available hires is so poor, buzzword matching is good enough. This may not be so true in the startup world. It still seems to plague big companies.

Re: Go To University, Not For CS

#148

Post by coned88 »

ErrantX wrote: post #113
coned88 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm really not sure what you mean. I have a CS degree from a ~50th ranked US University. It is not considered a math degree, but instead a CS degree from an engineering department. My education was engineering focused. My degree says I am a graduate from the Engineering school. I can write assembly, program a fpga, write OO programs, OS drivers and System calls. Shoot, I even wrote My own file system. I learned java…

That sounds exactly like the sort of degree I mean. It's not all that common though, in my experience, to find a CS degree with that sort of curriculum. Do you just cross me off the list because I have a CS degree. That's silly :) You may have noted from my post that I do hire CS majors. but do they understand the inner workings of a computer? Do they understand complexity, even the basic data structures. Yes, usuall…

Im not really sure how you the employer, knows what schools teach CS like mine did and which schools are Java schools. is it just a trial and error process? Should somebody like me, say that their CS degree is from an engineering dept on their resume?

Re: Go To University, Not For CS

#149

Post by ErrantX »

coned88 wrote: post #148
ErrantX wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds exactly like the sort of degree I mean. It's not all that common though, in my experience, to find a CS degree with that sort of curriculum. Do you just cross me off the list because I have a CS degree. That's silly :) You may have noted from my post that I do hire CS majors. but do they understand the inner workings of a computer? Do they understand complexity, even the basic data structures. Yes, usuall…

Im not really sure how you the employer, knows what schools teach CS like mine did and which schools are Java schools. is it just a trial and error process? Should somebody like me, say that their CS degree is from an engineering dept on their resume?

It would efnitely be useful IMO to highlight engineering type skills alongside the cs ones on a cv.

In our particular case we would check out the degrees people had done (just Reading the websites) to get an idea of what they had learned - I only really do that for new graduates though, it's less relevant to more experienced people.

Re: Go To University, Not For CS

#150

Post by coned88 »

ErrantX wrote: post #149
coned88 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im not really sure how you the employer, knows what schools teach CS like mine did and which schools are Java schools. is it just a trial and error process? Should somebody like me, say that their CS degree is from an engineering dept on their resume?

It would efnitely be useful IMO to highlight engineering type skills alongside the cs ones on a cv. In our particular case we would check out the degrees people had done (just Reading the websites) to get an idea of what they had learned - I only really do that for new graduates though, it's less relevant to more experienced people.

Well that is good to know, thanks.
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