Likewise.
Closest I ever got to lying on a resume was neglecting to mention that one of my references was my Mum’s new husband.
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Coding =/= computer science. I enjoyed my graduate coursework in things like analysis of algorithms, but by grad school I was already comfortable programming in several computer languages, none learned in the classroom. (OK, strictly speaking I learned Fortran for Physics.) University CS departments should no more focus on coding than university Math departments should focus on arithmetic, or English departments should focus on grammar and penmanship.
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That’s fair, but a lot of students go into CS because they want to be programmers, and spend a lot of time learning things they’ll never need before eventually dropping out.
That’s true for many majors, eg people who want to be writers or who like to read majoring in English and being confronted by Theory. CS suffers additionally from people deciding to major in it more because of the job prospects than because they are interested in the subject.
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That’s true. But writers have workshops and degrees that target them. A lot of people who want to be programmers get actively steered into CS. I should clarify, I’m not opposed to CompSci on principle. We need computer scientists too. But the lack of really good alternatives at university for people who just want to be programmers, coupled with a lot of people picking it as default or because of bad advice or just because they mistakenly think CS is the path to a tech career, fills a lot of freshman and sophomore CS track classes with people who don’t really need or want to be there.
[quote=“GulliverFoyle, post:45, topic:98458”]
fills a lot of freshman and sophomore CS track classes with people who don’t really need or want to be there. [/quote]
Fortunately, accreditation means that there are still a couple of good weed-out classes for students who shouldn’t be majoring in the field. I’ve taught them.
Honestly, I think there’s value in a programmer having been exposed to concepts like induction, computational complexity, and state machines at a basic level, as it means that when they are working on a project they at least understand enough to know (for example) how to judge which algorithm to use in the situation.
[quote=“GulliverFoyle, post:45, topic:98458”]
But the lack of really good alternatives at university for people who just want to be programmers[/quote]
There is a huge number of majors available at any university. College education is not vocational education; your major need not reflect your choice of long-term occupation. If you major in X because you like (or are good in) X, and you also happen to be a good programmer, then you probably have a better shot at a job involving X than someone who is not a programmer. If programming is the only thing that you like, but you are not good enough at theory to make it through a normal BS in CS, then honestly that is pretty sad.
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I mostly agree with your comment, but I can’t agree with this exactly. Lots of students make it through a BS in CS and even get a respectable GPA, who don’t actually need, want or care about 80%. Even those who drop-out, well I strongly doubt @japhroaig dropped out because he couldn’t hack it.
Many finish because they started and they’re capable, but would not be there if they’d known how much they wouldn’t use a lot of the material as a career coder. Or they correctly realized they’d likely get a higher starting salary for a BS than an associates, which is more along the lines of a vocation level track. Simply put, I want to see the insistence on four-year degrees as the gold-standard in industry to go away. It’s not right for everyone, and many just go through it by default. More emphasis on vocational and associates as acceptable launch-pads for developers would lower the attrition rates and increase the satisfaction rates of those who do complete a BS in CS.
Look, I’m not opposed to people learning higher math, architecture, systems and advanced network engineering, ect… I simply want a BS in CS to stop being the gold standard of anyone who goes to college to become a programmer. And I want the four-year degree to stop being the gold standard of the tech industry. It’s wasteful, like telling someone who wants to be an aircraft mechanic that they should get a degree in aerospace engineering because it pays better and they should have exposure to a surfeit of classes they may never use or remember in ten years.
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and @d_r yep, i never could have invented map reduce, hdfs, aslr, or a bunch of other stuff. i do have three patents though (one of the anti-anti-debugging patents isn’t on my linkedin profile, cause markus won’t tell me the damn patent number).
reading books, code reviews, peer review, and working with people smarter than myself is my preferred learning method. oh, and hitting my head repeatedly on my desk till i figure out the problem i’m working on.
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I think everyone indulges in a bit of cranial percussive maintenance from time to time. I have a hard head though, so it takes a toll on the wood.
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But that’s true for everything in higher education. There does not exist a major where you use 100%, or even 80% – probably not even 20% – of what you are taught, at least not explicitly. The idea is to get broad exposure, so that if you really do need the thing later you (a) recognize it from your training, and (b) can learn it, as learning something the second time you see it is always easier.
I agree that not everyone needs a 4-year degree, but even raising that question is an unfortunate artifact of the modern commodification of the 4 year degree. As for whether programmers need one to get a job, it is up to an employer to decide whether to hire someone with a BS in CS over someone with an AA or a MOOC certificate. My guess is that for most of the interesting jobs, employers will ceteris paribus prefer programmers who have the BS (or higher), both because of the level of perseverance implicit in the degree and because they might want someone who has done some training in the more advanced stuff, just in case. For jobs requiring special expertise, experience ought to trump education.
Sure. My father was a high school dropout, but he was a fantastic accountant. I was probably better at programming in assembler as a 17-year-old than most students with a MS in CS. The point I made in my first post in the subthread was that it is unreasonable to criticize a major because it does not train students to do something for which you don’t need such a major.
Why not major in something like Music while in college?
There’s nothing special about CS here. Pretty much every bachelors degree program is comprised mainly of material which will only be useful to people who go on to get higher degrees in the field, and a very small fraction of the majors do that. I don’t think that is a bad thing! Part of what you learn in college is how to delve deeply into a subject, and that translates to other areas even if you don’t stick with the field. You can get this same skill other ways, but the conventional way in our society to get it, and probably the easiest, is college.
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I did. Classical clarinet performance. Freshman year I was second chair in the orchestra, second chair in the opera pit, beating out 20+ other majors. I was also lead tenor sax in Jazz II, and missed making it as second tenor in Jazz I by a hair. I took a single CS course in my entire life.
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Well, yes, and that was mainly my point.
Absolutely. I’ve been in that position, and I’ve been in a position of TA’ing for 300 and 400 level CS track classes. I don’t have any problem with the major or with employers who really need someone with that BS. But even I initially believed that I was better off weighting degrees more than they really turned out to be worth. It’s the culture of the four-year degree in tech that I mean to criticize (and I recognize that I didn’t do a great job of framing my initial criticism). Singling out CS distracted from my point.
Interesting is subjective, but I think I get your meaning. To which my reply is that a minority of development requires that more advanced stuff. My company developed multidimensional data analysis tools. We had one lead developer with a masters who we helped support to get his doctorate in database programming. And his graduate school knowledge was useful, but he could have done what he needed without being a PhD candidate. I’m not complaining about it, it was part of the deal in hiring him that we helped him get the degree he wanted. But he didn’t need it to do what we needed him to do. We also gave him veto on the coders we put on his dev team, but he never asked about their education in interviews or follow-ups with us, he just wanted to know their experience and industry certifications.
As to perseverance, I’ve found that engineers without a four-year degree are not particularly less likely to be hard workers. I concede that completing an advanced degree shows perseverance, but the absence of it does not necessarily show a lack thereof, academic perseverance doesn’t always translate into the workplace, and persevering at an undergrad degree merely to finish without any other motive or reason does not, IMHO, show stellar judgement.
Again, while this may tend to be true, it often comes down to the individual. Some people learn things better in an academic environment, others learn better on the job, and the level of specialization is not always a reliable indicator of who will be which.
Again, I apologize for framing my criticism badly by singling out CS. My point is that a plenty more people end up in CS majors who would be better served in a different major or learning environment. I feel like a lot of people get shoehorned into CS as the gold-standard for programming. My beef, as it were, is with the culture doing the shoehorning, not with the major in and of itself.
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This is exactly my recommendation.
[quote=“GulliverFoyle, post:52, topic:98458”]
My point is that a plenty more people end up in CS majors who would be better served in a different major or learning environment.[/quote]
I completely agree. Students who 40 or 50 years ago would have majored in something other than CS now major in CS mainly for the wrong reasons. When I last taught the basic “math for CS” course, there were half-a-dozen students in there that - based on regular conversations outside of class - should have been math or physics majors. There were more that were mainly interested in web design, and would have done better to just take the basic programming classes in CS but do Art or English or Film Studies as their major.
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Or for geezers like me who have 20 years practical experience… what good is a 20 year old degree to me at this point? Other than making it past the resume bots?
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