Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Poll: Do you have a CS degree?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 176 posts

Re: Poll: Do you have a CS degree?

#161

Post by codesuela »

alecco wrote: post #38
kmfrk wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the reasons I dropped out was also that the people there were out of touch how things worked "in the real world". It was just the same curriculum as it had always been (minus the things that were cut to appeal to more students who otherwise couldn't cut the mustard). I was legitimately afraid that I would waste my time on things that would largely be irrelevant outside academia in the sense that I had to facto…

It's worse. The joke "MongoDB is web-scale" reminds me of this growing cargo-cult full of cocky CS graduates. Edit: thanks for the anonymous downvotes validating my point; dissent must be suppressed.

whats the definition of web-scale?

Re: Poll: Do you have a CS degree?

#162

Post by alecco »

codesuela wrote: post #161
alecco wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worse. The joke "MongoDB is web-scale" reminds me of this growing cargo-cult full of cocky CS graduates. Edit: thanks for the anonymous downvotes validating my point; dissent must be suppressed.

whats the definition of web-scale?

It's a vague term, my guess is they mean datasets like Google's.

Re: Poll: Do you have a CS degree?

#163

Post by jc4p »

aiur wrote: post #102
jc4p wrote: post #30

I'm "In Progress", I was doing contract work while I was still in high school and took two years off after high school to work at a variety of companies, then left a 6-figure job at 19 to go back to school and finish my degree so I wouldn't have a hard time finding jobs in the future (and because I knew that if I didn't do it then, which allowed me to graduate college the same year as my high school classmates, I wou…

I'm 20 and I've been working/interning at companies since high school. How did you manage to land a 6-figure job at 19?

Luck and a fantastic recruiter. In two years I went from doing freelance work online while working in retail to being a low level employee at a startup to being the only local programmer at that same startup to working at a company that really needed my skill-set (mobile development). The recruiter kicked in for the last one, everything else I looked for myself.

Are you asking for your own rates or are you letting other people decide for you? At my previous company I saw a guy exactly our age get hired without any recruiter or anything and the amount of money he asked for was so low it was embarrassing, we hired him quickly due to how much he asked but honestly with his experience and knowledge he should've been paid much closer to what I got rather than we he asked for, but he was young so he didn't dare ask for something fair.

Don't undervalue yourself.

Re: Poll: Do you have a CS degree?

#164

Post by lwat »

pepijndevos wrote: post #118
lwat wrote: post #101

For what it's worth we don't consider candidates without a degree when we hire. It doesn't HAVE to be a CS degree - math or electrical engineering is close enough most of the time. But there's just so many job seekers without a degree and most of them are useless so we save a lot of time and effort simply ignoring those.

"most of them are useless" Would you care to elaborate what constitutes useful? In my little bubble, there are a lot of useful people without degrees.

Useless as software engineers. We've had 'programmers' that could not FizzBuzz, ones that didn't know the difference between 0 and NULL, ones that could not read an E-R diagram, and so on. So these days when we hire a software engineer you don't get to round 2 if there's no degree on your resume.

Re: Poll: Do you have a CS degree?

#165

Post by andypants »

randomdata wrote: post #89
cmagahern wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes." - Edsger Dijkstra The name of the field misleads a lot of people into thinking that CS is only about programming, but it's way more than that. Personally, I think all of my CS background from university is what distinguishes me as a software developer instead of just a "programmer".

> Personally, I think all of my CS background from university is what distinguishes me as a software developer instead of just a "programmer". I consider myself a software developer because I work on the software from top to bottom. From business requirements, to user interface and usability design, to architecture and algorithms. Someone who is responsible for all aspects of code, but not other areas of the applicat…

I think 'Software Engineer' is thrown around too often.

That title should be reserved for those who pass (a currently nonexistent) certification like other professional engineers, and indicates that they are capable of working on life-critical systems like car software, medical systems, space shuttles, etc.

Unfortunately startups and web/mobile app companies may abuse this and require engineering certification for job openings when it's just unnecessary.

Re: Poll: Do you have a CS degree?

#166

Post by impeachgod »

irahul wrote: post #135
impeachgod wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I too am currently having the same problem. I am attending a very large state school (over 40,000 students) and I am struggling to connect with people. I also have severe depression and OCD which prevents me from getting things done. I feel very disappointed in myself and in my life because I was having high expectations about how awesome college would be after a crappy high school experience.

> I am attending a very large state school (over 40,000 students) and I am struggling to connect with people. Though the crowd might make you uncomfortable, you can take solace in the fact that you need not connect with all of them. Friends, or close friends, are mostly in single digit for most people. > I also have severe depression and OCD which prevents me from getting things done. Letting the mind wander isn't a…

So the way the OCD works is that I HAVE to have my documents formatted a certain way (e.g. characters per line), the time stamps a certain nice number, or I get super angry at myself. I HAVE to begin and finish eating, sleeping, and working at certain hours of the day. It suddenly arose within the last 8 months or so and I have no idea what causes it.

Re: Poll: Do you have a CS degree?

#167

Post by impeachgod »

alecco wrote: post #38
kmfrk wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the reasons I dropped out was also that the people there were out of touch how things worked "in the real world". It was just the same curriculum as it had always been (minus the things that were cut to appeal to more students who otherwise couldn't cut the mustard). I was legitimately afraid that I would waste my time on things that would largely be irrelevant outside academia in the sense that I had to facto…

It's worse. The joke "MongoDB is web-scale" reminds me of this growing cargo-cult full of cocky CS graduates. Edit: thanks for the anonymous downvotes validating my point; dissent must be suppressed.

Do explain how and why so many CS graduates hold on to cargo-cult notions?

Re: Poll: Do you have a CS degree?

#168

Post by impeachgod »

cowpewter wrote: post #143
impeachgod wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I too am currently having the same problem. I am attending a very large state school (over 40,000 students) and I am struggling to connect with people. I also have severe depression and OCD which prevents me from getting things done. I feel very disappointed in myself and in my life because I was having high expectations about how awesome college would be after a crappy high school experience.

I'm sorry to hear that. It was a genuinely terrible phase of my life, and caused a lot of personal re-evaluation for me. I actually adored high school. There were 330 people in my graduating class. I graduated third, only a sliver of GPA away from salutatorian. There were 6 National Merit Finalists in my class (including myself) and one of the things that always drove me to excel in high school was the sense of compe…

I feel like I have to get good grades, work research projects, and develop good relationships with other students, TAs, and professors in order to become better. I find it hard to relax because I feel like I'll be mediocre and end up working with third-rate soulless clock punchers; I want to work with first-rate colleagues.

Re: Poll: Do you have a CS degree?

#169

Post by cowpewter »

impeachgod wrote: post #166
irahul wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am attending a very large state school (over 40,000 students) and I am struggling to connect with people. Though the crowd might make you uncomfortable, you can take solace in the fact that you need not connect with all of them. Friends, or close friends, are mostly in single digit for most people. > I also have severe depression and OCD which prevents me from getting things done. Letting the mind wander isn't a…

So the way the OCD works is that I HAVE to have my documents formatted a certain way (e.g. characters per line), the time stamps a certain nice number, or I get super angry at myself. I HAVE to begin and finish eating, sleeping, and working at certain hours of the day. It suddenly arose within the last 8 months or so and I have no idea what causes it.

Doctor. Go see a doctor about it. If you're currently a student you probably have some sort of access to free/affordable healthcare, even if it just means starting at the university clinic. If the OCD started after/around the same time as the depression, then fixing the depression might fix the OCD.

Right now they're just feeding off each other. A big part of depression is feeling like you have no control over what's happening in your life. The OCD might be a way you're trying to feel like you have control over something again, even if it's just the formatting of your documents or when you wake up. Then when you can't achieve that you feel even more out of control and more depressed and the cycle is just going keep getting tighter.

I cannot recommend strongly enough that you go see someone and get this looked into. I know it's scary, I know it might feel like it's too hard or like it's pointless, but just do it. It took my mom actually showing up and physically taking me to the doctor before I started to get help, and by then school was ruined for me, and so was my credit. I had declare bankruptcy a few years later to shed the debt that I had run up while I was too depressed to make myself pay bills. Not the best way to start your mid-twenties.

You owe it to yourself to get this fixed.

Re: Poll: Do you have a CS degree?

#170

Post by hughw »

alecco wrote: post #155
hughw wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You dropped out of college because of a "ridiculous emphasis on calculus" yet you are able to track and form opinions on the quality of "algorithms teaching in top universities"? I doubt it.

Thanks for the ad hominem. I like calculus and math in general. But undergrad CS emphasis should be information theory, algorithms and discrete mathematics. They never used calculus to analyze algorithms, not even once. I've only seen it used on books (Knuth or Rivest et al.) In the majority of universities CS is still dominated by the same teaching body from math or engineering. Since now we have videos of classes a…

I admit my comment was harsh, but not ad hominem. It was a statement of fact: given your background as you laid it out, I would not trust your judgment about the quality of algorithms instruction in any university. If you offered me an appraisal of how well some university is teaching algorithms, I would seek a second opinion.

Calculus and other basic math is just part of general numeracy and a university that failed to teach it, even emphasize it, is a failure, or a trade school.

Post reply on HN