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How do non-software engineers feel upon reflection, about their degrees?

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Re: How do non-software engineers feel upon reflection, about their degrees?

#21

Post by jangliss »

I did a degree in Politics and then an MSc in International Relations, which are not subjects where there are definitive "canons".

To put it another way, you can go very far down the tech tree of one set of ideas without necessarily having to have the prerequisites from other courses, although you do build up your own inner library of useful tools, touchstone texts and concepts that stick with you for the long run.

I may never have directly put many of those into use in my career, but they've certainly given me a useful framework to interpret other things I've come across.

These days, I read a lot of effective altruist/rationalist discourse where they're reinventing very old social science concepts from first principles, and I feel it's a weakness of the monoculture that they have so little connection to what came before.

Re: How do non-software engineers feel upon reflection, about their degrees?

#22

Post by calderarrow »

I work in software now, but I was an accounting major, CPA, and worked in Public Accounting for 4 years before making the switch.

Accounting actually is more of a trade, and I felt like the majority of classes they taught helped me on-the-job as an accountant. People who like systems engineering would enjoy accounting, because it's getting to the nuts-and-bolts of our financial system and understanding both the how and the why. Whether you're international conglomerate Apple, Inc or software engineer calderarrow working a day job, the laws of accounting still apply.

But I would not recommend paying more than you need to for an Accounting Degree. The Big 4 will recruit anyone from anywhere, and as long as you have a degree (which is usually required for the CPA License) and a 3.3+ GPA, you can get a job in any major city. Assets + Liabilities = Equity whether you're at community college or Harvard, so get the cheapest degree you can get.

Also, try to squeeze 150 credits into your undergrad curiculum, as some CPA licenses require 150 credit hours. This is typically 4 years of undergrad (120) + 1 year of a master's (30). The added cost of tuition for those classes isn't that much, but being able to get out and start working a year sooner is a ~$60k decision that is worth it if you can do it.

As for why I left accounting: I started learning Python to help me automate some of the boring parts of my job [0] and fell in love with software. It just clicked for me in the same way that accounting did, and now I work in fintech, where I'm able to blend the two.

[0] https://automatetheboringstuff.com/

Re: How do non-software engineers feel upon reflection, about their degrees?

#23

Post by Jtsummers »

AdobiWanKenobi wrote: post #18
dividedcomet wrote: post #16

Yeah, 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 cu…

Not even design? This was a EE degree?

Re: How do non-software engineers feel upon reflection, about their degrees?

#24

Post by AdobiWanKenobi »

sho_hn wrote: post #9

I don't have a degree, and I'm relatively fluent in both EDA tools and web dev. Don't despair, you can self-teach.

I will self-teach of course, my issue is why do I have to do it from absolute scratch if I literally have a degree in the field.

Re: How do non-software engineers feel upon reflection, about their degrees?

#25

Post by AdobiWanKenobi »

Jtsummers wrote: post #23
AdobiWanKenobi wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 cu…

Not even design? This was a EE degree?

Outside of the dissertation no not really. Best we did was in the group projects where at most we attached a couple sensors and maybe a motor to an arduino.

*Technically I did a robotics degree but the difference between mine and the EE degree at my university was at the most 5 modules, roughly 60 out of 360 credits.

The replacement modules certainly were not in anything to do with design or fabrication either. No soldering, no CAD, no ECAD.

You could have got through the entire degree without having once picked up a soldering iron or built a circuit. As long as you were good at maths you would get through, nothing else meaningfully mattered, except the dissertation of course.

Re: How do non-software engineers feel upon reflection, about their degrees?

#26

Post by AdobiWanKenobi »

arduinomancer wrote: post #8

It’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

>Hot take: CE is a better foundation for programming than CS

Not at my uni for sure. First (and only) microcontroller that we actually programmed that wasnt an arduino was in the final semester of the entire degree.

Re: How do non-software engineers feel upon reflection, about their degrees?

#27

Post by thiago_fm »

dakiol wrote: post #17

I 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 th…

Your comment about primary/high school is incorrect from my point of view. It's only evaluating that time on it being practical for your work (or CS study).

There's a lot of value on learning about Geography, History, Biology, the sciences, the social aspect of learning and going to a school and so on. It's hard to observe it after you have done it.

It can be possible you feel like you don't remember much, or don't find it useful, but in that scenario, I assume you'd easily be manipulated as you'd have very shallow knowledge about how the world works, despite perhaps having learned "30% more CS" because you just had less high school if it didn't exist.

Of course, there are improvements that could be made to the curriculum of schools, but I believe it's the most important learning lessons that set us up for life is there.

Re: How do non-software engineers feel upon reflection, about their degrees?

#30

Post by embeng4096 »

I think your university may have fallen short of its goals for the EE or robotics programs.

My EE major started with circuit theory, had labs with Arduinos and advanced to digital logic (embedded software) theory along with labs using professional-grade microcontrollers (TI MSP430, I think). Senior design capstone took us through schematic capture + PCB layout and getting a board fabbed. We did the soldering and populating components on the custom boards ourselves. Granted that was using Mentor Graphics and not Altium, which seems to be industry-standard, but it was still relevant and practical coursework.

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