The limited value of a computer science education • Hacker News Board

Re: The limited value of a computer science education

#71

Post by capote » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 3:56 AM UTC

taneq wrote: post #61

elliotec wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are about going to school , though, not getting a CS degree. And 100% of these things could, and probably should, be learned in the real world and not through paying tens of thousands of dollars under the guise of education. I did not go to school for a CS degree, and that has not hampered me in any way when searching for a job in software. All I learned in college was how to game the system of the institution…

If you mean 'school' as in 'secondary education' then no, they apply to tertiary education too. And this is going to sound weird if you're an engineer, but the 'real world' of commercial employment is 90% about gaming the system of an institution which is most likely also a social racket. That's why kickass engineers get paid less than mediocre managers; because they spend all their time solving fun technical problem…

Just to clarify, I and many other Americans use the term school to mean tertiary education (university, higher education).

Re: The limited value of a computer science education

#72

Post by catmanjan » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 3:56 AM UTC

catmanjan wrote: post #54

capote wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true, and I completely understand, but it's besides my point. My point is to implore people to stop looking at a CS degree as just a means to get a job. If you look at it that way, of course you're not going to find 100% value in it. Getting a job is simply not what a CS degree is for. It was never declared to be for this purpose—nobody claims it's for this purpose (except maybe some schools for marketing purp…

Most parents insist on kids going to uni specifically to get a job. If you can get the same knowledge for free (assuming you have to pay for uni), then what's the value?

Yep I agree they have, but that is just a fraction of the purpose they serve today - right now they're just filling the gap until something more effective comes along, like a better version of the technical college.

Uni never should have catered to the massive demand of skilled workers, leave it to the eternal academics I say...

Re: The limited value of a computer science education

#73

Post by capote » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 3:57 AM UTC

wildmusings wrote: post #67

capote wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that institutions like that are a societal racket and waste of time and money. This is completely wrong. Universities are tremendously useful and do many great things for society and humanity. I'm not going to provide evidence because I think that any reasonable person will agree with me.

Sure, but the other 90% of their budget is going to useless pet projects and bureaucratic waste.

This is a very pessimistic and conspiracy-theorist-ish way to look at it. Yeah, most entities in the world don't operate at maximum efficiency or make perfect use of their money.

Doesn't make them worthless, or even close to it.

Re: The limited value of a computer science education

#74

Post by stepvhen » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 3:57 AM UTC

I value my CS degree, but I also agree with the author. I don't think recruiters should ask for a CS degree, or focus on applicants having a formal CS education. There needs to be an simultaneous shift in the industry and in academia that allows for software engineering and computer science to be distinct diciplines with distinct goals: SE gets you into the industry, CS gets you into research. Most other sciences have their envineering partners, and technology should be no different.

Re: The limited value of a computer science education

#75

Post by j45 » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 3:58 AM UTC

InclinedPlane wrote: post #60

capote wrote: post #34

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 an…

I have a degree in Mathematics, I think my educational experience has made me a better developer than if I'd have pursued a pure CS degree alone. Does that mean that I think everyone who wants to develop software should get a math degree? Not even a little bit. But I also don't think they should pursue a CS degree either. In the end the answer is "it's complicated, and there isn't one good answer yet", but we don't g…

I remember specifically taking a few equivalent math or stats classes that were equivalent credit to Comp Sci classes and realized I gained a much deeper and more transferable set of mathematical and conceptualization skills in addition to the traditional comp sci experience I was receiving.

And to think... I did took the more gruelling math and stat's courses to get out of doing comp sci labs that didn't interest me so I could work on problems I enjoyed.

Re: The limited value of a computer science education

#76

Post by superuser2 » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 3:59 AM UTC

catmanjan wrote: post #54

capote wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true, and I completely understand, but it's besides my point. My point is to implore people to stop looking at a CS degree as just a means to get a job. If you look at it that way, of course you're not going to find 100% value in it. Getting a job is simply not what a CS degree is for. It was never declared to be for this purpose—nobody claims it's for this purpose (except maybe some schools for marketing purp…

Most parents insist on kids going to uni specifically to get a job. If you can get the same knowledge for free (assuming you have to pay for uni), then what's the value?

If college were about knowledge transfer, we'd all stay home and read.

The value is in guided discussions, meetings with your professors, comments on your papers and code, making friends as you finally begin to understand difficult material together in the library in the middle of the night, and 4 years of living in an environment with an anomalously high signal to noise ratio of smart people throwing 100% effort into their collective intellectual growth.

Re: The limited value of a computer science education

#77

Post by taneq » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 4:01 AM UTC

capote wrote: post #71

taneq wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you mean 'school' as in 'secondary education' then no, they apply to tertiary education too. And this is going to sound weird if you're an engineer, but the 'real world' of commercial employment is 90% about gaming the system of an institution which is most likely also a social racket. That's why kickass engineers get paid less than mediocre managers; because they spend all their time solving fun technical problem…

Just to clarify, I and many other Americans use the term school to mean tertiary education (university, higher education).

I thought this was the case but wasn't 100% sure which this poster meant. So in the last sentence where they say 'college' do you think they're talking about secondary or tertiary? It might just be a confusing-to-parse post.

Re: The limited value of a computer science education

#78

Post by curun1r » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 4:02 AM UTC

j45 wrote: post #53

capote wrote: post #34

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 an…

People without CS are miss out, and also, some CS programs come up short: Learning soft skills are as important as any technical chops. Learning how to learn and realize you're never really done learning how to solve problems. This is one of the reason some self-taught people often have more people skills than those who self-select to hide behind a keyboard most of their university years instead of getting out there,…

It's funny that you mention working in a group because that's one area where I've found where academia isn't really preparing CS grads. It seems that the most our new grads have been exposed to is an ad-hoc group that was supposed to work together and threw something together which they made work but with complete disregard for having to maintain the code 1+ years in the future.

They then enter an environment where the group isn't ad-hoc, meaning there's a hierarchy and people, especially new CS grads, get overruled. They're expected to comply with policies and processes that they had no input into. And they're expected to write code that doesn't just work, but is understandable and maintainable by every member of the team.

I find that most new grads are very able to come up to speed on the code and the structure of our project. This likely comes from having a very malleable mind and never having seen a well-organized codebase. But it takes a good two months of almost constant corrections before they're contributing to the team in the right way and many more years before the understand why that type of contribution is necessary. Teamwork is more than just not writing the entire project yourself and it feels like CS grads are never taught any of the skills necessary to collaborate in the real world.

Re: The limited value of a computer science education

#79

Post by woodman » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 4:03 AM UTC

capote wrote: post #34

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 an…

The things you listed are pretty much everything you learn on the way to adulthood, which for a lot of people occurs when they move out and go to college, so you might want to consider that.

I worked as a programmer long before the formal education, and the only thing I really learned is the only thing that is really needed to make it a worthwhile endeavor: a shallow but wide exposure to the body of knowledge out there. I accidentally reinvented poisson regression, I didn't realize that I had wasted a month of my life until going to college in my late 20s and finding out that somebody had already done the work (and a much better job).

Re: The limited value of a computer science education

#80

Post by lewisl9029 » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 4:03 AM UTC

_delirium wrote: post #8

I may have been lucky, but I don't recognize this statement when I think of my own CS curriculum: The vast majority of what a programmer does, forming good abstractions and avoiding complexity, is almost completely untouched by computer science curriculums. That's the majority of what my CS degree covered, in several different programming paradigms. Even the idea that there are "programming paradigms" is something I…

I got my degree in Computer Engineering rather than CompSci or Software Engineering at Waterloo, which is sort of a hardware/software hybrid program. In hindsight that was probably the wrong choice for me. I quickly found out I really didn't enjoy working with hardware, and that the software side of the program was woefully inadequate compared to some of the better CS programs out there, precisely because we had zero exposure to paradigms that were not imperative/OO programming.

My friends in CS at Waterloo got to work with Scheme in the first year for their introductory programming course, when we were using C# and Java and the like. I was young, stupid and arrogant at the time, and made fun of them because I dismissed Scheme as some weird language nobody would ever use, but now I really envy the CS grads for their clearly much more well-rounded and better thought-out software curriculum.

The saving grace of the Computer Engineering degree at Waterloo is of course the 6 4-month co-op terms (internships) sprinkled throughout the 5 years program, where I gained valuable real-world work experience and finally acquired an appreciation for functional programming, but there's a large degree of variance in students' experience in the co-op program depending on the jobs they can find, so not everyone can be so lucky.