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Hard Part of Computer Science? Getting into Class

nytimes.com

221–230 of 305 posts

Re: Hard Part of Computer Science? Getting into Class

#221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, but most recent PhDs can get a job at a FAANG company, where their starting salary will be much higher than a faculty salary (and that's before bonus, stock grant/options/etc). Even with the cost of living in the Bay Area, they'll be able to pay off student loans faster and will finally have time to enjoy life.

Fairly recent PhD graduate here (graduated last year). My observations are that the skills required to do a PhD are orthogonal to the skills required to pass FAANG interviews and, more importantly, to being a good software engineer. I don't dispute you can make a higher salary than a faculty member, even without working at a FAANG, but having a PhD won't automatically make you eligible to get such a job.

Interesting observation. I was under the impression that getting hired into research groups at a FAANG was a different process than getting hired as a SWE, and that you could bypass some of the whiteboard "find all sub matrices with matching determinants in an NxM matrix of arbitrary size" style questions.

Those jobs, the SWE jobs, there's really no degree that will allow you to skip that gauntlet. But I think there might be a different hiring process for PhDs or faculty leaving academia to work in research labs.

I don't really know, though, just something I heard/read somewhere.

Re: Hard Part of Computer Science? Getting into Class

#222
Meanwhile, at community college, a place with NO admission standards except a high school diploma, enrollment numbers are down, down, down. How do I know? I teach at one. And I used to teach at a different one, WITH TENURE, but we didn't have enough students so they let me go. A Merry Christmas that was.

Re: Hard Part of Computer Science? Getting into Class

#223

I had a professor mention that during the last bubble (circa 2001), they had dedicated an entire building to the EECS department. Shortly thereafter, the bubble popped, enrollment collapsed and the EECS department went back to just the hacker type. It seems we are in another one of those cycles. Anecdotally, when I was in university around 2012, I noticed that the same people who would have gone to medical or law sch…

Yup. I know a lot of smart people who are good at everything starting to enter CS a few years ago at elite institutions like Harvard and MIT.

In all honesty, I much prefer them to the "I want to code videogames" crowd that made up a big chunk of my undergrad class.

Re: Hard Part of Computer Science? Getting into Class

#224

>Aafia Ahmad, a sophomore computer science major at U.T. Austin, had hoped to take an elective course in computer security this semester. But when she tried to sign up during early registration in November, the course was already full. I know this doesn't refute the point the article is trying to make, but it doesn't seem that unreasonable to me that an underclassman might not get into a highly sought after elective.…

I had to write a script to constantly monitor my school's class scheduling system to get into a couple of classes. It was an interesting script because the system was an IBM 3270 style mainframe.

This has been a thing for a long time. Back around 2003-2004 people at UTexas used a site called classgrabber.

Back then people would also oversignup to classes then leave them after the first few class days of it didn’t work with schedule/etc.

Re: Hard Part of Computer Science? Getting into Class

#225
Isn't this a problem of too much coupling between credentialing and education? People aren't seeking to sit in a room full of 400 people through a lecture given by a certain professor at a certain time. They could probably find the lecture video online and watch it whenever and however frequently. They are only seeking the stamp of approval from a well respected institution. Assessment is not the same problem as education. Even though online education is getting some traction, it seems as if employers (and parents!) can't give up obsessively indexing much on traditional multi-year lecture-driven university education.

It's ironic that university engineering (especially software) departments teach modularization, decoupling, distribution, reuse, etc. that makes possible to scale like Google, Amazon, etc, but fail to apply these learnings to themselves.

Re: Hard Part of Computer Science? Getting into Class

#226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had to write a script to constantly monitor my school's class scheduling system to get into a couple of classes. It was an interesting script because the system was an IBM 3270 style mainframe.

This has been a thing for a long time. Back around 2003-2004 people at UTexas used a site called classgrabber. Back then people would also oversignup to classes then leave them after the first few class days of it didn’t work with schedule/etc.

I got into the AI class at my school (it was not overbooked) only to discover that I didn't have the necessary math background. Also, the class was going to be all math and wouldn't involve computers. It was not what I was expecting at all. Ended up dropping it after a week.

Re: Hard Part of Computer Science? Getting into Class

#227
post #96

This article is credentialism at its worst. The best programmers I know are self-taught, because they have a passion for it. I know people working at minimum wage, never enrolled in college, who got decent programming jobs after a year or two learning CS on their own. These people will always (I hope) form the core of the profession.

I didn't finish my degree, but I can tell you that "a year or two" is nowhere near enough to "learn CS on (one's) own". On a daily basis, I use the foundations that I did learn in a formal environment much more than any of my self-taught skills. It's a very complex subject that cannot be effectively navigated without some guidance. Otherwise, you may think you know it, but you're just skimming the surface (and likely…

My experience with a BS in CS degree was that 60% of the classes provided no career value at all. There's all the general ed classes meant to make you well rounded, and then there's classes in the core that are either useless (Calculus, very few CS grads will ever use it) or provide history/background about the field that is nice to know, but not generally useful or necessary.

Out of the remaining 40%, the level of overlap and repetition was just absurd. It seemed like each class spent the first half of the semester re-covering things that were covered in prerequisite classes. So maybe 30% of your actual class time is spent on new concepts, skills, etc.

Of those, probably 1/3 involve very basic things, like bubble sorts and the like, which help you build basic problem solving skills and language familiarity, but not much else. Then you get another 1/3 of CS related stuff, like architectures, patterns, SDLC, etc, which is probably the stuff that separates the degree holders from the self-taught in most cases. Then, if you're lucky, you get a couple of classes that are elective and teach something moderately interesting or useful. As I recall, the only classes I had in that category were a class on Computer Graphics (which ended up just being a bit of Java Swing and a bit of math to explain some of it), Web App Engineering (neat class using ASP.NET MVC), and an AI class that really just covered some solvers and search algos, topping out with Genetic Algorithms and Simulated Annealing.

Point being, I could definitely see someone being able to learn all the same CS stuff in a year, if they were self-motivated enough. A few good programming books, a few good CS concepts books, and you'd be covered. Honestly, you could probably cover CS with both more depth and breadth in a year than I got in my degree, if you put a full-time effort into it.

And all that is ignoring the fact that half my class graduated with virtually no ability to actually sit and write code of their own beyond just copy-pasting snippets from online examples until they had something that worked well enough to pass. The only real value of a CS degree, as far as I can tell, is to signal to employers that you can show up and put in at least a minimal effort at something for years without giving up. I guess that makes for a useful enough filter to keep employers using it and keep colleges in business.

Re: Hard Part of Computer Science? Getting into Class

#228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment is elitism at its worst. Even if you completely accept the validity of self-learning, there is still a place for formal education. Some people can learn a lot about a complicated field on their own, but there are still plenty of people who would benefit from some pedagogical help.

Can't agree enough. I am a autodidact, and am still learning. And really every other week I wish I had a mentor/professor. Even though good books somehow covers up for no teacher. But, you can't just read thousand of books before solving a petty problem and there's where a Professor comes. They provide you with a distillation of years of work and experience. and not to mention the resources available for you at Uni

No CS professor I had ever helped me with a problem I had in CS. Now, as a Teaching Assistant I helped tens of other students diagnose bugs in their code, but that's a different game.

Re: Hard Part of Computer Science? Getting into Class

#229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't finish my degree, but I can tell you that "a year or two" is nowhere near enough to "learn CS on (one's) own". On a daily basis, I use the foundations that I did learn in a formal environment much more than any of my self-taught skills. It's a very complex subject that cannot be effectively navigated without some guidance. Otherwise, you may think you know it, but you're just skimming the surface (and likely…

I don't agree. Most people simply don't work very hard. For a motivated person, 1 year on their own time can easily be enough time to replicate a bachelor's in CS. When I did my bachelor's I was a young dumb kid who partied a lot and wasted a lot of time. Now, 14 years later and tons of industry experience, I realize how trivial the material in my CS bachelors was and really the big problem is that most students don'…

An example of someone going through all of the classes for a bachelor's in CS in one year: https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/myprojects/mit-challenge-2/
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