The limited value of a computer science education

How do you look at code written if it's all confidential and owned by their previous employer?

Post 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 and criticism from people who know better than me.

4. How to deal with someone I don't like but who has power over me.

5. Lots of other fascinating things that have nothing to do with my job but that learning about made me happy and appreciative of life.

6. A handful of things that are pertinent to my job, but I see this as added extras because I didn't go to school for the sole purpose of getting a job.

7. That a lot of people seem to think that the only things in life worth learning or paying for are those that will be useful at a job. This is a sad one.

I really view that algorithms class as a massive, massive wasted opportunity. There are really two aspects to that kind of a subject - the theoretical underpinnings, and the practical applications. We beat the ever-living piss out of the theory, but I doubt anyone who didn't already know how to do it came out of that class knowing how you would actually code a linked list or a graph, and what the trade-offs of various implementations were. That kind of a subject would be such a rich field for a course in low level C or Rust or [insert manual-memory-management language]

As someone that had a highly theoretical computer science education, worked in the industry for three years, then returned to academic CS for summer research, I have a few thoughts on this.

1. A highly theoretical CS foundation is still very useful. One of the hardest classes I've ever taken in all my studies was an upper-level proof-based algorithms course. Nowadays I can glance at an algorithm and give you it's runtime complexity. This is actually an important skill because it influences how you construct your own methods and such. There were quite a few times at my old employer where I'd be like, "If we just switched this out to a hashmap, we'd have a constant time solution instead of this polynomial one," or something of the sort. Furthermore, that algorithms course changed how I thought about computing (and life) forever. Computational complexity theory is simply wonderous. I'm in med school now, and I will tell you, learning about human biology through the lens of a computer scientist is a truly enriching experience. Computation is everywhere!

2. Your everyday programming jobs probably don't require that deep-cut CS coursework BUT there are plenty of specialized jobs that do. I can think of many sectors where you need to be fluent in something like graph theory and ways to traverse graphs, or statistical methods + machine learning. Not all jobs are full-stack dev jobs. Undergraduate CS is supposed to lay a solid foundation that you can build your career on. It's not vocational training. You have no idea where you'll end up! And honestly, I think there's plenty of hindsight bias going on here.

3. Man, oh, man, people in academia suck at software engineering (and not to mention, product design). This isn't their fault! They haven't worked on a large codebase before. They don't understand git-flow or continuous integration or test-driven development. Their products need to get A's, not sell to a consumer. I will say, coming from the industry into back an academic environment it has been a bit of culture shock. Tools used, architecture, even ways of speaking about the software are often completely outmoded.

All in all, I'd say both are very desirable. I'd recommend self-taught programmers take some classes on the more theoretical/mathy side of computer science. And I'd recommend that the academically-minded CS seniors FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THINGS GOOD take a year off and work in the industry before pursuing grad school.

I probably covered more on networking than algorithms. I only did 2 papers on algorithms at university, as well as AI, which covered some more algorithms.

I did 2 papers on networking, a paper on computer security, and a paper on web development, and implemented an http client for Operating Systems.