It's hard to think of much from my 4 year SE degree that is ever relevant to my work in JavaScript programming.
Very occasionally a data structure or understanding O notation.
Certainly none of the maths or electronics stuff.
How do non-software engineers feel upon reflection, about their degrees?
11–20 of 41 posts
Re: How do non-software engineers feel upon reflection, about their degrees?
#12I did a "Business" degree and sitting here in 2025 I could give you 12 LLM prompts that will teach you everything I learned, and in better quality than the textbooks or lecture notes. I don't regret it because it allowed me to get and keep overpaid so-called "bulls*t" jobs for 15 years, but I wouldn't start down that path today.
Re: How do non-software engineers feel upon reflection, about their degrees?
#13I did a "Business" degree and sitting here in 2025 I could give you 12 LLM prompts that will teach you everything I learned, and in better quality than the textbooks or lecture notes. I don't regret it because it allowed me to get and keep overpaid so-called "bulls*t" jobs for 15 years, but I wouldn't start down that path today.
I felt the same thing in business school, I switched out after a year. The only useful thing we learned was excel (but holy fuck, excel is a rabbithole)
Re: How do non-software engineers feel upon reflection, about their degrees?
#14[deleted]
Re: How do non-software engineers feel upon reflection, about their degrees?
#15Building your own devboard requires skills in many interdependent areas. Have you tried using an Arduino or similar first? Having built computers from TTL chips and wirewrap chassis, I can confirm that digital electronics field has grown massively and requires knowledge in many specialist areas. Even designing a PCB requires a great deal of knowledge. Tools like KiCAD are great, but they don't abstract out the requis…
>Have you tried using an Arduino or similar first?
That’s why I went to uni to do EE/Robotics. I wanted the next step, suffice to say I did not get the next step from university.
I see what you’re getting at though. Just in time learning seems to be the way it will be. It’s just frustrating I don’t even have a base to go off of. Pretty much all my background knowledge has come from stuff I learnt outside of uni.
Re: How do non-software engineers feel upon reflection, about their degrees?
#16Yeah, we all go through it. I got a degree in economics and we used a program called SPSS developed by IBM to do regression analysis. No one in the industry uses it and it was very frustrating looking for a first job and no one was wanting the software I learned in university. But university isn’t about leaning to uses tool and apply it somewhere else, it’s about the underlying concepts and the people you get exposed to. I don’t use regression analysis in my job any more, but I’m much more prepared in doing numerical analysis than my co-workers who have traditional CS or marketing degrees.
Re: How do non-software engineers feel upon reflection, about their degrees?
#17I studied computer science over a decade ago. What I learnt at the university was: 1) perseverance. I wanted to learn about writing programs and OS and hardware… but I had to first pass all the mathematical lectures. It wasn’t easy. 2) How to learn. I feel like I can learn any topic nowadays, And pretty much I have been doing this over all my career. I didn’t learn about Kafka or K8s or Go in the uni, but I learnt the fundamentals and got a grasp on how to learn new things. Invaluable I would say. 3) How to deal with people I don’t like. I didn’t like many professors but I had to pass the lectures the way they want it. Same for my professional career.
I pretty much study every week to keep up with the industry, but I like it, so it feels more like a hobby. I’m not sure I would have the same strength and perseverance if I had quit uni the first year (or if I had never attended uni). This is just me, so YMMV.
If any, I feel like primary and high school are the real “scams”. I think they waste so much time over and over the same topics without going deep into nothing. I think it could be cut by 30% without any repercussions. I don’t recall anything valuable I have learnt in school (all the great lessons were due to my parents)
Re: How do non-software engineers feel upon reflection, about their degrees?
#18Yeah, we all go through it. I got a degree in economics and we used a program called SPSS developed by IBM to do regression analysis. No one in the industry uses it and it was very frustrating looking for a first job and no one was wanting the software I learned in university. But university isn’t about leaning to uses tool and apply it somewhere else, it’s about the underlying concepts and the people you get exposed…
>But university isn’t about leaning to uses tool and apply it somewhere else, it’s about the underlying concepts and the people you get exposed to.
You’re not wrong at all on the software side. With regards to the concepts though, we did a whole bunch of theory, but fairly often we did not do even the basics of applying it. I mean we literally did not do any, we did zero circuit/PCB design (the thing I’m trying to currently learn).
Re: How do non-software engineers feel upon reflection, about their degrees?
#19It’s covered if you major in computer engineering rather than CS Digital circuits, FPGAs, microcontrollers, basic electronics, lots of making stuff on breadboards One of my big undergrad projects was to build a CPU from scratch on an FPGA and write an assembler for it Hot take: CE is a better foundation for programming than CS
I ended up doing more actual programming in two of my Computer Engineering classes than I did in most of my computer science classes. We actually learned about structuring programs and adding useful abstractions to our microcontroller code, something that was only touched on in some of my early CS assignments.
I feel like so many CS classes are all about theory while a good chunk of CE classes actually have you writing code. I should have taken more CE classes, but I at least feel like I got to take some of the fun ones.
Re: How do non-software engineers feel upon reflection, about their degrees?
#20We're actually in a the same boat, as I've recently fired up KiCAD for the first time. Keep in mind, I did not go to school for this type of stuff, but yes, I feel illiterate and like I'm missing all sorts of info. You're not alone in that.
But guess what? Because of my business experience, I love it. I'm incredibly excited about what the project (and potential final product) will be. So, I've been reading anything and everything, testing, exploring, learning. Can you believe we have the access to do this stuff today? It's incredible.
This is how the world works. For example, a few weeks back, I was under the hood of a steam-powered car, analyzing, looking, thinking about how they figured out some of the things they had figured out. What were they thinking historically? How did they feel about this design decision? Who taught them?
Moral of the story: Degrees don't teach this drive; you must nurture it. It's normal to feel lost at sea.