Hard Part of Computer Science? Getting into Class • Hacker News Board

Re: Hard Part of Computer Science? Getting into Class

#191

Post by kd0amg » Thu, Jan 24, 2019, 5:07 PM UTC

lordnacho wrote: post #69

Isn't CS teaching the kind of thing that ought to be able to scale? There's no other subject that's as well covered on the internet; nothing in an undergraduate course isn't public knowledge. There's loads of video lectures these days. And the coursework is incredibly scalable too, in addition to being similar to what people actually use in industry. My brother did CS at an Ivy, and they were just pushing repos to a…

Automated testing scales easily, but properly reviewing code/proofs/technical prose really doesn't. Lecturing scales even more easily, though maybe not if you want students to be asking questions in class.

Re: Hard Part of Computer Science? Getting into Class

#192

Post by maxxxxx » Thu, Jan 24, 2019, 5:10 PM UTC

nradov wrote: post #179

maxxxxx wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's true. If your job is checking off Jira tickets maybe it's the case. But there are plenty of areas where you need a lot of creativity and deep knowledge to make progress.

It takes just as much creativity and deep knowledge to achieve the Master Plumber rating (or for any other skilled trade).

Exactly. There are plumbers who just execute exactly what they learned in school but nothing else and there are others who can solve tricky problems. Same for programmers.

Re: Hard Part of Computer Science? Getting into Class

#193

Post by cs-holder » Thu, Jan 24, 2019, 5:10 PM UTC

nwbrown wrote: post #185

cs-holder wrote: post #174

Since when is being a software engineer a "high-status" job, as mentioned in the first paragraph? Most people would consider a non-washed out doctor or lawyer (which is expensive and difficult to achieve) as having higher status than pretty much anyone working with a CS degree, unless they are a successful founder or went into investments. Besides medicine/law, young people with some degree of privilege and ambition…

If by lawyer you mean partner and by doctor you mean a practicing surgeon, both of those are pretty far into their careers. It's not very fair to compare them with an entry level engineering job.

By lawyer I meant either hired at big law or running a profitable practice, by doctor I meant made it into residency. This is only one, narrow dimension of "high-status", but still. Newspapers get things wrong all the time.

Re: Hard Part of Computer Science? Getting into Class

#194

Post by mberning » Thu, Jan 24, 2019, 5:15 PM UTC

_hardwaregeek wrote: post #177

I'm very curious to see the number of people start as CS and drop vs the number of people who end up as CS. I know at my school there's a lot of people who come in wanting to do CS but end up dropping and a decent amount of people who end up in the CS major either via other STEM majors or just randomly. Because of this churn, the intro classes need to be a lot bigger than the rest, simply to accommodate both sets of…

This is what I would like to know as well. These cycles tend to follow the job market pretty well. I remember when I was in school after the dot com bust our CS department really cut back on entry level classes because the interest was not there. In the end I don't think it made a large impact in the number of CS graduates.

Re: Hard Part of Computer Science? Getting into Class

#195

Post by sys_64738 » Thu, Jan 24, 2019, 5:17 PM UTC

chrisseaton wrote: post #8

sys_64738 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the UK they oversubscribe most 101 courses, including Psych and Comp Sci. The real watershed is Junior Honours classes which are fixed places. Even 201 is very large.

Oversubscribe in what sense? In that they're a bit crowded maybe - but it's not the case that they admit you to the university and then won't let you take the course, which is what this article is about. Did you go to Edinburgh? They have a US system unlike the rest of the UK.

Oversubscribe in that they fill the auditorium and overflow with high numbers (psych 101 was 500+ and CompSci was 250+). Many will dropout or won't make the level 2 cut.

No I didn't go to Edinburgh.

Re: Hard Part of Computer Science? Getting into Class

#196

Post by tzs » Thu, Jan 24, 2019, 5:17 PM UTC

AznHisoka wrote: post #44

"The university is looking to hire several tenure-track faculty members in computing this year, he said, but competition for top candidates is fierce. I know of major departments that interviewed 40 candidates, and I don’t think they hired anybody." That doesn't sound like fierce competition if they were able to interview 40 candidates... Did they give them all high-paying offers and they all rejected?

I don't understand how you can infer from the number of candidates they interviewed how fierce the competition is. Don't you also need to know the number of positions available at other institutions that those candidates are also considering in order to estimate competition fierceness?

Re: Hard Part of Computer Science? Getting into Class

#197

Post by ck425 » Thu, Jan 24, 2019, 5:17 PM UTC

gumby wrote: post #33

chrisseaton wrote: post #3

Why do US colleges over-admit like this? In the UK you apply to do a computer science course, and they have 50 places or whatever for that course, and so they admit 50 people. You can't get into the college and then be told that actually it's full. If they do accidentally over-admit it's their problem to solve, not yours.

The US university system is quite unusual (I believe Canada also has a similar system): at the undergraduate level you typically don't apply to a specific program; all students are expected to take a variety of classes (confusingly called "courses"), only some of which apply to a specific course of study. Domain-specialized classes become an increasing proportion of your overall classes after the first or second year…

The system in Scotland is somewhere in between - atleast in the ancient universities. I was accepted as a BSc Math student and took Math, Compsci and Psych first semester. Second semester I switched to BSc Compsci and took two Compsci and a generic 'great ideas' module. It was generally up to three subjects first year, up to two second year, then your degree subject in third and fourth year. But you could only do subjects in your faculty, most subjects falling into Arts or Sciences, with a few such as Math, Psych and Philosophy being part of both.

That said they did limit some popular classes to only people accepted to those subjects but Compsci wasn't one last I checked - though first year Compsci in my fourth year had tripled in size from my first year.

Re: Hard Part of Computer Science? Getting into Class

#198

Post by sys_64738 » Thu, Jan 24, 2019, 5:17 PM UTC

ashleyn wrote: post #16

sys_64738 wrote: post #5

I was interviewed for five mins on the phone back in 1990. They asked if you programmed your own computer at home. Not sure what they would say if you said "No."

This wasn't particularly true by 1990 but early in computing history, most engineers didn't have any computer in their house; being expensive and all. Maybe they thought of it from that angle. There'd still be a lot of older engineers who may not have gotten on board the PC revolution that began in the late seventies.

I came in through UCCA via clearing.

Re: Hard Part of Computer Science? Getting into Class

#199

Post by rchaud » Thu, Jan 24, 2019, 5:18 PM UTC

electricslpnsld wrote: post #109

Wohlf wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Competition must be fierce... at the level they want to pay.

95K a year for a starting professorship... or 3.5X that in total comp in industry. Not a terribly difficult choice!

I went to a highly ranked liberal arts college and in 4 years, I didn't have a single instructor that wasn't a PhD. I don't know what the salaries were like then, but even freshly minted PhDs can be over 30, meaning that from ages 22-30, they were making graduate/doctoral student stipend money at best.

$95k at age 32-35 honestly doesn't seem like a lot if your savings at that age doesn't even hit 5 figures.

Re: Hard Part of Computer Science? Getting into Class

#200

Post by rchaud » Thu, Jan 24, 2019, 5:20 PM UTC

amvalo wrote: post #96

This article is credentialism at its worst. The best programmers I know are self-taught, because they have a passion for it. I know people working at minimum wage, never enrolled in college, who got decent programming jobs after a year or two learning CS on their own. These people will always (I hope) form the core of the profession.

> I know people working at minimum wage, never enrolled in college,

If your starting point is "didn't go to college", then why comment on an article specifically about college students trying to enroll in a class?

Would you suggest that in addition to a full course load + tuition, students should set time aside to learn on their own? When they already go to a school with a highly regarded CS program?