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

Why do so few people major in computer science?

danwang.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 627 posts

Re: Why do so few people major in computer science?

#271

Post by sidlls »

ArialAnemone wrote: post #127
sidlls wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're making many assumptions that really aren't justified.

How are they not justified? A cynical understanding of human nature and society serves a person far better than the opposite. People want to do less work than more work. For people involved in acquiring, placing, and managing human resources, an easy way to signal "work"/"useful work" is by parroting the line of superficial diversity. That's my experience at least. I win far more bets by assuming the worst of intenti…

I invite you to re-read this comment after you've had time to reflect. So much about it is representative of exactly the sort of casual sexism that runs rampant in this industry. From the assumptions about "human nature" to the straw-man "diversity" you describe, even.

Re: Why do so few people major in computer science?

#272

Post by Guyag »

peter303 wrote: post #233
lordnacho wrote: post #107

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…

If you regularly experience grief in a subject, theN YOU SHOULD NOT CHOOSE THAT FOR A CAREER. You could be doing it for 30-40 years. Why make life miserable if you have a choice.

I agree with you that people should probably choose a career in something they're good at, but I think that's separate to the issue of making life easier for people entering the subject from nothing. The CS courses I've seen are different from those in other subjects in that they assume a whole lot more background knowledge, which is a pretty exclusionary assumption to make. Stopping this is no bad thing.

Re: Why do so few people major in computer science?

#273

Post by zaptheimpaler »

01572 wrote: post #216

To an audience of CS majors this will probably sound like trolling but honestly I have never used any software written by a "computer scientist" that I came to value and rely on -- software that I consciously chose to use. Whereas I have found such software on multiple ocassions written by mathematicians or persons in some other field, e.g., physics, etc. As a user of software , I do not believe that a computer scien…

If you've even used an operating system or the internet there are a hundred algorithms/datastructures/CS concepts at play. One example is consistent hashing used by CDNs such as Akamai, so indirectly almost any website you visit. All of the routing/control flow/congestion control algorithms that make internet work. Algorithms to wrap text on a website to a certain width. Algorithms to schedule processes on your OS, variations of linked lists and trees to manage memory and give you malloc, parsers, compilers, interpreters everywhere including web browsers .... The list just goes on and on.

It sounds like trolling to CS majors because if you don't know CS, you wont recognize it where its used, so it will seem like its not used at all. Most programming jobs don't need CS very often, but thats because all the core CS is usually packaged in a library already and we just reuse/abstract the bits we need. BTW Michael Lewis got a masters in economics before working in finance.

Re: Why do so few people major in computer science?

#275

Post by brandonmenc »

jdietrich wrote: post #254
walshemj wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

novice programmers should not be starting a CS degree

Given the gender skew amongst high-school programmers, this is almost equivalent to saying "women should not be starting a CS degree". It also further entrenches the advantages of people who come from affluent backgrounds. Given the success of some short coding bootcamps, it isn't inconceivable that novices could be brought up to speed within the first semester. We don't expect law students to have been amateur lawye…

> It also further entrenches the advantages of people who come from affluent backgrounds.

If you can afford a video game console, you can afford a raspberry pi (or equivalent.)

> We don't expect law students to have been amateur lawyers in high school

No, but we expect math majors to have done some math before they get to college.

I don't disagree with you that most people can be brought up to speed in less than a year, but it's also not unreasonable to expect first year CS students to have had some programming experience. Computers don't cost thousands of dollars anymore.

Re: Why do so few people major in computer science?

#277

Post by alistairSH »

SamReidHughes wrote: post #212
elsombrero wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 >In fact, every exercise in CS has this problem. You add a new thing (eg inheritance), and it breaks. But not only that, it might be broken because of a banal little syntax problem. That can be said for math as well, swi…

The difference with math is, you can get partial credit.

There's no reason you can't receive partial credit in CS. If assignments are being graded solely on whether or not the output is correct, I'd say it's a flaw in the curriculum. FWIW, I do not remember this being the case when I studied CS in the mid-90s.

Re: Why do so few people major in computer science?

#278

Post by exolymph »

pmorici wrote: post #270
lordnacho wrote: post #107

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…

"One missing semicolon will take your whole tower down, and you realize this in the first day of practical exercises." Isn't that what makes CS easier? You get immediate feedback. You know if it will be right or wrong before you even turn it in.

Depends on your personality.

Re: Why do so few people major in computer science?

#279

Post by simonsarris »

Spooky23 wrote: post #164
simonsarris wrote: post #11

Slight note about Dan Wang picking 2005: That was the peak of CS degrees awarded because it's 4/5 years after the height of the dot-com bubble. So the upward bump in the mid-2000's is somewhat explainable as an anomaly. I think his point 1 is underrated. CS degrees are flat because aptitude is flat. You can compare CS degrees to other degrees over time at nsf.gov: https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/2016/nsb20161/#/report…

Who gives a hoot about IQ in 2017? That doesn't match what I see in the ground. I get 10-20 interns a year on my teams from big state universities and liberal arts schools with CS and stem degrees. They tend to be awesome. The best ones outperform most of the consultants you find.

More people than ever, especially on HN.

https://www.gwern.net/iq

Nothing you say relates to IQ stats about the median grad. If CS enrollment was up, it would push the needle I'm sure. It's not. You may as well be saying, "What do you mean most wine is bad? I drink good wine all the time."

Re: Why do so few people major in computer science?

#280

Post by ransom1538 »

lordnacho wrote: post #107

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…

Agreed. I learned this in our new student orientation.

"If you can't recompile a linux kernel by the time you graduate, you have learned nothing. Oh, yeah, also, we wont teach you that - it's just something you will run into. "

-- Professor Norman S. Matloff

Post reply on HN