In my years working in the computing field, I have found that individuals with a Computer Science (or related) degree to be much more adaptable to emerging technologies. Individuals without a degree have proved to be excellent at yesterday's problems, but they have a difficult time moving past their initial expertise.
The limited value of a computer science education
121–130 of 163 posts
Re: The limited value of a computer science education
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, but the other 90% of their budget is going to useless pet projects and bureaucratic waste.
This is a very pessimistic and conspiracy-theorist-ish way to look at it. Yeah, most entities in the world don't operate at maximum efficiency or make perfect use of their money. Doesn't make them worthless, or even close to it.
Funding to universities in the US has increased a ton by increasing student loan amounts and availability, to try to get more people degrees.
Studies have shown that the effect on universities is that "administrative expenses" have increased to absorb around 90% of the additional tuition funds coming in from loan-bearing students.
The parent is not pessimistic nor conspiratorial. This is observed behavior on the part of the universities.
Re: The limited value of a computer science education
#123CS education is not useless, but less used. And it is also used-less by the same people who teach it. There are exceptions - but that number is way too small than it should be.
If someone wants to learn coding or programming - screw the CS degree, there are better options. I know CS degree holders who can't code more than a few lines or can't debug a large program. And there are better programmers who don't have a CS degree. YouTube will teach better programming than a CS degree class.
Apart from programming, if one "also" wants to learn the mathematical aspect of CS and want to work on core-stuff, go for a CS degree. And those skills do not come easy from some tutorials - a academic rigor is probably the best way to earn it. But if you use the O-notation at some jobs - you could become an outcast in the team.
When I got into a top college for a CS degree, I had high hopes from it. For the first 1.5 years, I wanted to quit, quit and just quit. It was hopeless - they were teaching few subjects that I was way better at. But for some reason they would not allow me to just give exams and get promoted. I already knew programming, patterns, electronics and even dealt with basic robotics before I joined college. For one example - when they started teaching operating-systems, my expectation was that they will at least give a hands-on on writing a pretty basic OS. No - they were just doing theories. Ultimately, I ended up writing a pretty simple version of a custom OS without any mentoring (and used Google) - because the professors had never even written a boot-loader to start with. I also ended up helping weaker students get upto the mark. In one of the semester assignment evaluations, I was told by a senior professor " you copied programs from the internet - how come they are so well written". I lost trust in them.
I did learn some stuff in the later years and came to peace. While I knew programming, I did not have a strong math background - stuff like probabilities, numerical methods, theoretical computer science and bit of advanced algorithms were the things I learnt and explored further. The most important thing was getting introduced to AI which turned out to be a huge area of interest for me.
However, all of that bad experience has turned me sour towards academia in general and I do not recommend spending a lot of money and more-important-time learning "used-less" things - unless you are expecting more than programming in CS. And when it comes to CS, the learning never stops.
Re: The limited value of a computer science education
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're still, in this post, trying to extract the value of a degree in terms of job power. That's what I'm arguing against. I paid $180,000 to go to university and I think it was 100% worth it, regardless of my job or how much it helped my job. My selection of 7 points was mainly to make a point , that point being that I see a lot of value in university, many people do, and we should all stop trying to fit all of thi…
Interesting. I was with you until this post--I'm curious if you haven't wondered, even a bit, if 180k was too steep of a price tag? I'm a fan of university in general, but find the sky-high prices of private institutions hard to stomach compared to similarly-good in-state options.
Yeah... it's definitely a high price tag. I should've probably gone to a state school to save that money. But I still find it worth it because I see what I got from school as priceless, as silly and dramatic as that sounds.
As an aside, I am of the opinion that university should be free. But in the US, it's not. It's super expensive. That's a bummer, but like I said, it's worth it to me, money or not, job or not.
Re: The limited value of a computer science education
#125So I did a 4 year computer science degree about 10 years ago. It's really hard to understand why anyone would bash a degree. What I still find "relevant to practice" from then is: - Any good CS curriculum is basically a calculus, statistics, linear algebra, real analysis, combinatorics, discrete mathematics course with a bunch of CS modules thrown in on the side - All the computational intelligence stuff we did (part…
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Re: The limited value of a computer science education
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, 90% is me being a little facetious. I don't know the exact number. But I saw the waste first hand. My college ran large parts of its operations for the benefit of the employees, to the active detriment of the students and everyone else. For example, dining employees were easily paid 2x market wage, probably 4x counting fringe-benefits, while students were forced to pay for a wildly overpriced meal plan that robb…
DDS is and was a complete fucking scam. Seriously, nobody should make $20/hr for being a lunch lady, not even Ray - and I love the guy, since he does such a great job with Pigstick. Not to mention OPAL and the various other Collis directorates - I'll be honest, I benefited from all of them, since I worked for the A/V tech staff on work-study, but the amount of money that was lit on fire to administrate all of that is…
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Re: The limited value of a computer science education
#127As for testing a prospective programmer, what I consider an ideal test would be something like this: 1. Pick the three most important lines out of this 100 lines of code. 2. Explain why they're important to those who're not familiar with the problem at all. 3. Rename its functions and variables to achieve maximum consistency to you. 4. Optimize the code for maximum efficiency. 5. Optimize the same code for maximum ma…
You start with a subjective criteria? Ouch. It reminds me of the time I had to do some work for a factory... every department was telling me how theirs was the most important work - with arguments.
I can make an argument for even a "write to log" line as being extremely important when something goes wrong; I have no idea how I would pick three lines out of a hundred.
Re: The limited value of a computer science education
#128Post number 7,819,394 talking about how useful or not useful a CS degree is to a programming job. Here are some lessons I learned by going to school that I find incredibly useful: 1. How to shut up and get some work done, even if I don't see the point to it. 2. How to shut up and get some work done, even if it isn't directly applicable or valuable to a job or something I want in the future. 3. How to take feedback an…
Also, while people like to argue that it's possible to get programming jobs without a CS degree, it is guaranteed to be some value of harder to get those jobs. Especially if you dream of working in less common and more specialized areas, like (for example) working on compilers or doing HPC stuff, etc.
Yeah, in theory someone can get a job without a CS degree. But it'll be a lot harder, and it's very likely that doors will be closed to you that you would prefer be open. It might be unfair, it might be an injustice, but it's still part of the equation. You might overcome it, but it is still a thing to be overcome that was taken on as an additional burden in exchange for losing a different burden (college).
I have no problem with people with passion and talent skipping college and going straight into the workforce. And it's very clear up front what they get out of it- they get an additional 4 years of professional life, and they never rack up student loans. I just object to people claiming that there's no cost to it.
There is a cost: maybe a negligible one, maybe just a little, or maybe a lot if it means you don't get to do the things you really want to do. Or if you never even find out about the stuff that you would have been incredibly passionate about because you were never exposed to it.
By not going to school, there is guaranteed to be a cost in missed opportunities. Maybe those shut doors and lost opportunities are all for things that the person didn't want to do anyway. The part that bites people is that when they are making the decision to skip school, they're probably in the 18-20 age range and most likely do not have the capacity to evaluate what those lost opportunities even are, and whether or not each one is OK to discard as a long term life decision.
Re: The limited value of a computer science education
#129So basically the guy is saying there IS value, but limited. And in a fairly neutral stance about a rather sensitive topic, he gets to advertise his book as well.I guess with degree from Stanford, he may have written a program to generate that article with a target sentiment and then insert the plug ?
Re: The limited value of a computer science education
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you can't see the point, then maybe university isn't for you. I'm not going to write an essay on what point I saw in school because I don't have time or interest. The point is that I saw value in it. I liked learning about computer science. Why can't people stop shitting on this concept?
Good for you for being lucky enough to be able to follow your dreams. But you have to understand that other people mostly just care about being able to put food on the table, pay rent, and being able to save up enough to be able to support a family and buy a house.
Perhaps, but on a site intended for matters of intellectual substance I think it's fair to expect a bit more of ourselves.