CS degree is not all that fun. You’re better off doing math and just learning to code on the side.
Any suggestions for online program / distance learning (I'm in Australia)? I want a proper challenge not a walk in the park.
Completing a computer science degree on Coursera
121–130 of 177 posts
Re: Completing a computer science degree on Coursera
#122I have a similar trajectory. I attended two very competitive military schools in Brazil but never finished and moved to America. Today I’m a senior software engineer at a FAANG company. The lack of diploma has never been a barrier and I progressed very quickly in the company from junior to senior (4 years). But this has always been a perceived pain point and limiter for me so I decided to get a CS degree during COVID…
> Johns Hopkins Masters in AI (online) do whichever one of these online MS which permit you to leave off the "online" part (i.e., are awarded through the conventional faculty). i'm not sure johns hopkins does but OMSCS from gatech does.
GaTech only permits OMSCS if you have a 4 year undergrad. In many countries undergrads are three years. Even you have a Master's, that is also not counted. 4 years undergrad or nothing.
Re: Completing a computer science degree on Coursera
#123I have a similar trajectory. I attended two very competitive military schools in Brazil but never finished and moved to America. Today I’m a senior software engineer at a FAANG company. The lack of diploma has never been a barrier and I progressed very quickly in the company from junior to senior (4 years). But this has always been a perceived pain point and limiter for me so I decided to get a CS degree during COVID…
I had an unrelated undergrad did my MSCS online (not JHU but same idea). It was great. But if you’re already senior at FAANG I’m not sure you need further legitimacy.
The actual education can be useful. I dont think my masters degree has ever landed me job. But I would not have been able to deliver many of the things that got me a leadership position, nor be as capable as an engineer as I am today without the experience. The milage obviously varies greatly here based on where one goes.
Re: Completing a computer science degree on Coursera
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
When you say “political“, what do you mean? It’s easy for me to relate to talk of software development aesthetics or philosophy and I’ve certainly had plenty of conversations that I think are accurately described that way. But I can’t think of software development discussions that I’d describe as political (except in the sense that politics is what happens when people disagree on anything).
Might be like, do we build more datacenters whose masters and possessors are all in the oligarch club, or do we build distributed systems that maximize flat power distribution.
Re: Completing a computer science degree on Coursera
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
My day job is relatively boring JavaScript components and SPA's, but even there I find things I learned in my Computer Science degree valuable. "Hey, this looks like a finite state machine.." "This could be a simple domain specific language, good thing I had to write compilers in college and I can easily make a simple lexer/parser.." "This other thing is easy to parse if I ingest it into a lexer-resembling state mach…
If I had two SWE candidates with the same genes where one dropped out of high school to build a portfolio of software and the other followed the traditional CS trajectory, then I'd pick the one who "wasted" their time trying to solve the halting problem.
I am biased because I did drop out of high school, yadayada. My career has seen consistently a much steeper incline than nearly all CS graduates I've ever met. Plus, I got to build a bunch of useful and cool stuff, while others were wasting their time studying.
Re: Completing a computer science degree on Coursera
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
> got accepted at Johns Hopkins Masters in AI (online). Anyone had any experience with that program? Thoughts? Not worth the tuition. GATech and UT Austin is highly respected and they only costs $6k and $10k respectively for their OMSCS. The only online CS degree programs I can think of that are actively taught by top faculty and don't break the bank are GT, UT Austin, and UIUC.
Agree on the list, I would say GT is hardest to get in, but most inexpensive. While the later two are much easier. I also suggest reading Dr. Joyners’ Reddit posts and books, they helped me quite a bit and I do want to reiterate that if you need help on admission and completed the EDX cs50(?) course, you can personally email him, as it’s stated on one of the last slides. All around an amazing program that I hope to o…
> I would say GT is hardest to get in, but most inexpensive. While the later two are much easier.
Regarding the acceptance rates, it's actually the opposite. GT OMSCS has a very high acceptance rate (~80%) and UIUC and UT Austin online masters are much more selective (~30%).
Re: Completing a computer science degree on Coursera
#127[dead]
Re: Completing a computer science degree on Coursera
#128Wow, I'm surprised that doing an online course through coursera is still that expensive - £17,000 or $22,000 USD over 3 years!
Interestingly it does seem comparable with what it would cost through The Open University - https://www.open.ac.uk/courses/computing-it/degrees/bsc-comp...
Re: Completing a computer science degree on Coursera
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
the distinction is specific to the economic value calculation. it’d be disingenuous to assume the conversation is about anything other than the economic trade off. That said, wholly agree that if school was about learning, it’s great for advancing and curating an environment for learning as its own value. fwiw in high school, authority figures justified college as a way to counteract the failure scenario of dead-end…
> it’d be disingenuous to assume the conversation is about anything other that the economic trade off. To me it seems hollow and sad to think about higher education purely in job and money terms, but maybe I’m weird. I studied what I wanted to learn about, and was naïve about any economic trade offs. There were a few companies I thought were cool and dreamt about working for, and at some level I knew it’d take a degr…
It's not necessarily fully causal though.
You'd need a comparison group who are just as intelligent and conscientious and equally rich as the college graduating population for comparison. They would likely find ways to demonstrate their value in other ways if forced not to attend college.
Re: Completing a computer science degree on Coursera
#130Congrats! > Group projects were also a common complaint. You were randomly assigned a group, but it was often unclear if the participants were even doing the course - many people were in completely ghost groups. I see that nothing has changed in 20 years. Even when attended the courses physically in person, group project usually had 1 or 2 people doing all the work and the rest nowhere to be found, or just hanging ou…
An important lesson.