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For me the hardest and most interesting part working at Google was statistics, although I have a Masters degree in CS, and I was very good at math in high schoo

For me the hardest and most interesting part working at Google was statistics, although I have a Masters degree in CS, and I was very good at math in high school. A lot of the really interesting work at Google is data mining and modelling, and for that you need some level of statistics understanding. Of course for developing an app, it's not needed (could be a counteractive skill as well in iterating fast).

scarface74 8y ago
Well seeing that most developers don’t work at Google, on the west coast or even for a tech company...,
- xiphias2 8y ago
  Sure, I'm more commenting on the general feeling on the whole thread that having a CS degree should be dropped as a (soft) requirement for working at Apple/Google/Amazon, and coding can be learned from coding / working with colleagues. This is all true, but math has to be learned by getting a deep understanding of concepts that build upon eachother over many years, and understanding it is an important skill with large scale systems, so they can't be treated equally with other coding jobs.
edejong 8y ago
Yes, statistics is a corner stone. I've come to appreciate it during my career as a software engineer as well. It's not just at Google but across many (competitive) companies. Developing an app... How is one going to be competitive doing that? It's dime a dozen, unless it provides something algorithmically interesting. And that is generally only possible when you have large amounts of data. In my opinion, the real skill is not in coding, but in data. Understanding the flow, the quality, the entropy, the structure, the meaning, the value, the meta. And code is data, and as such subject to the same understanding.
- xiphias2 8y ago
  > Developing an app... How is one going to be competitive doing that? I tried to do it with a friend and failed. With apps looks are the more important than UX, and I was mainly working on usability features. Also market research and understanding your target audience without data is really important. At Google, understanding the user / customer was really easy, it doesn't need that much empathy: just give the user more quality clicks by changing the ranking and give the advertiser more conversions per dollar spent.
- rland 8y ago
  Easier to teach an engineer how to program than to teach a programmer how to engineer.
  - scarface74 8y ago
    By the time I graduated from college, I had been a hobbyist for a decade. I was a good programmer and created a C based data entry system that double the size of the company six months out of college. But, after changing jobs and staying at a company too long, I became an “expert beginner” and in hindsight was a horrible engineer. Learning how to engineer happened on the job working with more experienced architects and managers, changing jobs 5 times, and by reading and studying a lot. There is nothing magical about college that you couldn’t learn on the job.

scarface74 8y ago

Well seeing that most developers don’t work at Google, on the west coast or even for a tech company...,

xiphias2 8y ago
Sure, I'm more commenting on the general feeling on the whole thread that having a CS degree should be dropped as a (soft) requirement for working at Apple/Google/Amazon, and coding can be learned from coding / working with colleagues. This is all true, but math has to be learned by getting a deep understanding of concepts that build upon eachother over many years, and understanding it is an important skill with large scale systems, so they can't be treated equally with other coding jobs.

edejong 8y ago

Yes, statistics is a corner stone. I've come to appreciate it during my career as a software engineer as well. It's not just at Google but across many (competitive) companies. Developing an app... How is one going to be competitive doing that? It's dime a dozen, unless it provides something algorithmically interesting. And that is generally only possible when you have large amounts of data. In my opinion, the real skill is not in coding, but in data. Understanding the flow, the quality, the entropy, the structure, the meaning, the value, the meta. And code is data, and as such subject to the same understanding.

xiphias2 8y ago
> Developing an app... How is one going to be competitive doing that? I tried to do it with a friend and failed. With apps looks are the more important than UX, and I was mainly working on usability features. Also market research and understanding your target audience without data is really important. At Google, understanding the user / customer was really easy, it doesn't need that much empathy: just give the user more quality clicks by changing the ranking and give the advertiser more conversions per dollar spent.
rland 8y ago
Easier to teach an engineer how to program than to teach a programmer how to engineer.
- scarface74 8y ago
  By the time I graduated from college, I had been a hobbyist for a decade. I was a good programmer and created a C based data entry system that double the size of the company six months out of college. But, after changing jobs and staying at a company too long, I became an “expert beginner” and in hindsight was a horrible engineer. Learning how to engineer happened on the job working with more experienced architects and managers, changing jobs 5 times, and by reading and studying a lot. There is nothing magical about college that you couldn’t learn on the job.