61–70 of 177 posts
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What questions in particular are you thinking of that's purely about the engineering and ultimately not the political agenda?
- If it's about gaining a deep understanding of the topic involved for the pursuit of knowledge, it's science or engineering. - If it's about manipulating people, it's politics.
I got a Bachelor, Master, and PhD in Computer Science, with a total of 11 years of education. It's the biggest waste of time of my entire life. As I progress in my professional career I'm more convinced that pretty much everything in tech is on-the-job learning, and universities are little more than a social club. Nowadays you can learn everything you do at university and far more online and for free. Universities (e…
I won't try and argue the merits of Bachelor's and Masters. But if you honestly believe that you can pick up the same experience from PhD on the job, then is seems like you learned little from that PhD that you were supposed to and your supervisor failed you. PhD is not about learning content. It's about picking up research independence, confidence, and a strong capacity for critique. It is supposed to be suffering o…
> It's about picking up research independence, confidence, and a strong capacity for critique.
lolol maybe in the days of yore. today it's about pumping out questionable papers that your advisor tells you to pump out and targeting the right conference.
> It is supposed to be suffering of a special kind
are you also one of those people who takes cold plunges every morning? this myth is what perpetuates the same horrible relationships with shit advisors. it's not supposed to be suffering. it's supposed to be challenging. there's an enormous difference.
> an experience in grinding and radical unproductivity when the problem really is that hard
there are no problems like this in academia (at least not CS) because it's absolutely impractical (re graduation, tenure, etc.) to set out tackling problems which are intractable.
in summary: this entire comment is "phd virtue signaling"
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Computer science is a weird degree because it was meant to produce computer scientists. Theory of computability, graph theory, discrete math, formal logic, etc. But the world just doesn't need as many computer scientists as it needs people who know JavaScript. Over time, many CS degrees shifted toward producing software engineers, and it sounds like this person's experience was closer to that. But the problem is that…
> But the problem is that as an engineering discipline, software engineering is just profoundly underwhelming. There are basically no universally-respected design best practices, no governing bodies, no calculations of safety limits, no nothing. I somewhat disagree: there exist a lot of deep questions in software engineering, and there do exist some (very, very partial) answers. The problem rather is that most people…
CS degree is not all that fun. You’re better off doing math and just learning to code on the side.
I got a Bachelor, Master, and PhD in Computer Science, with a total of 11 years of education. It's the biggest waste of time of my entire life. As I progress in my professional career I'm more convinced that pretty much everything in tech is on-the-job learning, and universities are little more than a social club. Nowadays you can learn everything you do at university and far more online and for free. Universities (e…
I won't try and argue the merits of Bachelor's and Masters. But if you honestly believe that you can pick up the same experience from PhD on the job, then is seems like you learned little from that PhD that you were supposed to and your supervisor failed you. PhD is not about learning content. It's about picking up research independence, confidence, and a strong capacity for critique. It is supposed to be suffering o…
In most of Europe, the PhD contains no formal training. It's just what you informally pick up while working with other PhD students, if you do collaborations (depends on whether the supervisor likes that), or from postdocs (if there are postdocs), or from your rare meetings with the supervisor (which are often about updating the supervisor on new developments, not getting much actionable insight from them), but many many are simply left to their own devices and just do stuff and cope with the inevitable rejections, etc. At other places the supervisor organizes things like retreats, internal poster sessions, lots of internal presentations, discussions among the group etc. While in other places there is none of that, in some places many PhD students simply work from home and don't even meet much.
The winning strategy for prolific professors is to get a good early-career reputation, then hire really smart and conscientious applicants (proven through already published papers) and let them carry out the research. It's nothing about training them in any practical way. There are some who do that but it doesn't scale. You have to hire 20 PhD students and they will deliver enough papers for you to preserve your status and be able to hire the smartest applicants again and again.
But again, there's huge variation. Even at good universities.
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> Further to this point, it's quite common to favour a candidate with a strong STEM degree who has learned to code as an adjacency. ... because they know less about programming, and thus think much less deeply how a novel abstraction could look like which solves the problem much more elegantly. In other words: these applicants more obediently do their work instead of regularly questioning whether there could be a bet…
As someone who has met a lot of math majors and a lot of CS majors, I am skeptical of your supposition that CS majors are better at finding and applying novel abstractions than math majors who know how to code.
I do work with people who have a math major. Let me put it this way: if they were interested in finding and applying novel abstractions for programming, they would for sure often be very capable in this, but people who majored in math often rather love to apply these skills to more mathematical problems in their area of interest.
Often the reason is something like _"that's how it is in the workplace"_ which is a blatant cop out, imo. It's clear the reason that Universities force group work is because it's a cost cutting exercise.
They need to pay the hours for people to mark assignments. Make groups of 2, and you've cut the number of hours that need to be paid by 50%. Make groups of 5, and you've cut the cost by 80%. Of course, this comes at the cost of some students unfairly carrying others.
I got a Bachelor, Master, and PhD in Computer Science, with a total of 11 years of education. It's the biggest waste of time of my entire life. As I progress in my professional career I'm more convinced that pretty much everything in tech is on-the-job learning, and universities are little more than a social club. Nowadays you can learn everything you do at university and far more online and for free. Universities (e…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the biggest thing is most software "engineering" jobs are in no way engineering and are closer to a trade like being a mechanic or (imo) a doctor. It's fairly rote - you need good judgement and to stay current in latest state of the art but generally speaking you're not researching (nor should you be) cutting edge algorithms or anything. Add a new button, add some parameters to this analytics call, implement…
and yet, the collective industry has still continued to expand for decades because people overwhelmingly cannot consistently do these tasks without their code collapsing on itself. imagine if people regularly had tires fall off on their way home from the mechanic. or regularly having to get bones rebroken to set them correctly. I can agree that much of the work is not true "engineering" but most of what I've seen pro…
I got a Bachelor, Master, and PhD in Computer Science, with a total of 11 years of education. It's the biggest waste of time of my entire life. As I progress in my professional career I'm more convinced that pretty much everything in tech is on-the-job learning, and universities are little more than a social club. Nowadays you can learn everything you do at university and far more online and for free. Universities (e…
> Nowadays I wouldn't recommend anyone to get a tech degree in a university unless it's a world class one. And even then, I would focus on networking and finding like-minded people rather than necessarily getting good grades. I am a teenager and I am currently going to college. I am not going into a world class one college but its a decent college. I think that you might be right in terms of pretty much everything in…