Why do so few people major in computer science? (2017) • Hacker News Board

Re: Why do so few people major in computer science? (2017)

#321

Post by blaser-waffle » Mon, Jun 29, 2020, 4:57 PM UTC

HanP77 wrote: post #161

tosser0001 wrote: post #72

The problem is CS is just a miserable field to be in unless you really, really enjoy the grind of it. To me it comes down to some CS-specific version of Mike Tyson's (perhaps apocryphal) quote "everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth" - something along the lines of "Everyone has fun programming until they have to start debugging". My city has several years of programming courses at the high school. A…

This I've been working has a web developer for two years after completing a bootcamp. Peoples often ask me questions because they think about doing the same. I always say to them that this is not for everbody, you are banging your head against the wall most of the time. Off course nothing beat that sensation when you finally found the problem or even when you get closer. But that has to be your thing.

Tell me more about the bootcamp.

I'm in IT and could probably bridge the gap to dev on my own -- did a CS degree ages ago, but don't do much coding outside of bash one-liners and some SQL -- but I'm rusty.

Plus I'm not super motivated to do hours of coding after dealing with 9 hours of BGP issues, etc.

So the bootcamp seems appealing. I'm not starting from zero, and could probably go hard for 3-6 months doing pure coding, and then run with it. I'm just not sure what my options are.

Re: Why do so few people major in computer science? (2017)

#322

Post by dylan-m » Mon, Jun 29, 2020, 4:58 PM UTC

I got about 8 years into my four year degree program in between interesting part time and then full time jobs on the side, and recently came to a set of realizations:

1. I'm never going to finish this damn thing because I keep failing or almost failing math courses (and it happens the three required courses I have left are gated by math courses). All it does at this stage is make me feel inferior. (I do suck at thinking mathemetically, but I guess I've sucked at it for long enough I can deal with it in practice. Alas, they aren't buying it :b).

2. The only required course that remains which I'm really interested in doing is about writing a compiler, but I could do this myself. I'd miss having the excellent prof who teaches it, but that isn't worth the tuition until then. I already found my way into the others. There were some good ones which I'm really glad I did.

3. Upon graduating, my job prospects wouldn't change. Things are going fine. I might regret not having the piece of paper if I want to switch fields, but…

4. Outside of two or three excellent CS courses, the courses I have most enjoyed and grown from have been humanities and archaeology electives. They have a more interesting, diverse range of students; heaps of opportunity for cross-discipline thinking; and content I genuinely know nothing about, would like to learn about, and have no idea where to start. If I decide at some point I'd like to finish my degree, I'd probably take more of those courses and try to find an applicable degree than suffering through more CS.

The trouble with CS is (as a job training program, as opposed to a program about science and mathemtics), if you're the type of person who's doing the degree program because you're already doing this stuff, there's a decent chance you could find a relevant job while you're still at school. And that job _also_ provides educational opportunities, because that's how our field works. Unless you are in a place where that four year full time degree thing works for you, it makes itself irrelevant.

Re: Why do so few people major in computer science? (2017)

#323

Post by ntsplnkv2 » Mon, Jun 29, 2020, 4:58 PM UTC

corpMaverick wrote: post #231

tosser0001 wrote: post #72

The problem is CS is just a miserable field to be in unless you really, really enjoy the grind of it. To me it comes down to some CS-specific version of Mike Tyson's (perhaps apocryphal) quote "everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth" - something along the lines of "Everyone has fun programming until they have to start debugging". My city has several years of programming courses at the high school. A…

You bring a great point that I think needs to be discussed further. Every year I spend more time banging my head and I think it is having serious effect on my mental health. I enjoy programming and I don't really spend a lot of time debugging. My code usually runs fine, or I am able to easily find out what is wrong. It is the whole combined complexity of all the tools that we use. Git, Java, maven, gradle, jenkins, O…

There is an ever-increasing library of skills and tools that all have major flaws that have to be used in IT/Software Development.

Nothing ever seems to work right - and because all software is written differently by different people in different companies and languages, old and new, you can't solve everything. Things just don't work, and often. Problems are ignored. Software is thrown out to users to be "updated later."

Re: Why do so few people major in computer science? (2017)

#324

Post by ghaff » Mon, Jun 29, 2020, 4:59 PM UTC

zxcmx wrote: post #317

ghaff wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That pretty much lays out one of the more standard explanations for why more women don't go into CS. Things arguably changed in the early 80s with the rise of PCs and gaming. While programming certainly existed before that, it wasn't something that most kids were exposed to in high school and CS curricula in general were heavily theory oriented and often in the Math department. Today, if you want to be a mechanical e…

The observation re: engineers who never set foot in a machine shop is actually a real problem in industry, and a common cause of antagonism between engineers and the victims of their designs and drawings: machinists and fabricators. There's a huge class divide in engineering between designing the the thing and making the thing, despite the fact that the two activities might require equal skill in different ways, or t…

And, ironically, the better the school the more theoretically focused the curriculum tends to be. That said, I did take a manufacturing processes course (basically machine shop plus some related theory) undergrad and I did have project-based classes that involved actually designing and building things.

Re: Why do so few people major in computer science? (2017)

#325

Post by non-entity » Mon, Jun 29, 2020, 5:00 PM UTC

x87678r wrote: post #142

CS is a bifurcated world. Yes there are very well paid people in FANG companies and in Bay Area start ups. The reality is that 90% of IT people are working in a cubical making bug fixes to TPS reports in nondescript corporates where they're just another cost center - until they hit their forties when it gets tough to find a job. Most people see that reality.

Goddamn, why didnt I choose a different field.

Funny enough when I was a teenager I wanted anything but to become the latter guy, I even had my own unrealistic goals to avoid it. Unfortunately reality would kick in not too much longer later and I was forced to resign to that life.

Re: Why do so few people major in computer science? (2017)

#326

Post by ahartmetz » Mon, Jun 29, 2020, 5:00 PM UTC

thegeomaster wrote: post #232

saiya-jin wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Immature is the word that comes to my mind. And yes, that generally doesn't produce much respect (or attraction from other sex), does it

Right, a lot of FAANG companies' offices look like kindergartens. I get that all of the perks are "cool" to someone, but to me it's just embarrassing.

Oh yeah. Even when I was in my mid twenties, when I visited a Google office during some software event, I felt that the decoration was too childish and frankly ugly.

The testing or whatever tips on the toilets also felt a little invasive.

Re: Why do so few people major in computer science? (2017)

#327

Post by enumjorge » Mon, Jun 29, 2020, 5:03 PM UTC

corpMaverick wrote: post #231

tosser0001 wrote: post #72

The problem is CS is just a miserable field to be in unless you really, really enjoy the grind of it. To me it comes down to some CS-specific version of Mike Tyson's (perhaps apocryphal) quote "everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth" - something along the lines of "Everyone has fun programming until they have to start debugging". My city has several years of programming courses at the high school. A…

You bring a great point that I think needs to be discussed further. Every year I spend more time banging my head and I think it is having serious effect on my mental health. I enjoy programming and I don't really spend a lot of time debugging. My code usually runs fine, or I am able to easily find out what is wrong. It is the whole combined complexity of all the tools that we use. Git, Java, maven, gradle, jenkins, O…

To your point, there was an Ask HN thread yesterday where someone was asking for a simpler alternative to git. They kept messing up their repository when using git and they were ready to give up.

The responses were basically a) “git is the de facto standard. You can try mercurial but you’ll be missing out on a lot”, which is sadly true or b) “it’s not that bad, just really study the underlying data structures and git will get easier”.

I think the attitude of the second point is one of the reasons why writing software for a living can be so frustrating. Even the tool that saves and tracks changes in your work requires a non trivial amount of cognitive load to use correctly. It’s death by a thousand cuts. Sure, tool X isn’t rocket science but it’s also one of 20 tools I use and if it’s giving me trouble it can make the process of shipping software so frustrating.

Re: Why do so few people major in computer science? (2017)

#328

Post by sixstringtheory » Mon, Jun 29, 2020, 5:07 PM UTC

_visgean wrote: post #300

ardit33 wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and that's why we are a low status profession... Instead of digging your heels, and telling her your speech will be much more beneficial to both the students and the company, you did the typical nerdy thing and avoided confrontation and just left

What kind of confrontation could that be? "Oh but come on! I am important!" or "But I have moderately high salary!"? I think OP did the smart decision.

I would have started by asking what position she was looking for, and if she started all the way at the top like CEO, I’d whittle it down by starting with “don’t you think encouraging your entire class to aim only for the top, that you’ll be setting lots of them up for failure?” And if she didn’t relent, follow it up with “people who are on a CEO track need to know what life is like for those who build their products.” Or ask her whether she’s running a CS or MBA program for a cheeky jab.

You’ll never know if you don’t ask, and there are no stupid questions.

Re: Why do so few people major in computer science? (2017)

#329

Post by eequah9L » Mon, Jun 29, 2020, 5:07 PM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #98

orobinson wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing quite matches that triumphant moment when you finally discover the root cause of an issue that's been bothering you for days.

At which point you bang your head into the wall because the fix is so bloody obvious. :-)

Well, sometimes, the _root cause_ is so bloody obvious. But now you have to figure out how to fix it without breaking everything around and spending a year refactoring.

Re: Why do so few people major in computer science? (2017)

#330

Post by roosterdawn » Mon, Jun 29, 2020, 5:07 PM UTC

thu2111 wrote: post #298

chrisseaton wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For example... I have a friend who is a barrister in London. He makes a lot less money than I do, and works a lot longer hours, so sounds like he has the lower status job, right? No, because he's getting invited to join elite private social clubs and organisations. He's going to dinner parties with politicians and could use that network to start a political career if he wanted. He's meeting people with capital to inv…

That's true but it cuts both ways. I think social respect is entirely relative. It doesn't make sense to talk about status as if there's a universal ranking. Your examples are all from the perspective of someone inside the British political system. Are these jobs high status? Not from my viewpoint - there's no way I'd want to be e.g. a civil servant, a Sir or even a politician in the existing parties. A whole lot of…

Great points. I think your points are especially salient given GP's points earlier above:

> There's a whole real-life social network out there, and they definitely aren't inviting the programmers.

Is that really the case? Or is it just the case that they're not inviting the kind of "programmers" that GP knows/is (and for what it's worth, I consider myself an engineer, not a programmer)? For what it's worth, as a 30 year old "just an IC" in tech, I know a lot more HNI individuals and "high status" people (supermodels, executives, musicians, scions) /and/ find it way easier to get meetings with folks in /their/ network if I want to than my peers from university who were just as ambitious as I was and who went into law, management consulting, banking, or academia.

While I wouldn't say my experience is necessarily indicative of the average IC in my field or world, it is certainly not unique; indeed, my managers at previous firms took very similar trajectories. But then again, this is based on my experience in NYC. As the world is changing, I do think there is an increasingly accelerating understanding that the wheels of power are increasingly being seized by technology, and that those who utilize it to do so have the world as their oyster.