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Operating Systems and assembly-level courses taught me the foundation for what I need for low-level and kernel debugging that I do now quite frequently. The ot
by thorax 19y ago
Operating Systems and assembly-level courses taught me the foundation for what I need for low-level and kernel debugging that I do now quite frequently.
The other courses all been used quite a bit towards opening doors for me in starting businesses and job opportunities.
I honestly have to say that there's not a single CS course that didn't provide me a valuable tool which I've used. I'm not sure if that's normal, or if I am just the sort of person who finds uses for the tools in my toolbox.
I think the course (in the last 7 years) that has offered me the least would have been Linear Alegbra, but that's primarily because I didn't go deep enough after it to really broaden my skills to apply to those sorts of opportunities. I see lots of cases where I could use it, I just regret that I didn't improve my grounding in it because it would have opened more doors for me.
I'd say that the first 2-3 years of engineering, I used very little of what I learned in school. Very strange, but now that I'm working as a principal engineer/architect or on my own projects, that CS schooling has been incredibly valuable. It helps that I covered areas like AI, languages, graphics, and networking in my electives.
If you want a generic software engineering job, I don't think a CS degree is really ideal (depending on the school). For me, (i.e. someone who loves computer sciences), it was a perfect choice and I use those building blocks all the time now.
- thorax 19y agoTo touch on your "web gui code" comment-- I think that may be marginalizing people a little bit. Hackers can do web GUI code. Nowadays they pretty much have to do so, because it's often the ideal front-end for whatever backend software you produce. Computer-oriented businesses that build up a long-term business advantage are going to start with some solid technology behind them that is difficult to reproduce without knowledge. For example, new search engine technologies, new streaming codecs, new AI prediction routines, etc, etc. For a less grand example, our site, http://bug.gd http://bug.gd is pretty simple from a web design point of view, but I learned from my CS courses that full-text indexing isn't something to take lightly in large quantities. So I know enough to search out tools (like sphinx or lucene) that implement algorithms I can literally understand to be reliable, fast, and memory efficient. The CS schooling also allows us to write more client software for different OS's that help catch and report error conditions into the global error database. We'd be stuck with only a web frontend if we didn't have people with good CS/os backgrounds to work on lower-level API to catch what we need there. Secure coding is another area in which core computer science compentencies are worth every penny. Anyway, sorry to ramble, but I think your question comes from a perspective of misunderstanding just how many zillions of doors open to a computer scientist that are harder/closed/lost/hopeless for those who don't dive into the technology. It's not all lost on web GUI development. Not that other hackers (non-CS) couldn't do the things I described, but I know those tools come in incredibly handy for me in trying to help shape this computer-heavy world.
- supahfly_remix 19y agoGlad to hear that such opportunities are open to the CS-knowledgeable. Where do you find such jobs? (Not on Dice -- they seem to just be about buzzwords).