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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]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?
[/quote]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.[/quote]

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.   [/quote]

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