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A CS degree is better than teaching yourself how to code?

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Re: A CS degree is better than teaching yourself how to code?

#171

Post by growse »

agumonkey wrote: post #163
lbj wrote: post #159

I think CS i still very much a discipline we fail to teach - And no wonder when you look at the curriculums. In our last hiring round, we filtered a lot of applications down to 5 individuals we wanted to interview. During the interview they were all asked to write their own implementation of Fizzbus in whatever language they desired. 3 out of 5 completely failed to arrive at a working function, the 4th was able but w…

Devil's advocate: did you ask them to solve graph traversals or complex string algorithms rather than fizzbuzz ? I recently had a technical test, which I failed because I was depressed how boring it was so I missed many easy answers (say asking about private/public fields in OO).

> Devil's advocate: did you ask them to solve graph traversals or complex string algorithms rather than fizzbuzz ?

Getting someone to regurgitate something they've been explicitly taught and memorized instead of trying to solve a problem they haven't been (does any CS course explicitly teach fizzbuzz) does not seem like good job selection criteria.

> I recently had a technical test, which I failed because I was depressed how boring it was so I missed many easy answers (say asking about private/public fields in OO).

If you're not willing to engage with a test because you think it's beneath you, you're going to have a bad time.

Re: A CS degree is better than teaching yourself how to code?

#172

Post by vfclists »

I think the issue here is not whether a CS degree is important, but whether the people doing the hiring consider having a degree relevant.

In many accounting related areas, having a degree is not important. The accountants, finance and management related executives who need the programmers didn't need CS degrees to create their Excel spreadsheets and macro, so why should they think a CS degree is important?

Try getting a programming job in an engineering domain without a CS degree. They would rather have a physics or maths major and teach them programming rather than a person with programming experience without a degree in that field.

It all depends on that programming tasks are required. You certainly don't need a degree to code for AWS or Kubernetes, but you will need it in hard STEM areas.

Re: A CS degree is better than teaching yourself how to code?

#173

Post by lol768 »

Jedi72 wrote: post #152

The lack of appreciation of pure knowledge in this thread is truly saddening. If all you care about is getting a job, this question boils down to simple finance. If you want to truly learn, understand and engage in a topic, what can possibly be better than emmersing oneself in an environment of learning, inquisitive students and knowledgable professors full-time?

> The lack of appreciation of pure knowledge in this thread is truly saddening. If all you care about is getting a job, this question boils down to simple finance. If you want to truly learn, understand and engage in a topic, what can possibly be better than emmersing oneself in an environment of learning, inquisitive students and knowledgable professors full-time?

It's sad, but inevitable with tuition and living fees as they are set now. I do some contracting for a university in the UK, and I honestly don't blame the students who treat the university as a service provider and the degree as a financial investment. They're paying customers and deserve a high quality service with good teaching and good facilities. There's no room for variability here, the CMA will rightly fine universities who have misled students or failed to fulfill their obligations.

If the degrees were free at the point of use (as used to be the case here), I'd totally be behind the idea of studying for the sake of broadening one's horizons.

Fact is, they've gotten increasingly more expensive and the students with sense are going to make sure they get a return on what will (for some) likely be a working lifetime of additional tax or a huge upfront cost.

You need to be in a privileged position to suggest that dropping probably around £45k on 3 years of a degree should solely come down to a desire of "immersing oneself in an environment of learning, inquisitive students and knowledgable professors full-time". The "simple financials" are a barrier to today's students - even with the UK's maintenance and tuition loans.

Re: A CS degree is better than teaching yourself how to code?

#174

Post by barry-cotter »

growse wrote: post #162
barry-cotter wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is a very strange article and premise to me. A university education is not vocational training. I know right? Stupid plebeians expecting to get something that will help them earn a living out of spending three or four years learning something and foregoing the earnings they could have made in that time. If you don’t know that university is for signaling your social class rather than learning skills that will b…

The purpose of a university is research. They teach undergraduate courses so they can get more researchers to further academia. The university isn't interested in anything else. If your goal is to maximize your earning potential, there's far more effective ways of spending 3-4 years.

If the goal of a university was research it wouldn’t have any undergraduate students and it probably wouldn’t teach Master’s students either. Some external organization would educate future researchers and then they’d hire them.

So you’d either have a graduate studies only university, like the European University Institute in Florence or Rockefeller University or a research institute like the Max Planck Gesellschaft, RAND, SRI International or the Institutes for Advanced Study.

The idea that research is even a part of the core mission of universities is at most 200 years old. They’ve always been traded schools for theology, medicine and law and latterly finishing schools for the upper classes but the research university emerged in Germany with Alexander von Humboldt.

Most people don’t decide upon goals and then look for the most effective ways to pursue them. They look for the socially approved and known good ways of getting what they want. For the huge majority of university students that means they’re at university because they need a degree to get a job. People with money and people who attended selective universities may think otherwise because they have other or better options but most people know that if they want a decent, respectable living they better get their certificate of middle class membership, their Bachelor’s degree.

Outside of maybe Cal Tech no university sends the majority of its students on to graduate study aimed at producing researchers[1]. They are funded by governments whose voters would be apoplectic to be told education was an afterthought to faculty research. The median college graduate might be capable of doing a Master’s degree but there is no way more than 10% of those who matriculates as university students are capable of becoming researchers if that.

Whatever universities might be of their purpose is research they’re a terrible waste of resources.

Re: A CS degree is better than teaching yourself how to code?

#176

Post by EliRivers »

monk_e_boy wrote: post #144
EliRivers wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I didn't do a CS degree, from what I could tell of friends who were doing that, it was a course in mathematical logic and algorithms built with that logic, and analysis of problems in such a way that they could be explored and solved using the logic, with some modules demonstrating applications of that mathematical logic such as operating systems and compilers, which were helpful tools created out of the logic…

The degree covers a lot of ground. Different languages, AI, robotics, people management, teams, etc etc Mostly it informs the student of their current level of understanding. 70% of lecturing is marking assignments. That’s what you don’t get when you teach yourself.

What can I say. My fellows did not cover AI, robotics or people management. Sounds like it's become a lot more of a practical degree in the last twenty years. Much more vocational, perhaps. There was a time when CS graduates would be hired and big companies would immediately start training them in how to engineer software, but now people expect to finish a CS degree and be capable of a related but different discipline; software engineering. I can only assume that CS degrees have changed to meet the demand.

Re: A CS degree is better than teaching yourself how to code?

#177

Post by anongraddebt »

pcmoney wrote: post #75
chrisco255 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the article made the best points in favor of a CS degree. I went to a top 40 program and I took a lot of CS and hardware classes and what I did learn, crucially, that is more difficult in the workplace, is how complex systems work and how to approach complex systems. Now, you could accidentally learn that on the job, or intentionally if you choose to, but you can also sort of skate by in a fog of ignora…

I think that is fair but remember over half of the classes you took in the pursuit of a CS undergrad were not CS classes. Of the half remaining maybe half of them were truly vital? Even the example of building a microprocessor (or your own compiler as a right of passage) totally useless to 99.5% of practitioners in industry. That is a quintessential "hoop-jumping" class. Did you also learn the proper way to heat sand…

Which six classes?

Re: A CS degree is better than teaching yourself how to code?

#178

Post by newswasboring »

greggman2 wrote: post #105

Teaching yourself to code while getting a CS degree is best IMO. Just teaching yourself you'll likely miss lots of topics and not challenge yourself as much. Conversely I've met plenty of students that don't really care about the topic and are just taking the class to get a job. So do both! Take the class and teach yourself. In other words pursue your hobbies and use code where those hobbies match. Learn the things y…

Is it really possible to apply CS skills to all hobbies? If yes then how do you apply CS to hobbies like woodworking or crochet? The only thing I can think of is a retail site, but then again why wouldn't you just use something like tindie?

Or should people who don't do coding related hobbies not do CS? Which is a special requirement just for this major. People in civil or biomedical engineering don't apply their majors to their hobbies.

Re: A CS degree is better than teaching yourself how to code?

#179

Post by lol768 »

EliRivers wrote: post #176
monk_e_boy wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The degree covers a lot of ground. Different languages, AI, robotics, people management, teams, etc etc Mostly it informs the student of their current level of understanding. 70% of lecturing is marking assignments. That’s what you don’t get when you teach yourself.

What can I say. My fellows did not cover AI, robotics or people management. Sounds like it's become a lot more of a practical degree in the last twenty years. Much more vocational, perhaps. There was a time when CS graduates would be hired and big companies would immediately start training them in how to engineer software, but now people expect to finish a CS degree and be capable of a related but different disciplin…

> What can I say. My fellows did not cover AI, robotics or people management. Sounds like it's become a lot more of a practical degree in the last twenty years.

Honestly, it needs to be. Employers are not going to be impressed with grads who've not encountered basic things like version control by the time they've graduated - and it's irresponsible to market a degree as a stepping stone to a e.g. software engineering job without covering these basics properly.

The theory is still incredibly important - mathematics, algorithms, performance & time complexity, data structures etc. It underpins everything we do in industry. But there really needs to be some element of practical software engineering too because the vast majority of the UG cohort are there to get a job.

Re: A CS degree is better than teaching yourself how to code?

#180

Post by FlyingAvatar »

Jedi72 wrote: post #152

The lack of appreciation of pure knowledge in this thread is truly saddening. If all you care about is getting a job, this question boils down to simple finance. If you want to truly learn, understand and engage in a topic, what can possibly be better than emmersing oneself in an environment of learning, inquisitive students and knowledgable professors full-time?

Devil's advocate: Doing the same thing at home with an online community and saving $100k?
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