Generic Computer Science question

[Anonymous]

Is a CS degree just a hurdle people are required to leap to get the job?

Most of the engineering grads I know have become managers. Or strangely economists.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Is a CS degree just a hurdle people are required to leap to get the job?

Most of the engineering grads I know have become managers. Or strangely economists.

yes you don't become a manger right out of college.
Many of the tech or engineering grads later in the career become team lead, manager, director, vice president, etc.
common sense.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Is a CS degree just a hurdle people are required to leap to get the job?

Most of the engineering grads I know have become managers. Or strangely economists.

It's a big field with a wide range of skills. Most of the jobs are basically mundane and require a marginal skill level. People who wish to work at top companies and earn high salaries need to grasp the basics. A degree from a top school will help for a variety of reasons.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Is a CS degree just a hurdle people are required to leap to get the job?

Most of the engineering grads I know have become managers. Or strangely economists.

yes you don't become a manger right out of college.
Many of the tech or engineering grads later in the career become team lead, manager, director, vice president, etc.
common sense.

One of the reason there are so many poor mid-level managers....

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There's a difference between being able to write code and being able to design software and systems.

unfortunately no school that I know of teaches that

DP. Can you name any important software and systems that are engineered and developed by high school graduates?

Serenity OS.

Is that like Windows 12?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There's a difference between being able to write code and being able to design software and systems.

unfortunately no school that I know of teaches that

+1

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There's a difference between being able to write code and being able to design software and systems.

unfortunately no school that I know of teaches that

BS.

You’re really out of touch. Undergrad programs definitely teach software design and systems design.

Example: https://cs.illinois.edu/academics/courses

[Anonymous]

IT person here. CS is very valuable. Yes, a lot of tools we use today have the algorithms already embedded, like sorting, hash tables, and so on.. but understanding the _how_ of those can really help, especially as you build scalable systems. At scale, performance is key and understanding the underlying concepts is very important then.

Kind of like memory management. "Kids these days" don't have to worry about memory usage as much as when I started, because it's cheap and abundant... but at scale you do becuase a small inefficiency becomes a big problem when you're doing 1,000 requests/second. I see this all the time when reviewing code from younger people -- they do stuff like pass a copy of an object instead of a reference to it (like pointers in languages like C). Big mess memory-wise at scale.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I work in the IT domain as a senior level manager having hired/worked with 100s of programmers over the past 20+ years. A substantial number did not have a CS degree (some from India had various engineering degrees but not CS). Some US educated programmers picked up programming on the job. We deal with COTS products - Salesforce, AWS, etc. and several custom-built apps.

It appears to me that a knowledge of programming languages is what is needed and the motivated, slightly above-average person can pick up most languages, in-depth, in about 6 months. It would probably take less time these days for the more modern languages.

My son wants to apply to study CS in college. Perusing the courses he'd have to study at some of the top schools - Discrete math, Operating systems, Linear algebra, etc - I don't see the programmers in my org. using any of those skills in their day-to-day. I'm sure if someone were coding for a rocket launch or creating a solution like AWS from scratch, or building a new AI platform they may need those things but for the vast majority of programmers who deal with business applications, all it should take are a few courses in logic and programming. If I am right, why then aren't there college programs that target such kids? We could be training a ton of "average" kids as programmers vs. importing those skills.

What am I missing?

Linear Alg and matrices are for graphics, Op. Sys is used in cloud/distributed and IOT/embedded systems/hardware integration, and Discrete just lets you figure out custom code (very frequent in gov systems). Yes, your son should apply to study CS if the dept doesn't suck or do it independently.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I don't think kids get CS degrees to become programmers. They want to design the next operating system or programming language or platform, and yes, the rocket launches, etc.

There are 2-year, on line, and IT degrees for the kind of job you describe.

+1 IT jobs can easily be outsourced for the types of jobs OP is talking about. I have worked in this space for 20+ years. They are all being outsourced. I don't have a CS degree. I got into it from the business side. I'm a logical thinker, and so could easily pick up the programming part. Combined with my business knowledge, it was an easy fit. But, I have not touched code in 10 years. Those jobs are all outsourced. Now I manage the system, and do PM work.

My DC is interested in CS, but we have told him to focus on something else other than generic programming, like cybersecurity, AI, machine learning.

People without CS degrees are not the best ones to comment on career options for folks with CS degrees.

There are an enormous range of skill and talent levels as well as compensation levels for developers. Basic CRUD (database create, read, update, delete) can be done by almost anyone. Clean, efficient code that scales and includes logic for things like optimization requires higher level skills than basic CRUD. A junior developer at, for example, Indeed (not a FANG) makes more than a developer with 15 years experience at most government contracting firms. And, that junior developer will need to pass a Karat tech interview that the body shop developers for the most part couldn’t begin to pass.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:IT person here. CS is very valuable. Yes, a lot of tools we use today have the algorithms already embedded, like sorting, hash tables, and so on.. but understanding the _how_ of those can really help, especially as you build scalable systems. At scale, performance is key and understanding the underlying concepts is very important then.

Kind of like memory management. "Kids these days" don't have to worry about memory usage as much as when I started, because it's cheap and abundant... but at scale you do becuase a small inefficiency becomes a big problem when you're doing 1,000 requests/second. I see this all the time when reviewing code from younger people -- they do stuff like pass a copy of an object instead of a reference to it (like pointers in languages like C). Big mess memory-wise at scale.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I work in the IT domain as a senior level manager having hired/worked with 100s of programmers over the past 20+ years. A substantial number did not have a CS degree (some from India had various engineering degrees but not CS). Some US educated programmers picked up programming on the job. We deal with COTS products - Salesforce, AWS, etc. and several custom-built apps.

It appears to me that a knowledge of programming languages is what is needed and the motivated, slightly above-average person can pick up most languages, in-depth, in about 6 months. It would probably take less time these days for the more modern languages.

My son wants to apply to study CS in college. Perusing the courses he'd have to study at some of the top schools - Discrete math, Operating systems, Linear algebra, etc - I don't see the programmers in my org. using any of those skills in their day-to-day. I'm sure if someone were coding for a rocket launch or creating a solution like AWS from scratch, or building a new AI platform they may need those things but for the vast majority of programmers who deal with business applications, all it should take are a few courses in logic and programming. If I am right, why then aren't there college programs that target such kids? We could be training a ton of "average" kids as programmers vs. importing those skills.

What am I missing?

Linear Alg and matrices are for graphics, Op. Sys is used in cloud/distributed and IOT/embedded systems/hardware integration, and Discrete just lets you figure out custom code (very frequent in gov systems). Yes, your son should apply to study CS if the dept doesn't suck or do it independently.

Algorithm time and space complexity take math also. And you don’t need to know how to analyze your code’s time and space complexity to bang out basic code, but your code will scale and perform much better if you know this stuff.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There's a difference between being able to write code and being able to design software and systems.

unfortunately no school that I know of teaches that

BS.

You’re really out of touch. Undergrad programs definitely teach software design and systems design.

Example: https://cs.illinois.edu/academics/courses

Is that like this one at RIT: https://www.rit.edu/study/software-engineering-bs?