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1. Most westerners born outside the USA. And in the USA anyone willing to take out a loan. 2. The core requirements for a cs major at a typical university (rea

1. Most westerners born outside the USA. And in the USA anyone willing to take out a loan. 2. The core requirements for a cs major at a typical university (read: not CMU,MIT,Stanford,Berkeley) and especially at a non flagship is basically 4 or 5 courses, which you can for sure cram into 6 months if that's all you're studying. Personally, I'd rather work with people who learn some part of that on their own (or even not at all) but have a stellar education in reading, writing, and math. The former are often provided by good high schools. The latter not so much. At least in the states. But if all you want is just the core fragment of just the cs, six intense months are enough.

pjmlp 9y ago
Having a 5 year degree in Informatics Engineering, I doubt very much you could cram that much in 6 months. Not at my university, with the amount of stuff we had to do, unless in the 20+ years that have gone by, they got the quality level down.
- throwawayjava 9y ago
  > I doubt very much you could cram that much in 6 months. No, you cannot cram an entire degree into six months. Hence the second paragraph under my second point. But the core CS sequence? 4-5 courses is a rough semester, but it is a semester! And if you already have some mathematics or especially some programming background, the sequencing that causes those courses to stretch into 1.5 years is already resolved.
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    Well, 4-5 courses was the minimum we had per semester, with enough deliveries to keep us rather busy, starting with 3rd year. Some people managed to jungle a few more courses. I don't see such a program being much more than simple introduction to CS.
    - throwawayjava 9y ago
      Yes, that's exactly my point. You can get a simple introduction to CS in six months, especially if you already know how to program. No, you're not going to be publishing papers or talking through OS implementation details with CMU grads or designing computer vision systems with Berkeley grads. But you'll have the baseline knowledge that agumonkey is referring to in their comment.
      - chickenfries 9y ago
        You still might accidentally invent the command pattern on your own.
chickenfries 9y ago
> The core requirements for a cs major at a typical university (read: not CMU,MIT,Stanford,Berkeley) and especially at a non flagship is basically 4 or 5 courses I went to a school that is very far away from CMU, MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, etc and my core requirements were A LOT more than 4 or 5 courses. I'd have to check by I can name at least 8 core requirements off the top of my head. > which you can for sure cram into 6 months if that's all you're studying So your suggestion is for people to look at a CS syllabus and find a way to teach themselves all of the core courses? I have my bachelors in CS. I never really programmed until college. 6 months into my BS I had barely wet my feet with Scheme, learned a little bit of discrete math, and had a VERY basic introduction to formal logic. I knew exactly one programming language.
- throwawayjava 9y ago
  > I'd have to check by I can name at least 8 core requirements off the top of my head. I'm familiar with a vast array of CS curricula at many types of institutions. I have no doubt that this is true, but it's also not universal. To be clear, I'm referring to the courses that everyone from that institution will have taken before graduating. So almost all CS majors require much more than 4 courses, but only 4 courses worth of certain, common, shared knowledge. If you only count courses offered by the CS department, and that everyone must take to receive a major, I think 4-5 is fairly typical. Maybe 6-7. Especially at places that aren't ABET. Most programs will also require 3-4 additional courses for the major (that the college/university does not require for graduation). E.g. at least one or two mathematics courses, sometimes a Physics course. And of course all those programs require some electives -- sometimes selected from subject area "buckets". But my point is that it's certainly possible for two students to get a CS degree from the same (decent or even good) institution and only share 4 "core" CS courses. Typically an intro course or two, a lower-division algorithms-style course, something architecture-y, and something systems-y. > So your suggestion is for people to look at a CS syllabus and find a way to teach themselves all of the core courses? Maybe. This approach would certainly be inappropriate for a student with no background in Mathematics or programming. But a strong programmer can breeze through or even skip those intro courses. And a student with a strong mathematics background -- e.g., an accountant, other science major, or finance person learning to code -- can breeze through that otherwise time-intensive algorithms course.
Merad 9y ago
> The core requirements for a cs major at a typical university (read: not CMU,MIT,Stanford,Berkeley) and especially at a non flagship is basically 4 or 5 courses, which you can for sure cram into 6 months if that's all you're studying. Huh? That's an incredibly terrible CS curriculum. 4-5 courses is at most 20 credit hours. A typical undergrad degree requires about 120 credit hours of courses before you can graduate. I went to a second tier state school and our CS curriculum had 12 common required courses (excluding seminar courses) that everyone took, plus three upper level electives of your choice. Basically half of the four year degree was CS.
- throwawayjava 9y ago
  Please see my other comments. I'm talking about the set of courses that are 1) offered by the CS department and that 2) every student must take. Not even the entire set of cs courses. Just the ones every student must take. > A typical undergrad degree requires about 120 credit hours of courses before you can graduate* Obviously you cannot get an entire degree in 6 months. You can't even finish all of the required coursework. That's why I said "core CS sequence", not "a degree".
  - Merad 9y ago
    > I'm talking about the set of courses that are 1) offered by the CS department and that 2) every student must take. As I said, that was a dozen courses at my school.
    - throwawayjava 9y ago
      12 CS courses, offered by the CS dept, and that everyone takes means that either A) your department was internalizing a LOT of service courses; B) left very little room for differentiation within your major; or C) provided very little time for exploration outside of your major. Either way, that level of straight-jacketing and/or in-sourcing is atypical. Even at top schools that number is usually below 10. E.g. CMU 6 (well 7, but really 6); Berkeley 4-6; MIT 8; Standford 6. These are all off the high end of my 4-5 estimate, but only because they ALL in-source a course that at most places would be farmed out the math dept and therefore not counted by my criteria. And MIT also a comm course. Plus, there's the other extreme of places that only require the intro sequence and an algorithms course, leaving all else to the students. In order to get up to 12 at any of these places you'd need to only offer one course for a lot of the "breadth" requirements, or else in-source the calculus sequence (or similar silly things). Again, I'm counting courses offered by the CS dept, AND that everyone takes. The minimum viable "common knowledge" we can reliably assume is shared among all CS majors, as offered by the CS dept. IME 4-5 is pretty typical. Maybe 6. Yes, we also assume some background in other fields of study from CS graduates (some calculus, reading/writing skills, etc.) But those courses are not the ones I was referring to with my 4-5 count. They were also addressed in my original comment.

pjmlp 9y ago

Having a 5 year degree in Informatics Engineering, I doubt very much you could cram that much in 6 months. Not at my university, with the amount of stuff we had to do, unless in the 20+ years that have gone by, they got the quality level down.

throwawayjava 9y ago
> I doubt very much you could cram that much in 6 months. No, you cannot cram an entire degree into six months. Hence the second paragraph under my second point. But the core CS sequence? 4-5 courses is a rough semester, but it is a semester! And if you already have some mathematics or especially some programming background, the sequencing that causes those courses to stretch into 1.5 years is already resolved.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  Well, 4-5 courses was the minimum we had per semester, with enough deliveries to keep us rather busy, starting with 3rd year. Some people managed to jungle a few more courses. I don't see such a program being much more than simple introduction to CS.
  - throwawayjava 9y ago
    Yes, that's exactly my point. You can get a simple introduction to CS in six months, especially if you already know how to program. No, you're not going to be publishing papers or talking through OS implementation details with CMU grads or designing computer vision systems with Berkeley grads. But you'll have the baseline knowledge that agumonkey is referring to in their comment.
    - chickenfries 9y ago
      You still might accidentally invent the command pattern on your own.

chickenfries 9y ago

> The core requirements for a cs major at a typical university (read: not CMU,MIT,Stanford,Berkeley) and especially at a non flagship is basically 4 or 5 courses I went to a school that is very far away from CMU, MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, etc and my core requirements were A LOT more than 4 or 5 courses. I'd have to check by I can name at least 8 core requirements off the top of my head. > which you can for sure cram into 6 months if that's all you're studying So your suggestion is for people to look at a CS syllabus and find a way to teach themselves all of the core courses? I have my bachelors in CS. I never really programmed until college. 6 months into my BS I had barely wet my feet with Scheme, learned a little bit of discrete math, and had a VERY basic introduction to formal logic. I knew exactly one programming language.

throwawayjava 9y ago
> I'd have to check by I can name at least 8 core requirements off the top of my head. I'm familiar with a vast array of CS curricula at many types of institutions. I have no doubt that this is true, but it's also not universal. To be clear, I'm referring to the courses that everyone from that institution will have taken before graduating. So almost all CS majors require much more than 4 courses, but only 4 courses worth of certain, common, shared knowledge. If you only count courses offered by the CS department, and that everyone must take to receive a major, I think 4-5 is fairly typical. Maybe 6-7. Especially at places that aren't ABET. Most programs will also require 3-4 additional courses for the major (that the college/university does not require for graduation). E.g. at least one or two mathematics courses, sometimes a Physics course. And of course all those programs require some electives -- sometimes selected from subject area "buckets". But my point is that it's certainly possible for two students to get a CS degree from the same (decent or even good) institution and only share 4 "core" CS courses. Typically an intro course or two, a lower-division algorithms-style course, something architecture-y, and something systems-y. > So your suggestion is for people to look at a CS syllabus and find a way to teach themselves all of the core courses? Maybe. This approach would certainly be inappropriate for a student with no background in Mathematics or programming. But a strong programmer can breeze through or even skip those intro courses. And a student with a strong mathematics background -- e.g., an accountant, other science major, or finance person learning to code -- can breeze through that otherwise time-intensive algorithms course.

Merad 9y ago

> The core requirements for a cs major at a typical university (read: not CMU,MIT,Stanford,Berkeley) and especially at a non flagship is basically 4 or 5 courses, which you can for sure cram into 6 months if that's all you're studying. Huh? That's an incredibly terrible CS curriculum. 4-5 courses is at most 20 credit hours. A typical undergrad degree requires about 120 credit hours of courses before you can graduate. I went to a second tier state school and our CS curriculum had 12 common required courses (excluding seminar courses) that everyone took, plus three upper level electives of your choice. Basically half of the four year degree was CS.

throwawayjava 9y ago
Please see my other comments. I'm talking about the set of courses that are 1) offered by the CS department and that 2) every student must take. Not even the entire set of cs courses. Just the ones every student must take. > A typical undergrad degree requires about 120 credit hours of courses before you can graduate* Obviously you cannot get an entire degree in 6 months. You can't even finish all of the required coursework. That's why I said "core CS sequence", not "a degree".
- Merad 9y ago
  > I'm talking about the set of courses that are 1) offered by the CS department and that 2) every student must take. As I said, that was a dozen courses at my school.
  - throwawayjava 9y ago
    12 CS courses, offered by the CS dept, and that everyone takes means that either A) your department was internalizing a LOT of service courses; B) left very little room for differentiation within your major; or C) provided very little time for exploration outside of your major. Either way, that level of straight-jacketing and/or in-sourcing is atypical. Even at top schools that number is usually below 10. E.g. CMU 6 (well 7, but really 6); Berkeley 4-6; MIT 8; Standford 6. These are all off the high end of my 4-5 estimate, but only because they ALL in-source a course that at most places would be farmed out the math dept and therefore not counted by my criteria. And MIT also a comm course. Plus, there's the other extreme of places that only require the intro sequence and an algorithms course, leaving all else to the students. In order to get up to 12 at any of these places you'd need to only offer one course for a lot of the "breadth" requirements, or else in-source the calculus sequence (or similar silly things). Again, I'm counting courses offered by the CS dept, AND that everyone takes. The minimum viable "common knowledge" we can reliably assume is shared among all CS majors, as offered by the CS dept. IME 4-5 is pretty typical. Maybe 6. Yes, we also assume some background in other fields of study from CS graduates (some calculus, reading/writing skills, etc.) But those courses are not the ones I was referring to with my 4-5 count. They were also addressed in my original comment.