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The case against CS master's degrees

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Re: The case against CS master's degrees

#31

Post by bobbyz »

avgDev wrote: post #16
bobbyz wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your point is valid but you can also prove you can accomplish something while also actually accomplishing something meaningful. For example you complete one of your side projects instead of a meaningless assignment. Sure, the side project might not actually succeed, but at least it had a chance. I also feel like 95% of the key to learning are hard deadlines with consequences. Also, to varying degrees, every justifica…

I do not disagree with your last point but I don't think I would have gotten into programming if it wasn't for getting my feet wet in school. I guess what works for me, may not work for someone else. I do feel like online learning can be MUCH MUCH quicker, as no time is wasted on poorly designed assignments. I feel like it is much more optimized especially comparing it to my state school experience.

School is also how I got heavily involved in programming, but I feel like its more-so due to how difficult it is to self-teach programming. I'd imagine the number of people who tried to pick up native android as their first platform and then decided that programming wasn't for them must be quite large.

Re: The case against CS master's degrees

#32

Post by bobbyz »

bdcravens wrote: post #27
bobbyz wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time I make this point someone says something to this effect. If you spend your career writing garbage for a ransomware gang or an outsourced app development agency you probably won't have too high an opinion about software development. It's just a difficult thing for me to believe that this happens in large amounts at the best companies.

Most jobs aren't at either of those two extremes (garbage vs best companies). There's a lot of work in the middle, where your job is to use your tools to facilitate a business outcome; if your boss has to tell you how to do it, the company probably hired the wrong person.

I suppose thats true. Its not very interesting to think about the in-between.

Re: The case against CS master's degrees

#33

Post by anta40 »

xhkkffbf wrote: post #4

I hate to be super-negative, but I'm not even sure a bachelors in CS is a good idea. Oh sure, you learn a few good things along the way, but then the professors start dragging you down their favorite theoretical paths. I'm all for philosophizing and navel gazing, but there's not much practical in things like lambda calculus, NP-completeness and some of the other topics. To make matters worse, these pursuits can confu…

>> but I'm not even sure a bachelors in CS is a good idea

If your goal if "simply" to be a software developer (who usually use existing APIs), nope CS education is not needed No need to study fancy theoritical stuffs.

Just straight learn anything practical like Java/SQL/Python/etc. And thanks to internet, you don't even have to wait to be enrolled in university. Any high school kids can do that.

>> Most of the CS curriculum is pretty extraneous

It's science, after all. Can we say the same thing about physics/biology? OK, computer science may not be considered as science as in "natural science". Instead, see it as a mix of math & engineering.

Still, the goal of CS department is no to produce practical programmers. At least many many years ago in my 1st day at the campus, the lecturers said that. Although no doubt most CS alumni work as programmers. Yes, I'm aware understanding theories is a thing, and writing software is another thing. That's why we also had software engineering, project management classes.

Re: The case against CS master's degrees

#34

Post by liquidify »

I did a non-cs undergrad to cs grad path... It was hard. I wasn't admitted to the program without fulfilling almost all the core CS undergrad classes. This meant that between the prerequisites and the actual grad classes, I took over 120 credit hours of pure math and CS classes over the course of 5 years.

Obviously not every school has the same demands as others, and there are certainly a lot of degree farms that take foreign students money and funnel them though, but I'm not sure that the authors points ring very true... certainly not for everyone.

Re: The case against CS master's degrees

#35

Post by daniel-thompson »

_wldu wrote: post #18

The Georgia Tech OMSCS program is very good and affordable (10K or less). It's also the 7th ranked CS program in the world. And, you can and do interact with professors, not just TAs. I'm an OMSCS grad. I would do it again and strongly recommend it. I think programs like it are the future of higher education.

OMSCS student here. I agree with the parent. However, the one downside of the program is that since the marginal cost of admitting an additional student is very low relative to the tuition amount, GT has an incentive to not be very selective about who they let in. From a democratization-of-educational-opportunities perspective, that's good: if you can hack it, then you can hack it, regardless of what formal qualifications you might be missing. But this program is the real deal courseware-wise, and that results in a lot of those under-prepared students taking classes that they just can't keep up in. Lots of those students end up washing out of the program... after paying GT a semester or two of tuition.

Example: in the Intro to OS course I'm about to finish, we started with 700+ students and are now down to about 340. The projects are typical schoolhouse stuff for systems programming: C programs that manage memory, use sockets, IPC constructs, pthreads, RPC libraries, etc. One of the guys on the class slack just posted that when testing & debugging the projects, he just printed stuff to stdout... for the whole semester... because he doesn't know - and didn't bother to learn - how to use a debugger.

Re: The case against CS master's degrees

#36

Post by mandy12xx »

_wldu wrote: post #18

The Georgia Tech OMSCS program is very good and affordable (10K or less). It's also the 7th ranked CS program in the world. And, you can and do interact with professors, not just TAs. I'm an OMSCS grad. I would do it again and strongly recommend it. I think programs like it are the future of higher education.

5 courses in, instructor presence is minimal. TAs are phenomenal though!

Re: The case against CS master's degrees

#37

Post by throwlaplace »

daniel-thompson wrote: post #35
_wldu wrote: post #18

The Georgia Tech OMSCS program is very good and affordable (10K or less). It's also the 7th ranked CS program in the world. And, you can and do interact with professors, not just TAs. I'm an OMSCS grad. I would do it again and strongly recommend it. I think programs like it are the future of higher education.

OMSCS student here. I agree with the parent. However, the one downside of the program is that since the marginal cost of admitting an additional student is very low relative to the tuition amount, GT has an incentive to not be very selective about who they let in. From a democratization-of-educational-opportunities perspective, that's good: if you can hack it, then you can hack it, regardless of what formal qualifica…

>One of the guys on the class slack just posted that when testing & debugging the projects, he just printed stuff to stdout... for the whole semester... because he doesn't know - and didn't bother to learn - how to use a debugger.

Lol that's like the best way to debug C

Re: The case against CS master's degrees

#38

Post by theamk »

bryal wrote: post #23

Not everything has to be about work and employability. Some of us actually enjoy learning and exploring the more theoretical topics in CS.

Sounds like you should be doing PhD then?

At least in my university, MS students were usually paying full tuition, with the understanding that they'll take classes and leave for (presumably) high-paying job.

On the other hand, PhD students were usually paying no tuition at all -- instead, after getting their masters-equivalent, they were expected to do the research for a few years and therefore "pay back" by advancing the science.

(of course the fun fact was that one could drop out half-way from PhD program and get a MS degree.. but this did not happen very often)

Re: The case against CS master's degrees

#39

Post by theamk »

xhkkffbf wrote: post #4

I hate to be super-negative, but I'm not even sure a bachelors in CS is a good idea. Oh sure, you learn a few good things along the way, but then the professors start dragging you down their favorite theoretical paths. I'm all for philosophizing and navel gazing, but there's not much practical in things like lambda calculus, NP-completeness and some of the other topics. To make matters worse, these pursuits can confu…

Does not match my experiences at all. Plenty of data structures in my job, with occasional need to parse the data. Knowledge of how OSes work and distributed systems also come very handy.

I think this is because our product is not related to web in any way, and the only UIs we deal with are quick and ugly ones for internal use.

Re: The case against CS master's degrees

#40

Post by Rury »

commandlinefan wrote: post #24

What masters degree (or even undergraduate degree) is any of that not true of?

Yeah, past a certain point you realize how shallow degrees are, as they're merely an organization's approval that you studied something and demonstrated some level of aptitude of it.

Which is to say, you don't need a degree to study/learn things.

Though that approval is helpful in opening doors to employment when you're young, it again is not needed when your history of experience, abilities, and work can do the same later in your career...

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