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So where does one go to train as a software engineer? Many four-year computer science programs train you to become a CS professor, not to work in industry, whic

So where does one go to train as a software engineer? Many four-year computer science programs train you to become a CS professor, not to work in industry, which would be fine (most "soft" degrees do the same) if they didn't pitch their CS degrees as preparing you for an exciting and lucrative career, more like a law or medicine degree than an art or philosophy degree. I made some really valuable networking connections in college that helped me get my first several industry jobs--which is good, because I sure as hell didn't have any practical skills to sell myself with. Fortunately I was able to learn up on the job and get the skills I needed (at the expense of my first job's production schedule, sadly), but I was pretty unhappy once I realized how little I'd bought with all that tuition money.

pjmlp 10y ago
To the university, of course. In Portugal, our CS degrees are called "Degree in Software Engineering" and have a mix of everything that is relevant to the world of computers. If you want pure CS style math, then you need to take a degree in Mathematics with computing branch. Also we do have an Engineers association that validates which degrees are allowed to call themselves as such. We are not alone, most European degrees are like that.
mikehollinger 10y ago
I personally like Computer Engineering as a degree for this reason. I didn't take some of the higher end theory classes, and spent time in a lab making a chip do what I wanted, when I connected it to some device. I still remember the day that "multithreading" suddenly made sense to me, after spending a night trying to debug why i couldn't properly take characters off of a serial port and do stuff with completed strings on a network port. :-)