191–200 of 330 posts
A CS degree helps you get an interview. That's pretty much it.
It depends. Say as part of your job you have to read and understand something like this: http://users.ece.utexas.edu/~garg/dist/agarwal-garg-DC.pdf (sampled from my work activities today..) I suspect a CS degree is going to be pretty helpful. Disclosure: I have a EE degree.
People REALLY hate college degrees on this site. I think my degree was a great decision. I've met a few decent self-taught programmers. Most are awful. Over and over again the bootcamp grads and people who have never attended school end up being the worst performers on my team. A LOT of the people I have worked with who do not have degrees have bad attitudes and are hyper-vigilant about "no degree" microaggressions.…
People with no degrees hate degrees. People who can't pass FAANG interviews hate FAANG interviews. It's a defense mechanism, along the lines of "I'm not a bad student, the teacher hates me".
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 maj…
I wouldn't be surprised if you could apply modeling and wood quality simulations into a software program to help your woodworking, too.
My hobby is fiction writing. But hey, Scrivener exists for god's sake.
People REALLY hate college degrees on this site. I think my degree was a great decision. I've met a few decent self-taught programmers. Most are awful. Over and over again the bootcamp grads and people who have never attended school end up being the worst performers on my team. A LOT of the people I have worked with who do not have degrees have bad attitudes and are hyper-vigilant about "no degree" microaggressions.…
It is easy to see why having a degree is not popular here in this forum. It is probably acting as a hard barrier for some to get a job. Thus people don't like it. Per my experience working in a big tech shop, most of the engineer-kind co-workers DO have a STEM degree. I don't think a CS degree is required in that sense, as long as the background is relevant. Only one of them came with no college degree, but he fits i…
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…
This is effectively what I did. I found a job at a small company programming part time while I was still in school. Class was very much this is how things should work, and the job was this is how things actually work when you're coding for clients with unrealistic schedules just trying to make rent. I learned a lot in both scenarios.
The other thing I would add is to take additional classes other than CS/math. Most people in CS are there because they live and breath computers. Getting exposure to other subjects is how someone can standout and/or get that first idea for their own business.
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I - disagree here. My CompSci background gets me called in to deal with the hard stuff that others skip bc the theoretical parts of CS are not present. As mentioned in a further comment below - I can understand why code is slow (eg: BigO for cpu or memory), what structures and algorithms to use in different scenarios (Data Structures & algos), how things are working (Computer Architecture, Programming Languages [theo…
> I know what is happening at a network layer, OS layer, memory layer, application layer, and system layer, and code layer. Yep. For me, the biggest reason I think a degree is necessary is because it is comprehensive. Self taught people are going to inevitably have multiple holes in their understanding. And worst of all, they will be ignorant of where those holes lie and how large they are.
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Do you think most people with a CS degree retain sufficient skills in this area to be effective? Maybe PhDs.
Exposure to the CS curriculum at least gives you a leg up in asking questions and working out the shape of your lack-of-knowledge. Like, knowing that automata and complexity theory exists and remembering roughly how it works means that if something that needs that comes up, at least you have a sense of what you forgot about it. For instance, having taken a database class where we worked in the relational algebra has…
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Is there any part of a CS degree that educates students on how networks operate or what a protocol looks like on a wire? Most of the new grads I work with seem to think of all of that as a black box and are completely stuck when things aren’t working.
There are certainly classes that cover networking. IP, TCP, DNS, and HTTP were covered in classes I took. As for actually on the wire. I haven't studied anything about how ethernet actually works. I assume its kindof like i2c, but I don't know more than that and haven't needed to.
People REALLY hate college degrees on this site. I think my degree was a great decision. I've met a few decent self-taught programmers. Most are awful. Over and over again the bootcamp grads and people who have never attended school end up being the worst performers on my team. A LOT of the people I have worked with who do not have degrees have bad attitudes and are hyper-vigilant about "no degree" microaggressions.…
It is easy to see why having a degree is not popular here in this forum. It is probably acting as a hard barrier for some to get a job. Thus people don't like it. Per my experience working in a big tech shop, most of the engineer-kind co-workers DO have a STEM degree. I don't think a CS degree is required in that sense, as long as the background is relevant. Only one of them came with no college degree, but he fits i…
At another job, a theoretically inclined colleague was grilling a junior candidate on DDD and hexagonal versus onion architectures because that interested him. I had to point out that wasn't relevant at all for a fledgling programmer's ability to write a basic web API.
Self-selection is a big problem, whether it be through cultural values, personal interests or the topic at hand: degrees. Let's please stick to what a degree is: an authority argument and a semi-reliable proxy for intelligence. The rest is incidental, as you can be lazy and disorganised with a degree, or possess a broad theoretical background and be intelligent without.