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Why do so few people major in computer science?

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

#551

Post by Shorel »

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…

IMO the difference with math is, you are the compiler, the linter, and everything else as well.

With programming, you have plenty of tools that detect errors for you. With maths you sometimes will only see the error after somebody else (like the tutor) point it for you.

Therefore you can be much more efficient when programming than when doing proofs and other maths stuff.

Except with economics, as you point out :)

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

#552

Post by GrinningFool »

literallycancer wrote: post #466
dagw wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but if you have been playing around with environment variables in your OS since you where 8 years old the problem becomes a lot easier to troubleshoot, compared to someone who has never heard of environment variables.

Maybe, but the procedure is the same as for any other error you don't understand, copy paste the error message to a search engine and use the results to figure out what it means and how to fix it.

Which teaches you how to find other people's solutions to your problem- a valuable skill - but you miss out on building foundational troubleshooting skills.

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

#553

Post by fivestar »

sidlls wrote: post #214
sbov wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point is a huge number of tech jobs are within these locations. The SF bay area has something stupid like the top 3 cities when it comes to tech jobs. Throw out all the locations with the most jobs and surprise, salaries suck.

Well, I wouldn't say salaries "suck" outside of well-known tech centers like SF/Bay Area and NYC. They aren't great, though. Even in the Bay Area, at least, the salaries of engineers still pale in comparison to the salaries of managers and executives.

Maybe not suck as compared to a lot of jobs, but the problem with software development seems to be that salary growth rises rapidly up to a plateau and then basically stops. The opportunities for salary growth past a certain point require risk-taking such as starting a company, consulting in some very specific niche, or what have you. It's still better than the lack of wage growth in other fields, I'm sure, it's just not something that was explained to me AT ALL when I started down this long road many years ago.

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

#554

Post by fivestar »

kelnos wrote: post #379
sidlls wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I wouldn't say salaries "suck" outside of well-known tech centers like SF/Bay Area and NYC. They aren't great, though. Even in the Bay Area, at least, the salaries of engineers still pale in comparison to the salaries of managers and executives.

> Even in the Bay Area, at least, the salaries of engineers still pale in comparison to the salaries of managers and executives. Depends on where you work. If you work at an actual technology company that "gets it", they'll have parallel management and individual contributor tracks where you can make as much as a director-level person as an IC, or more.

But you will never likely be financially stable due to your housing situation.

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

#555

Post by neutralid »

dahart wrote: post #251
dahart wrote: post #130

Whoa, that chart seems really misleading. There are 3x more CS majors than math majors and 2x more than physics. The chart is showing derivatives, not absolutes. That basically undermines the title of the article. Looking at the graph, it's also super important to see the context before 2005 -- that start date adds significantly to the misleading impression this graph is giving. Math had more majors in 1970 than it d…

I missed my edit window, but here's the absolute plot: https://www.dropbox.com/s/8uhphbrpgygcpgy/majors.png?dl=0 Contrary to the worry that not enough people are majoring in CS, what this shows is that CS is growing out of the relatively small math/physics group and into the larger mass appeal groups. And maybe what this shows best of all is that Biomed is through the roof. On the whole, CS has grown slightly more th…

Based on % total majors, interesting how biomed has been inversely related to engineering (and most of CS) except in the last decade where they're all growing at a higher rate than math + physics. Would be interesting to relate this to:

- the perception of U.S. manufacturing (affects engineering) '80s: http://www.epi.org/publication/manufacturing-job-loss-trade-...

- perception of CS (dot-com & bust: '94-'01): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble

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

#556

Post by lowbloodsugar »

ashark wrote: post #515
sah2ed wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's a ton of Stupid Computer Shit we all know, mostly from messing around on our own time, that makes programming or doing anything else with computers much easier. Thanks for clearly articulating this in 6 words: "Stupid Computer Shit we all know". This is something many people aren't willing to acknowledge (aka tribal knowledge gained from lots of trial and error). It perfectly summarizes what pg tried to com…

> Thanks for clearly articulating this in 6 words: "Stupid Computer Shit we all know". This is something many people aren't willing to acknowledge. I think a lot of us have forgotten how strange and frightening a blank command line was the first time we encountered it. And how long it took to actually get comfortable with it. Even a windowing system is weird if you're not used to it, and lots of people use those for…

>I think a lot of us have forgotten how strange and frightening a blank command line was the first time we encountered it.

  BBC Computer 32k

  FS 1.42

  BASIC

  >
As an 11 year old, this was thing of joy, not fear.

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

#557

Post by d0mine »

throwaway7645 wrote: post #454
xtreme wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the reason the riemann hypothesis is important is because it is the reimann hypothesis I can see this being a joke. Entire subfields of mathematics have been built on the assumption that Riemann hypothesis is true. He probably assumed that everyone in the audience would know this, which is not unreasonable.

In 6 years I never thought of it that way! :) Thanks! Now I feel like an idiot.

Try "Trolling Euclid" book by Tom Wright, to understand why the Riemann Hypothesis is considered by many mathematicians to be the most important unsolved problem in mathematics today.

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

#558

Post by quicknir »

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…

Honestly CS major is typically a joke compared to math (real math, not "CS is math" math), or physics. Comparing the hardest CS classes you'll do in undergrad to the likes of PDEs, Complex & Real Analysis, advanced QM, General Relativity, etc, it's just no comparison.

I took ML in person at UIUC 4th year / graduate cross-listed level, and the 3rd year Stanford algos course on Coursera (supposed to be identical to the material in the actual course, yes yes though feel free to laugh b/c it's Coursera). These classes were interesting, but about as challenging as typical second year math/physics classes. They are peanuts compared to senior math/physics classes.

That said I still think CS is more challenging than most majors, it's just that the "few" is much more highlighted because there is very high demand. Certainly way higher demand than math/physics, and more demand than other fields that are still reasonably challenging like engineering, pre-med, etc. It's definitely the field where some reasonable increasing function on both demand and difficulty is maximum.

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

#559

Post by alasdair_ »

tsukikage wrote: post #428
YZF wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I should have thought about beer money. But I was such an introverted geek. I do remember watching other people trying to figure out how to use a mouse or the most basic stuff. I've already studied algorithms and data structures and had a paying programming job. Most of the CS work seemed trivial but I did learn some math. The math did get hard so the degree was definitely not a breeze. Even with CS there were areas…

If anything, it's a disadvantage IME: the implicit lessons of the iDevice are that the world is made of non-user-serviceable black boxes that cannot be recombined to make anything substantially different than what you started with, and if one does ever manage to peek under the hood (and why would one do that, any more than they do with their fridge or their TV?) one sees only immutable non-deconstructible complexity.…

My son is five and recently put together one of these: https://kano.me/

It's a great little system. It teaches the commandline and python programming and it lets kids do things like play minecraft then change the code to make it run differently.

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

#560

Post by lordnacho »

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.

A missing semicolon tells you only one thing; In all likelihood, there are many things wrong with your code.

In most other subjects, there are ways to get most of the feedback in one go.

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