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That sounds exactly like the sort of degree I mean. It's not all that common though, in my experience, to find a CS degree with that sort of curriculum. Do you
by ErrantX 16y ago
That sounds exactly like the sort of degree I mean. It's not all that common though, in my experience, to find a CS degree with that sort of curriculum.
Do you just cross me off the list because I have a CS degree.
That's silly :) You may have noted from my post that I do hire CS majors.
but do they understand the inner workings of a computer? Do they understand complexity, even the basic data structures.
Yes, usually a lot better than most CS graduates. Because generally speaking in the real world these are engineering problems rather than pure problems.
This is just my observation, but I don't think I am wrong - CS majors are generally worse programmers (and usually more full of themselves, but that's another matter) than CS engineers.
I would consider you (based on your post) an engineer; as you explain, you were part of the engineering dept.
(that's not to say CS majors are all bad - I've met some extremely good ones. The problem is that the majority of CS is taught as a pure subject with a smattering of applied theory. There is a distinct lack of problem solving involved. Traditional disclaimer: YMMV)
Also I should point out that being an engineer does not automatically make you a great programmer. Clearly you need an interest, an amount of aptitude and the ability/willingness to learn the pure subjects (if they were not part of your degree). The last of those isn't all that important - to be a good programmer you only need the amount of pure theory that is required (and you learn to pick it up as you go) - this is a common trait of all engineering.
- arethuza 16y agoSo what on earth do they teach in CS courses these days? That course sounds similar to the one I did in the 80s in the UK - especially the bit about not really getting that much instruction on languages, you were expected to be able to largely pick that kind of stuff up by yourself.
- ErrantX 16y agoA lot of them tend to be just "java schools" plus a load of pure CS. > you were expected to be able to largely pick that kind of stuff up by yourself. I think the main problem lies here; because a lot of people are possibly too lazy to do this...
- coned88 16y agoIm not really sure how you the employer, knows what schools teach CS like mine did and which schools are Java schools. is it just a trial and error process? Should somebody like me, say that their CS degree is from an engineering dept on their resume?
- ErrantX 16y agoIt would efnitely be useful IMO to highlight engineering type skills alongside the cs ones on a cv. In our particular case we would check out the degrees people had done (just Reading the websites) to get an idea of what they had learned - I only really do that for new graduates though, it's less relevant to more experienced people.
- coned88 16y agoWell that is good to know, thanks.
- tsally 16y agoThe problem is that the majority of CS is taught as a pure subject with a smattering of applied theory. Curriculum wise UIUC actually does an excellent job of addressing this issue. I imagine other schools are similar. We basically have our three core theoretical courses and everything else involves programming. Every course that isn't a theory course involves several significant programming assignments. For example, in our networking course the final programming assignment (in C) is to implement TCP over UDP. We have a seperate course called Programming Studio that is required. The entire course just focuses on learning programming well. And students can opt to do a large software engineering project instead of a thesis their senior year (the vast majority do software engineering, not a thesis). I think all these measures help, but despite the heavy emphasis on programming, a lot of graduates are still horrible programmers. I think the root cause is that we are still learning how to teach programming well; we've had a much larger head start on learning to teach mathematics.