231–240 of 627 posts
What interesting things are going on in the field of CS from a scientific POV?
https://arxiv.org/list/cs/recent
I would say Machine Learning is particularly "hot" right now, with the anecdotal evidence being that many ML conferences (like NIPS, ICML, CVPR, etc) have been experiencing better than linear growth.
I majored in computer science, and I don't feel like I've learned anything. Every time there was an opportunity to learn something cool (mathematical theory behind cryptography, assembly language, details of a processor, the cache, or a communication protocol) or useful, it was glanced over as 'technical details'. Instead, I was introduced to many, many small topics (programming, graphics, databases, algorithms, user…
I saw the quality difference in the two schools I attended. One had profs teaching by the book and the other had profs that wrote the book.
The grief factor of learning to code is on a different scale to every other major. One missing semicolon will take your whole tower down, and you realise this in the first day of practical exercises. Even if you are of the opinion that CS is math, and coding doesn't come into it, you will hit a coding wall early on. In fact, every exercise in CS has this problem. You add a new thing (eg inheritance), and it breaks. B…
I think the market is just way over saturated. Hiring practices for developers point to just that. I mentioned in a different thread how simole it is for my travel-nurse of a sister to get a new job (her stints around the Bay Area paid ~100k and she only has 2 years of experience). Developers jump through hoop after hoop for employment, this wouldn't happen if they were in demand like a nurse. The market is just resp…
I'm a freelancer/run-my-own small dev consultancy and I pretty much never jump through hoops. The level of demand doesn't create the hoops. Some combination of needing to create the appearance of "only hiring the best of the best of the best just like everyone else" & fear of a bad hire creates the hoops. I don't have trouble finding work and often need to bring on additional help. The hoops are cultural.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm a freelancer/run-my-own small dev consultancy and I pretty much never jump through hoops. The level of demand doesn't create the hoops. Some combination of needing to create the appearance of "only hiring the best of the best of the best just like everyone else" & fear of a bad hire creates the hoops. I don't have trouble finding work and often need to bring on additional help. The hoops are cultural.
Bad hires are totally worth the hoops to avoid. The problem I have seen is no one knows which hoops are useful and which are harmful and they do all the superstitions they have read about. I don't know if anyone has figured out a methodology for solving that.
Correlation does not imply causation. Disparate outcomes do not imply disparate treatment. Nobody in the right mind looks at the 94% of child care services jobs being filled by women and exclaims "Aha! Systemic sexism against men, matriarchal oppression afoot, we must address this social injustice!", yet all common sense falls apart when it comes to STEM.
Good talk on the subject here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gatn5ameRr8
If a university has 100 spots for CS, then even if twice as many people apply for CS in one particular year, there will still be 100 people (but with higher SATs, presumably). There is some flexibility here, but it is limited - those 100 people require a certain number of faculty and grad students to teach them. They need a large-enough building with the proper facilities (you can send students to classrooms in another building sometimes, but it's not optimal). The campus can't just accept more than the students they planned for without preparation, and those plans are made long in advance.
If a university sees a field is popular, it may work to eventually be able to accept more applicants. But it might not decide to do so - popularity among students isn't the only factor considered, there are many others, like ease of acquiring funding and grants, likelihood of undergrads becoming graduate students (and whether the university wants more or less of those), etc., all of which require multiyear planning and also have various political factors.
tl;dr It's worth seeing if we can find data on the number of applicants, and not the number of graduates. It's possible the number of applicants has been increasing.
The grief factor of learning to code is on a different scale to every other major. One missing semicolon will take your whole tower down, and you realise this in the first day of practical exercises. Even if you are of the opinion that CS is math, and coding doesn't come into it, you will hit a coding wall early on. In fact, every exercise in CS has this problem. You add a new thing (eg inheritance), and it breaks. B…
tl;dr at least in CS you get immediate negative feedback
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's interesting to me about that data is the high rate of biological and agricultural sciences grads, relative to all other sciences. CS grad rates seem to fall right about where they should on XKCD's Purity Scale [1] (if CS had been included in it). 2004 was an outlier for CS, but it has reverted to its mean since. But bio and ag sciences are beating out Psychology, which is a bit of a reversal. Biology isn't eas…
Although biology and organic chemistry are much harder then CS anything, they can be learned in school and from school resources only. No one expects you to already come in already knowing how to code or configure linux. If you are good students willing to work, you will learn them, period. With cs, you are expected to already know a lot that was not taught in school - meaning that all kinds of cultural and social ef…