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What every computer science major should know (2011)

• commandlinefan 7y ago
  > must practice persuasively and clearly communicating their ideas to non-programmers If you’re a CS major, panicking over this sort of “technical skills aren’t enough, you have to be a persuasive public speaker and effectively do management’s job for them”, people have been saying this since at least I started coding 30 years ago, and I don’t see any evidence that it’s actually true any more than it was back then - focus on technical ability, that’s a hell of a lot harder to come by than “powerpoint skills”.
  • asark 7y ago
    Powerpoint skills are where the money is, in large businesses that aren't FAANG. And probably even there, somewhat. I've come to this conclusion after seeing a lot of not-especially-smart-or-effective people-person folks with Powerpoint skills making serious money. [EDIT] it also seems to me that good presentation and communication skills are how you achieve "you don't apply for jobs, jobs apply for you" status without top 1% tech skills.
    • black6 7y ago
      The best advice I ever received re: PowerPoint was: "Don't present with PowerPoint. Use it to create a PDF from which to present."
      • invalidOrTaken 7y ago
        I'm not sure I fully understand. Would you mind expanding on that?
        • NikolaNovak 7y ago
          I'm curious too, but from related personal experience: 1. One of the best communicators I've met strongly suggested never to present from powerpoint on screen, but rather create a brochure to print and hand off to participants. His claim was less that it impresses, but rather that it changes dynamics of "presenter vs audience" and makes it more of a "discussion group / workshop", which tends to be a more productive dynamic, especially in sales/persuasive setting. 2. Alternatively and more prosaically, dear gawd, 99% of people using PowerPoint don't know how to use it. They don't know how the slide show view interacts with a Webex presentation, so they end up sending a small thumbnail to projector, presenter view to remote audience, but hey things look ok on their screen so they keep going. PDF would alleviate some of those issues :P
        • black6 7y ago
          A PDF is more portable, smaller file size, and it brings along the fonts it requires to display as-you-created-tt on another computer, which may not have them installed. Plus you don’t have to worry about the errant slide transition working its way in, and it tends to load faster. I don’t, as a rule, include video or other fancy effects in presentations ( they’re still referred to as “slide decks” where I work ), so PDFs are perfect. YMMV
          • cambalache 7y ago
            Meh, I worked for one of those Fortune20 behemoths (Not tech) and all the presentations from a fresh intern up to the CEO were made in Power Point. 99% of business analytics? = Excel. Same in a big government organization (non US), I am as much a nerd as most people here, but being outside in the real (non-tech) world helped me to realize how much the tech world can blind you.
      • lyctc 7y ago
        I use PDF for high-level conversations. It appears more polished. I use PPT for low-level conversations. You can double click on graphs to see the numbers.
        • asark 7y ago
          Not that you're necessarily emailing these, but on the "appears more polished" thing, you may be surprised how many C-level (and somewhat under) folks don't read email attachments unless they are .ppt(x) files.
          • bdamm 7y ago
            Well, knowing your audience is a thing too. If your C-level eyeballs only read pptx, then do that. But honestly I wouldn’t count on C-level at any company to understand what I’m saying unless I say it directly to them and answer their questions in person.
        • randcraw 7y ago
          How do you compose the document / slides that you use to present via PDF? Using powerpoint or something else? I'd love to find a tool that composes more attractive presentation media than does powerpoint. But I'm too blinkered by my and everyone else's use of powerpoint to know what that could be.
    • _emacsomancer_ 7y ago
      Powerpoint seems designed to lead people to create poor presentations. NOT learning Powerpoint would seem to give one an advantage.
  • NikolaNovak 7y ago
    There's probably a few qualifiers: 1. What environment you work in: a large corporation vs small technical startup 2. What your ambitions are: * Bluntly, if you want to be a very, very good coder who gets left alone and is largely handled/insulated by management, gets client requirements translated to and from them, that is certainly achievable by focusing on strictly technical skills. You can advance and be respected within that particular niche. * If you want to be a solid team lead or manager who actually solves their team member's organizational problems / abstracts the organization challenges away from them; understand and trully aid your client; interact with various parts of your and client's organizations to make a larger change or lead a larger project; then a communication skillset is of course crucial. It is almost tautological that to effectively communicate to various groups (programming peers, other technical personnel, management, business, clients, users) you have to be good at communicating to various groups :-/ --- As to what's difficult to acquire, again, it can be argued both ways. My wife is a tremendous communicator but technical abilities would be hard for her to acquire. At the same time, quite certainly a large amount of my technical colleagues and co-workers would and do clearly struggle to acquire communication skills. Or put another way, I'm personally in an environment with technical skillset out the wazoo (which is important and respected and appreciated), but communication skills are rare and prized.
  • jcranmer 7y ago
    > focus on technical ability, that’s a hell of a lot harder to come by than “powerpoint skills”. I don't know, actual presentation skills seem to be rather hard to come by. Just because someone can crank out presentations does not mean they actually have any skill in it.
    • NikolaNovak 7y ago
      This. Droning over PowerPoint != Communication Skills (most people holding PowerPoint presentations are blissfully ignorant how bad they are at it)
  • rossdavidh 7y ago
    I would say there's plenty wrong with this list, but this one is, ironically, mostly true but malphrased. A better way to put it would be: "don't be content with being so bad at communication that it gets in the way of your ability to make your (technical) point". If you know something about how _not_ to communicate (badly), you can allow your technical expertise to be more influential when technical decisions are made (by people higher ranking than you). It's not becoming a salesman. It's avoiding the situation of being so bad at communicating, that your technical expertise is ignored. Non-technical people usually _want_ to hear your point, in regards a technical decision. If you are unable to help them know what you're trying to say, they may not understand what you're trying to say, and then you'll wonder afterwards why they hired the technical person and then ignored their technical advice. They're not ignoring your advice, in many cases they simply cannot perceive clearly what you are trying to say. I hope that I have made my point understandable here. But, you know, I may not have. :)
    • karmakaze 7y ago
      I know what you're talking about. I've done it and seen others fall into this trap as well. If there was a list of ways in which this can happen, it would be golden.
    • randcraw 7y ago
      You seem to be saying that unless someone's communication skills are WAY below average, they can slide by unnoticed. I can't agree. In my experience, 90% of developers have poor communication skills and it hurts them every time they write or speak publicly (or document their code). Not just developers, of course. It's a rare person who knows how to tell a tech tale that isn't a confusion of disconnected factoids, or who seems to care whether they bore the hell out of their audience. But I care. And everyone I respect cares; they just won't admit that they expect to be bored by techies when they speak or write, so they accept boredom and confusion as the norm. (In large corporations, especially.) But it shouldn't be. As a professional, everyone is obliged to organize their thoughts, be clear, and convey a message. THAT should be the norm. It's an essential part of doing any job well. Like so many things in life that matter most, teaching good communication skills (and rational thought) is largely absent from college curricula (aside from writing a paper). But its absence doesn't mean that communicating badly won't hurt your career later. Wasting other people's time is disrespectful and lazy and unprofessional. And it makes you look bad. So blather not.
  • ergothus 7y ago
    > focus on technical ability, that’s a hell of a lot harder to come by than “powerpoint skills”. I'll agree and disagree: Yes, the target audience here SHOULD focus on technical ability. Not because it's "harder", but because that will be the primary decider in getting hired. That said, I'd say my communication skills have been a central part of my success. Not "powerpoint", so much as being able to distill down ideas, translate abstractions, and of late, learning how to examine other people's ideas without coming across as I'm attacking them. My personal impression and the reaction my managers have given me is that these skills are both rare and valued in the field. But you do of course need technical ability or they are worthless. I definitely think I've achieved more success than my technical ability alone would grant me. It could be Imposter Syndrome talking, but I'm not actually all that great at this. Just good enough, and my communication skills ensure that the "good enough" is applied where it's needed and to the degree it is needed. Ultimately, coding is communication, and maintainable/extendable/flexible code is a lot of communication to other devs (including your future self). Even outside of the role of managers, and even outside of planning and architecting with your peers, communication is a valuable skill for a programmer to have.
    • filoleg 7y ago
      Fully agreed. Technical ability comes first, but having good communication skills is a hell of a force multiplier.
    • nostrademons 7y ago
      Junior developers get hired on their technical skills. Mid-career developers get hired on their communications, interpersonal, and domain understanding skills. Founders and executives get "hired" on their strategic skills. If it's your first job out of college, don't worry too much about the communications skills yet. Your technical abilities will be your differentiator, and your daily job will largely consist of implementing things. But if you don't pick up communication skills within the first 10-15 years of your career, it will limit you. You'll be stuck implementing things forever, which may be what you want, but it will shut you out of some higher-compensated and higher-impact jobs. Unless you just want to go the founder route and hand your company off to a professional CEO that the VCs hire once you've proven out product/market fit. If you have both technical and strategic skills you can do that, but the lack of communication skills will still keep you from running your own company.
  • vkou 7y ago
    PowerPoint is one of the worst way of persuasively and clearly communicating ideas, be it to programmers or non-programmers.
    • karmakaze 7y ago
      This. There's a difference between superficially appearing to be effective and actually being so. See Death by Powerpoint[0]. [0] https://www.zdnet.com/article/death-by-powerpoint/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/death-by-powerpoint/
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  • grimjack00 7y ago
    I don't think that point is saying "you have to be a persuasive public speaker and effectively do management’s job for them". I really dislike speaking to groups of more than 2 or 3, and I want to stay as far away from any management-like duties as I can. That said, I'm on a smallish dev team in a very large company, and I regularly find myself having to explain technical things about our products and components to people without a current technical background. If I can't clearly communicate, things can go badly to varying degrees.
  • ebg13 7y ago
    > I don’t see any evidence that it’s actually true any more than it was back then - focus on technical ability Learning how to communicate to non-programmers improves your technical ability. In my experience, programmers who can't communicate to non-programmers don't understand that all scenarios are specific instances of increasingly more abstract scenarios. Programmers who don't internalize that build inelegant and fragile systems which work for specific arbitrarily chosen test data and then instantly fail in the real world. If you can't explain a program further than jargon, then you haven't thought enough about what the program is actually supposed to accomplish.
  • mcguire 7y ago
    It may not be any more true today than it was back then, but it was hella true back then. (Crap! Almost 30 years?! Geeze.) Not being able to convince other people that a) you know what you're doing and b) they should do what you suggest will hamstring your career. Just like it did back then.
  • Ar-Curunir 7y ago
    You're falsely equating the ability to communicate one's ideas clearly with "PowerPoint skills". Technical ability is useless if you're not able to convince others why your project is useful or interesting. If you can't distill what you're doing into terms understandable by a non-expert, then you don't understand your own work well enough in the first place.
  • lph 7y ago
    Strongly disagree. Effective technical leadership is a rarer skill than pure technical chops, especially as one becomes more senior in an organization. And it’s much more than “PowerPoint skills”——it’s driving consensus and making good decisions in highly ambiguous situations. That said, I agree that it’s not something CS majors should worry about much in school. It’s something you learn as your career progresses.
  • diminoten 7y ago
    Technical ability isn't relevant in ~90% of "CS" jobs. Everyone can do the basics, and you don't need more than the basics to do 90% of "CS" jobs. You will be left behind by coworkers who can communicate, and you will be confused about why, if you can't communicate well. Specifically, if you can't take an idea you have and convince others it's the right idea.
    • randcraw 7y ago
      I agree, but I'd describe those as "corporate IT" jobs, not as "CS" jobs. A degree in CS really isn't suited to later being embedded in a large corporation's IT division. To fit in there, a computer scientist would first need a lobotomy.
      • diminoten 7y ago
        I definitely think these corporate IT jobs are challenging, just not in any way a Computer Science degree prepares you for (nor should it?). I don't want to drag us down the rabbit hole that is the current state of software education, however.
  • reificator 7y ago
    I have noticed a distinct improvement in my day to day life, not even just interviews, from really focusing on soft skills. When I was a kid I'd start every sentence with "actually" and use jargon without considering whether the other person was following what I was saying. I got told to shut the fuck up a lot as a result. Now I've had at least a half-dozen people earnestly tell me I should be a teacher. When I think back to my childhood, that blows my mind. The biggest benefits to my life and mental health came from learning: * How to better squeeze requirements out of non-technical users, and explaining why the edge cases shouldn't be left to the last minute. * How to talk to the boss(es) about prioritization, hard requirements vs nice-to-haves, and estimated timeframes. Understanding why you're being asked to do a task and varying your approach on that information will instantly improve your relationship with your boss. * How to respectfully delegate and offer assistance. * How to productively critique and receive criticism. And the best thing? I don't feel at all like these came at the expense of technical skills. I need to be a different mindset to learn either of them, so I structure my efforts around that.
  • dlphn___xyz 7y ago
    they're equally important and require time and practice
  • krageon 7y ago
    I've actually found the opposite. Even when I was consistently evaluated to have above-average technical skills (for the company I work at), what kept my career growth from advancing was a lack of personal skills. What's more, ever since I started improving those my personal life started seeing a big improvement as well. I recognise that for most, being at least moderately skilled at people comes as a given. For those of us where this is not the case it really helps to consciously work at those limitations.
  • _pmf_ 7y ago
    Politics and stupid games are at the majority of challenges by a vast margin. Most of us are actually happy when they face a technical challenge, because it's so rare compared to arbitrary shit thrown in your way as a pissing contest between nominal "stakeholders" who don't care about the product, the user or the future of the company.
• dang 7y ago
  Thread from 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9490723 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9490723 and originally: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2921440 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2921440
• llamaz 7y ago
  Differential equations and electromagnetism? Maybe 30 years ago, but these days electrical engineers know how to code
  • chrisseaton 7y ago
    Isn't modern ML based on differential equations?
    • commandlinefan 7y ago
      Gradient descent is partial differentiation, and Lagrange multipliers come up in the context of nearest-neighbor searches. I’m almost positive most people just use it without actually understanding the theory behind why it works, though.
    • tcgv 7y ago
      Sure, but only a handful of people really employ advanced calculus for building ML, while the vast majority of Data Scientist only use the ML algorithms implementations as a black box, without diving into its inner workings.
      • mcguire 7y ago
        I realize that there is a certain conflict here, since I'm happy to program computers without understanding the physics of transistors, but your comment makes me nervous.
    • diminoten 7y ago
      I imagine the DE part of ML is, practically speaking, imported from a library somewhere by practitioners.
  • Chathamization 7y ago
    There seems to be a tendency to exaggerate the breadth of things that people should study. When you ask for specific instances where something would be useful, you usually get a hand wavy answer that since X field is connected to what you want to study, it is therefore worthwhile to study X field ("Of course computer scientists should study advanced chemistry, we wouldn't even have computers without chemistry! And what if you needed to written a program for chemists!"). In my experience people retain very little of something if they don't keep using it. Many people take things like calculus in highschool or college, and completely forget it within a few years. I often checked with classmates about how much they retained from courses we had just taken the previous semester, and most of the stuff that wasn't directly connected to what they were currently studying seemed to be forgotten (if they ever had a real understanding of it to begin with).
• vages 7y ago
  Is there anyone who ever knew all of this when they graduated? I think maybe the top student through my five years at university might have known all of this. I sure as hell did not check all the boxes when I graduated two years ago. If you're nervous after reading this, just know that the "should" probably means "in an ideal world".
  • throwawayjava 7y ago
    Students at good programs will check all the technical boxes just by attending required classes. Those schools tend to also have enough project based courses and career prep coaching that the portfolio box is also checked. The intersection of that and communication skills is rarer, but it happens often enough, especially for people who pick up a second major in the humanities or did a lot of public speaking prior to/during college. Again, not the average case, but not terribly uncommon.
    • vages 7y ago
      Could you point me to the website of a school which makes you check all the boxes just by attending?
      • lagadu 7y ago
        Mine[0] did the vast majority of them. [0] https://sigarra.up.pt/feup/en/CUR_GERAL.CUR_PLANOS_ESTUDOS_VIEW?pv_plano_id=2496&pv_ano_lectivo=2015&pv_tipo_cur_sigla=MI&pv_origem=CUR https://sigarra.up.pt/feup/en/CUR_GERAL.CUR_PLANOS_ESTUDOS_V...
        • vages 7y ago
          Cool! That looked like an extensive program. I studied at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, and my partially self-chosen courses covered most of it too. I think we may differ on what we mean by "should". I don't (really) doubt that it's possible and valuable to learn all of this in university (forgive my use of hyperbole in the original comment). But I don't think it's necessary for most people with a major/master's degree in CS to do so. The ideal and the necessary should not be confused.
• codesushi42 7y ago
  I would add a Statistics or Applied Math co-major, or even a Master's degree. Being able to analyze data is becoming a must have skill.
• _hardwaregeek 7y ago
  Eh, skimming through this list, I see what's essentially a bunch of courses. While all of the listed topics are fairly important, it's highly unlikely there exists a curriculum that covers all of them. I'd even venture that no matter which school, which curriculum, which professors, there will be something absolutely and obviously essential omitted from one's education. There's certainly topics left out from this list that are undeniably crucial. In some schools there will be far more than one thing omitted (reading the list, I'd say my school teaches maybe half of this to the good students, and less than a quarter to the mediocre students). in others, it'll be one or two topics. Regardless, the answer is not to cram more into the curriculum. The answer, as trite as it is, is to teach a man to fish. If you want people to learn a wide breadth of topics, provide them with a set of qualities like curiosity, determination, problem solving skills, etc. Don't just give them what you deem to be a wide breadth of topics. I see far too many fellow students who just want a list, a guide such as this to follow so that they can be the best student and get the best job and live the best life (not that that's a bad goal). But in their attempt to live by a list, they ignore anything and everything else. I find it really sad when I talk about using OCaml or the fun of playing with Emacs, they shrug and insist that it's not "useful", that it's not on the list.
• bigred100 7y ago
  To me, this sounds more like what a good CS Ph.D who spent his free time filling in every general CS knowledge gap he could come up with would know. I don’t know why he says learn real analysis and linear algebra to talk to engineers when I doubt 90% of engineers took one analysis course unless they’re Ph.Ds.
  • jstewartmobile 7y ago
    Judging by the Wikipedia article, "Real analysis" is freshman-level math for most branches of engineering. Pretty shocking how little math most CS programs require in comparison.
    • bigred100 7y ago
      In the US universities I’ve attended, it’s a senior level mathematics major course. Second semester freshman calculus will teach you similar material in a much more glossed over fashion and apply it to very simple examples.
      • cvoss 7y ago
        Yeah, I would be surprised to see an actual Real Analysis course in an undergrad engineering curriculum. All of the Calculus courses, ODEs, and LA for sure. And these will lightly touch on all the topics listed on the real analysis Wikipedia page. But a course actually bearing the name "Real Analysis" is typically a 300 or 400 level course, rigorously proof-based, and not needed by an undergrad engineer.
      • jstewartmobile 7y ago
        Matt brought up RA in the context of "speak the same language". In that context, freshman calc ticks the box. His standards are high, but fair.
        • bigred100 7y ago
          There’s no reason to call it RA as no one including almost all the engineers took that class. They’ll just call it all calculus
• ben509 7y ago
  A small point on your portfolio: Your portfolio should show products rather than projects. Not everything needs to be complete, but you should be able to show that it does something. Ideally, your resume is linking straight to a live demo, and that page links back to the repository. Besides the fact that many devs will be too busy/lazy to read your source, everyone will be more impressed and interested in an actual thing they can play with. If you wrote a library that doesn't do much by itself, at least give it a README and documentation, and publish it to a repository. I'd rather see a link to a package repository than a git repo. (And, of course, fill in the metadata so I can get back to your git repo.) (And, really, if you set up a lambda in AWS running your library, your page can just have some input fields and a button to call the functions and show what your code does.) The point of all this is to take the time to put in some extra polish that shows that you not only have ideas, but execute on them.
• quickthrower2 7y ago
  In my experience no one cares about the portfolio. They want your CV, some references and to pass some coding tests. Now to be fair I am not going for the highest paid jobs or jobs required deep computer science knowledge, but for the ordinary job I have found that recruiters and employers alike look at CV. They might look at github if you are lucky.
  • kasey_junk 7y ago
    If you aren’t using your network (you have a network right?). You’ve already failed. No one in tech knows how to hire so its all network based. This isn’t a good thing but it’s where we are.
    • quickthrower2 7y ago
      I don't do networking, and I don't make a lot of friends outside of work, so I really only know people I have worked with before, and those people are mostly working at the same company I left, or they are working at companies I don't want to work at. So I've failed by the bar set in your comment, but for some reason I don't feel that way, because there are plenty of jobs out there on job boards. I got 1 job through my network (an ex boss) and it wasn't any worse or better than the others. I've got a really good job now. I can see where networking shines, and it's where you went to a top university, made lots of friends - especially in the same course and kept tabs with them since and a lot of them have gone to work for Google (etc.) or cool startups and now you can find an easier way in, which is fair enough. Note: I'm not in the USA
      • kasey_junk 7y ago
        You do networking everyday of your professional career. It’s a real consideration if the job you are going to take will allow you to work with people you want to work with at the job after this one. Don’t discount that value. Right now is not a good time to judge your career pathing plan. It’s literally the easiest time to get a job in computing in modern history, which includes the first web boom. It’s like judging your investment strategy right now. That said if your plan is working, great! I wouldn’t spend much time on indeed if it were me but good for you. Note: all of my jobs ever have come from networks and I went to the wrong state school and have never worked for Google.
• tiryns 7y ago
  Ruslan! I was reading your how to build a simple intepreter tutorial, and I looked at this link yesterday. Crazy coincidence
• tiryns 7y ago
  Ruslan! Yesterday I was going through your how to build a simple interpreter tutorial, as well as looking through the posted link to see where I need to polish my skills. Crazy coincidence.
• tracer4201 7y ago
  My day job is engineering at one of the big tech companies whose search services most of the people I know use almost every day. In the 100+ interviews I’ve done for engineers, I’ve never cared for their portfolio. It’s hard for me to know if it really is their portfolio or if they actually wrote the code, etc. I’m going to ask you design and coding questions.
  • mieseratte 7y ago
    If someone has a portfolio I will certainly ask about those projects. Gives an opportunity to demonstrate technical acumen and communication skills at the same time.
  • KUcxrAVrtI 7y ago
    >I’m going to ask you design and coding questions. My day job is engineering in systems that kill people or cost billions of dollars if they go wrong. I'm never going to ask you to code something on the fly other than hello world, a loop to print 0..9 and maybe a recursive function to print 0..9. You can't think deeply enough about a problem in one hour, or one day. I will ask you a lot of questions about what you will do, how you will do it, and what the possible problems and mitigations are. A portfolio that you've worked on is great because I can find the worst code in it and ask why it's there, what the trade offs of putting it there were and how you would fix it if you had infinite time.
• irundebian 7y ago
  I don't think it's that valuable to improve IDE-less software development skills. Just because some Unix nerds find it cool to play with text files, avoid modern software development tools or program in date languages like C it shouldn't be desirable for a computer science major. Computer science should focus on long-live principles, the Unix philosophy may have a lot of good worth to keep principles, but kinda nothing in the software engineering space should suggest we've already approximated perfect solutions and nothing could be improved.
  • odyssey7 7y ago
    Working with an IDE is important experience. However, speaking as someone who tutors CS students, there's a lot that people can miss about what they're doing when they have only ever worked in Eclipse. There's something enlightening and empowering about tangibly having a specific file that you wrote, applying a compiler to it to produce an executable, and then invoking it yourself. It gives a better sense of ownership of the process that people don't always feel when they load a project into and IDE and fill in lines of code until the play button stops telling them what they did is wrong.
  • JustSomeNobody 7y ago
    Your comment shows a lot of naivety. Text is near universal, C still makes the world go ‘round and modern doesn’t mean graphical.
    • jcranmer 7y ago
      Text is not universal. Instead, there is a nearly infinite variety of output formats which consists of 96 printable ASCII characters (or perhaps a superset of those characters), that may be unstructured, structured, or semi-structured, using a variety of often ad-hoc and poorly documented formatting for values, and a (sometimes surprisingly small) subset of the outputs can even be read in again as inputs. A great example of this is CSV. It's a wonderfully simple format... so simple that there is considerable variety in things such as "how do you quote a field," "how do you delimit fields" (considering its name is Comma-Separated Values, you'd think everyone would agree it's a comma), and "what characters are legal within fields," let alone the semantic interpretation questions of "is there a header row", "is this column numeric or textual or something else," etc.
• jcranmer 7y ago
  This list feels rather more like "this is all the courses I took in college, and why you should take them too" than what should be the minimum knowledge level of a computer scientist. For that list, you need much fewer things--I can think of 5 things, but learning them well may require several courses: 1. Communication skills. This should need no explanation. 2. Required math curricula. You need high school algebra and discrete math. Light introductions to statistics, linear algebra, calculus, and logic are too damn useful to pass up, but a full semester course in these topics is often overkill. Abstract algebra, graph theory, and numerical analysis are more situational in their utility. 3. How to design software. This is more than just programming 101 and software architecture, you also should know how--and when--to use IDEs, version control, refactoring, testing, debugging, code review, how to report bugs, navigation of large codebases you didn't write, etc. 4. What makes fast software fast and slow software slow. Computational theory and data structures and algorithms fall into this bucket. There's a fairly standard set of data structures to learn, but I would caution that you don't ever need to know how to actually write a good hashtable or binary search tree, but you should know how they work and what the performance ramifications are. Basic computer architecture should also be required, and I think there's often too little emphasis on the impact of the memory hierarchy in software. I also think you should understand how a compiler is going to interpret your code, what it will and won't do to make it faster, and what you can and can't do to make compilers work better. (Lexing and parsing theory, which tend to be the bread-and-butter of early compiler courses, need not apply). 5. A deep understanding of different programming languages. First, you need a workhorse language that most software is written in, just to get you employed. In addition, you should cover the four major programming paradigms: imperative, object-oriented, functional, and logic. It is more important to deepen your understanding of one of these paradigms than to pick up another language. Once you understand all of these paradigms, you should be able to quickly pick up whatever language you need to get your job done. As you can see, I definitely favor depth over breadth. The utility of breadth is mostly in knowing that there are topics out there that other people know much more about than you do, and you should defer to their opinions (and in choosing something to specialize in if you're unsure). But many intro classes will probably leave students with an inflated impression with their competence. This is particularly dangerous in cryptography, which is so easy to screw up that even experts do so on a regular basis; if you're not an expert, you shouldn't even try.
• acbart 7y ago
  > Racket, as a full-featured dialect of Lisp, has an aggressively simple syntax. For a small fraction of students, this syntax is an impediment. To be blunt, if these students have a fundamental mental barrier to accepting an alien syntactic regime even temporarily, they lack the mental dexterity to survive a career in computer science. Racket's powerful macro system and facilities for higher-order programming thoroughly erase the line between data and code. If taught correctly, Lisp liberates. What a rude paragraph. I think this viewpoint is very unfortunate. I love functional programming, and I think everyone benefits from learning it, but this garbage attitude is toxic to students. The author cannot imagine a successful computer scientist who doesn't love the same PL paradigms as him. I would prefer to keep them away from my learners.
  • Gene_Parmesan 7y ago
    > who doesn't love the same PL paradigms as him. I don't see that at all. It's not about enjoying it, it's about having the ability to adjust to the Lisp syntax, full stop. Given that Lisp is just about as close to programming directly in an AST as you can get, I'm not sure that claim of his is too far from the truth. Remember, we're talking about computer science, not programmers generally.
    • namenotrequired 7y ago
      I don’t know why you’re being downvoted, you are correctly pointing out the GPs fallacious argumentation.
  • ori_b 7y ago
    I didn't see anything in that quote about loving it -- just about being able to handle it temporarily. I deal daily with technology that I have don't enjoy, but have to accept temporarily. I wouldn't be fit for a career in computer science if I couldn't adapt to that.
• JustSomeNobody 7y ago
  Whew! Good thing I took the easy route and got a Computer Engineering (BSCpE) degree. /s
• hermitdev 7y ago
  One thing that surprises me that Python wasn't mentioned as a language of interest. It's used in a lot of scientific computing, financial spaces and others. Ive been using it in finance for 15 years. 15 years ago, there was little traction, but now the quants I work with only want to use it. The quants aren't really programmers, but numpy, scipy and pandas make them productive without a lot of dev experience.
  • analog31 7y ago
    I'm a huge Python fan, and introduced it to my workplace, where it is now heavily used by about a half dozen scientists and engineers. But... I think a person who has mastered the other languages and general concepts of computer science can pick up Python in a jiffy. And they will probably pick it up by osmosis, if it's used in their vicinity. I'm saying this as a physicist who has not studied CS formally, but worked with a lot of CS'ists.
    • hermitdev 7y ago
      I totally agree. I think what really helps is Python has really great documentation. Probably best I've seen in a large community project. Also, the great standard lib (batteries included). Doesn't help either that Python has a great tutorial at the main project site with loads of examples, and it starts slow. Very helpful for non programmers to get started. Using it to get my 10 year old daughter into programming. I used the same tutorial around the v2.2 days to get accustomed with it. I already had a number of years of programming experience and had the help of knowledgeable coworkers to learn, but it quickly became apparent to me the value of the language. I actually found out yesterday I'm being partially transferred to my companies quant team to help mentor and develop best practices. I'm really excited about it, given the opportunity to share my knowledge but also absorb knowledge from the; finally learn what all the data Ive been pushing around actually means (and maybe dusting off my rusty math skills from college that ive barely used since).
• swframe2 7y ago
  It is easier to just list the meta skills regardless of major: 1) You should always be learning. 2) You should mostly do interesting work you love. 3) You should foster good friendships with your highly ranked coworkers; at least having dinner once a month. 4) You should regularly look for and fix your weaknesses. 5) You should balance work and play. Exercise. Travel as much as possible.
• pinacarlos90 7y ago
  I come from a CS background and learned a lot from studying CS, it definitely gave me a strong foundation and changed the way I view and understand computing. I learned most of the topics mentioned in this document while in school, and although they are all valid, they are not enough for real world needs. ~90% of CS undergraduates will end working as or with engineers, and in 2019 here are the skills that are indispensable: 1) understand popular protocols used in WWW (http, ssh, ftp, etc) 2) version control (Git). Understand pull-requests and the process of collaboration in a team 3) problem solving - how to breakdown problems, and how to overcome them when you reach a wall (use known algorithms when possible) 4) design patterns (learn as many as you can) 5) frameworks: MVC, angular, dependency injection, etc 6) communication skills 7) how to organize work, how breakdown big tasks into small easier-to-accomplish pieces 8) understand deadlines 9) write tests (unit-test, integration-test, etc) 10) understand that “good enough” sometimes is all you need (still try to fix it later :) )
  • burlesona 7y ago
    This is a great list. I would add estimating, although it's implied in a few of your points. As an engineering manager I find that a consistent difference between good engineers and great engineers is that great engineers can tell me how long something will take even when they haven't done something just like it before. That doesn't mean they can perfectly forecast how the hours will be spent -- no one could do that -- but they know how to figure things out, know how to build in some buffer, and know how to go heads down and crank when absolutely necessary, and as a result they can consistently hit deadlines.
    • drieddust 7y ago
      Don't you think estimation is a management job? What if Engineer decides to over estimate and enjoy the freetime?
      • winrid 7y ago
        Usually it's a team effort and not just one person. Yes the manager should have say.
• WalterBright 7y ago
  It's a good list, and I always recommend these: 1. Public Speaking. If you can't talk coherently in front of a group of people and sell your ideas, your career will be stunted. 2. Accounting. Accounting is the language of business. If you don't understand double entry bookkeeping, you can't be a manager. You can't run a startup. You can't talk to investors. If you misuse terms like "gross margin" you'll be overlooked as someone not worthy of doing business with. And worst of all, your feathers will get plucked by people who do, and you may never even realize it. Neither of these are particularly hard to do, but like flossing one's teeth, avoiding them will be costly to your future.
  • trilila 7y ago
    2. Is a must have skill for consultants as well, a career path common for software developers.
  • Dextro 7y ago
    And I've spent far too much of my time in my last project explaining double entry bookkeeping to coworkers to little effect. I had to watch has they re-invented the wheel. Sadly I'm not that good point 1 (actually terrible at it).
    • WalterBright 7y ago
      > Sadly I'm not that good point 1 It gets better each time you do it. Taking a class in public speaking helps a lot. I've seen engineers stand with their back to the audience and mumble - it's not hard to do better than that. > And I've spent far too much of my time in my last project explaining double entry bookkeeping to coworkers to little effect. I had to watch has they re-invented the wheel. Yah, reinventing that is certainly cringe-worthy. I took a 2 week class in it at the local community college one summer. It's paid off well for me ever since. A very high return on time invested. The other huge ROI for me was I took a 2 week summer school in 8th grade on touch typing. Considering how much typing I've done since, that had a heluva huge return. I sometimes shake my head in astonishment at professional programmers hunt-peck with just their forefingers as they resolutely refuse to learn touch typing. What a waste of time.
• archagon 7y ago
  This is tangential, but HOW, HOW, HOW does someone have the time to do all this stuff? http://matt.might.net/materials/matthew-might-cv.pdf http://matt.might.net/materials/matthew-might-cv.pdf I'd love to see a timeline of how some of these super-productive academics are able to fit so many activities into their lives. I doubt I've done 1/10th of what Matt has done in the same amount of time. (And all this while researching, publicizing, and treating his son's rare genetic disorder, in an entirely separate field from the one he got his PhD in: http://matt.might.net/articles/my-sons-killer/ http://matt.might.net/articles/my-sons-killer/)
  • felipap 7y ago
    Related: should I also be including my Twitter and Google+ followers in my CV?
    • titanomachy 7y ago
      Do you have a lot of them?
      • felipap 7y ago
        Afraid not. :'(
  • randomsearch 7y ago
    What stuff? If you mean publish a lot of papers, quantity doesn’t mean much.
    • archagon 7y ago
      The work that Matt does seems quite impactful, however: http://matt.might.net/articles/tenure/ http://matt.might.net/articles/tenure/
• GoToRO 7y ago
  I agree with it but I also disagree. They are all valuable skills but guess what? If I know how to be persuasive, I know how to present, I even see jobs asking for "self starters", "knows how to manage multiple projects" and maybe I learn how to do sales then... I just start my own thing. I don't need your job! Of course all those skills are valuable for anyone, just like learning to play piano is. Doesn't mean you shouldn't hire people because they don't have those skills.
• rronalddas 7y ago
  Currently, I think dockerfile are more omnipresent than makefiles
• somezero 7y ago
  The sources, at least for engineering section, are not useful at all. Assuming this stuff is needed in the first place: Spivak's calculus, while a fantastic read, was "difficult" for motivated honors students at institutions like Harvard. Great exposition, and great exercises, but it's mostly for aspiring math people who want to spend some time on the exercises. For example, within the first couple of chapters, readers will have to do epsilon-delta style of inequalities and basically learn the tricks, before reading about them in the "limit" chapter. For calculus, any lightweight calculus book would do. For analysis, Abbott's "Understanding analysis" is quite illuminating and if exercises are your thing and want to build up to real analysis from the natural numbers in an accessible way, then Tao's analysis volume 1 would be good. "All of statistics" is a bad introduction to statistics because it contains too many things (Kullback-leibler?!) early on?! It's a great book for a reference or for a refresher, but not something to learn from. Wackerly is light enough introduction to statistics, and for probability, Bertsekas!
• glangdale 7y ago
  These kind of lists are always hilariously overstuffed, like a big comfortable rhetorical couch. It's not all that hard to make up a giant list of 8-10 years worth of material, which if anyone took seriously would also lead to a monoculture i.e. we didn't have any time to do anything aside from computer science and this giant-ass list of requirements like "physics up to electromagnetism". I'd say I was close to hitting, for about the year 1997 or so, these requirements or their equivalents as they existed then, after (a) a pretty decent prep at high school level (Australian high schools allowed a heavy math/science concentration), (b) 4 years of undergrad with - nominally CS as 1 subject in 4 in first year, 1 in 3 in second year, 1 in 2 in third year and full-time in honours (but actually way more focus on CS vs other subjects), and (c) completing the 8 graduate courses required to move on to the rest of the PhD at CMU. Even then I'd have a long list of gaps in his definition. And that's off 7-8 years of prep, not 4, and an Australian honours CS degree allowed a lot more specialization than a lot of 4-year degrees in the US at the time. It would be a more interesting approach to try to define a minimal set. Anyone can spam out 8-10 years of study and everyone will agree that, sure, someone who knew all that would be Pretty Good (better have 11 programming languages under your belt, hey). But a far more interesting task is - what do you need? And, perhaps, in a class of 100 people, why should everyone come out with the same laundry list? Maybe it's good to have 20 really good statisticians there, as well as 20 people who could design the processor they are programming on, etc etc (obviously an overlapping set).
  • toper-centage 7y ago
    This list was surprisingly sane and almost exactly the programme of my 5-year degree.
    • meuk 7y ago
      I can't help but think that you can only do a very shallow treatment of everything in this list in a CS program. It seems like the author basically put down his own CS program as a requirements list. The style the author uses reinforces this thought, since the sections are very shallow and very closely match what I would expect from someone who did an introductory course on every subject in the list. And I'll be damned if the 11(!) programming languages "every CS major should know" aren't exactly the programming languages that the author happens to know. It would be a surprising achievement to even know just C and C++. This post may be influenced a little by the irritation that after seven years of study and two years of work experience (and many time spent on this stuff as a hobby in my free time), I still don't match nearly 50% of the 'requirements' in this list. But hey, these lists should be taken with a lot of salt. It's pretty fun to make one and reflect on all the things you've learned. In my list, there would be more numerical analysis and less languages.
• known 7y ago
  40 Key Computer Science Concepts Explained In Layman’s Terms http://carlcheo.com/compsci http://carlcheo.com/compsci
• austincheney 7y ago
  I am a self-taught developer. After spending years in the corporate world working along side CS graduates here are the skills I see as missing from CS education: * Writing skills. It is absolutely important that developers be able to communicate needs and requirements with precision and specificity. I always recommend that developers spend more time with their QA staff as the experts next door. Good QA people are excellent, I am mean absolutely astounding, communicators with a very deep understanding of the product. * Structure versus composition. So many developers really want the world to be simple AND easy. There appears to be some false expectation that programming is like putting lego pieces together, and when this isn't the reality they are utterly lost. Instead developers need to have beat into their heads that code is more like a thought structure. Part of this comes from developing reading/writing skills and part of it comes from an appreciation that logic and abstractions aren't static qualities. * Reading code. I often see junior developers struggling with how to write code. This is the vast majority of programming related topics I see online. There is a lot of insecurity around this and many developers first try to solve for the insecurity opposed to actually writing original code. This means that instead of taking a risk on writing original code developers will cost themselves in comfort blankets of tools, frameworks, dependencies, and layers of configurations. These insecurities are better solved from building comfort directly through an appreciation of reading code (RTFC). * Technology diversity. Most developers I have worked with either get into stuff like robotics, or IoT, or simply remain hopelessly isolated to writing code in their primary domain. Most developers who isolate themselves to the code have no idea what is really happening in technology whether its security, networking, hardware, storage, or whatever. The really sad part is that many developers falsely believe themselves to have some expertise or advanced understanding of these non-coding concepts when its very clear, to people in that line of work, the developers have almost no practical experience there (spinning their wheels). As an example I have seen numerous comments here on HN where developers will downvote, into oblivion, networking or security focused comments that defy common understanding of application coding despite never having touched a switch, router, or any sort of security vulnerability assessment/resolution. * Product management. More often than not developers are writing code in support of some software product. I often see many developers in pursuit of qualities completely opposed to the desires of the end users or the business that pays the bills. Sometimes these erroneous intentions are due to pursuit of easy, sometimes its due to an imaginary understanding of what people want, and sometimes its due to a false or incomplete understanding of the technology. No matter the reason developer focused intentions are generally bad. * Data structures. Not having a computer science background myself I have always imagined that data structures are a core component of a good CS education. I am frequently reminded of how wrong this thinking actually is. --- I also see developers often spending amazing amounts of energy focused on qualities that aren't helpful to their careers or the products they support. The following is a wishlist of what many developers wished they learned from their education that simply isn't helpful. * Frameworks. A framework is an application serving the purpose of architecture in a box. Sometimes a framework is abused because its either completely unnecessary or because a developer is using it to solve all of the world's problems. A framework isn't going to do your job for you or get you promoted. It is just a tool. Sometimes original code really is better. * Testing. Test automation is important. A good set of tests reduce risks of regression and demonstrates appropriate handling of various features used in unexpected ways. Many developers often test for all the wrong things. Tests are tech debt. Tests are not an excuse to avoid reading code. When in doubt about what to test sit down and have a very precise conversation with your QA people. * Design patterns. Memorizing patterns is never helpful and is sometimes harmful. Instead solve the problem any way possible, even if inefficiently. Then refactor that solution over time to achieve better performance and superior simplicity. Through that process of continuous improvement you will unexpectedly learn design patterns.
• nezzor 7y ago
  ”Every engineer should know” -> ”All of statistics”
• supernova87a 7y ago
  As a manager, I'll tell you what is more important than almost any of these technical skills (although they are important): 1) The ability to communicate what needs to be done, and how it is to be done, _before_ diving into the work. I work with tons of people who, sure, can get the work done, but I have little to no visibility about what they're going to do and when they think it will be done. I'm never going to be in the code as deep as you -- the purpose of my management is to help make sure the thing you do fits into the rest of the plan and doesn't waste time and resources. What good does it do our team if I don't find out how long it was going to take until you finished? Inability to do this is generally an indication that they've not done the task before, can't tell you how they're going to solve it before they actually do, or are generally unable to plan their work at a higher level that is useful for a manager. And I don't even mean that the answer has to be a rock-solid time estimate -- if they can raise and communicate the uncertainties, that already is an important piece of information and next level thinking -- what do you know you don't know. You can tell a more experienced person by whether they can give you plans and estimates for how long and what approach they will take, before they immediately start the work. The work isn't just a coding puzzle to be solved -- they understand it's a project to be managed properly and are working at your level to plan it. Versus you having to painfully extract that info from them. 2) The ability to self-assess whether their approach is the right/best approach, or what compromises or missing elements their approach adopts. Rarely do I find that people who dive right in because they "know how it needs to be done" are doing it because that is really the right way among all possible solutions. More like, it's the first thing that popped into their mind. You can tell an experienced person by whether they take some time at the beginning to debate / discuss with you what approach optimizes for what outcome (whether time, resources, maintainability, scalability, data integrity, etc). The person who does even these 2 things (or similar indicators of self-reflection and considering the problem) is -- almost unfortunately -- the standout these days.
  • crispyambulance 7y ago
    I think those two abilities which you cite are developed ONLY with experience in solving real-world work problems. These are not skills which can be taught in a school. They have to be learned through work, through mentorship and through the experience of failures and successes. Internships certainly help, but it takes years. It's OK if hires fresh out of school aren't able to do these things. These need to be cultivated by you, the manager.
• ubermonkey 7y ago
  I'm a member of an older generation (in college 88-92). It's interesting how few of my cohort (a) have a formal CS degree or (b) would tick even most of the boxes that were possible in 1992. Back then, many if not most CS programs were super behind industry, so what got you hired wasn't your coursework in FORTRAN. It was what you did outside of class, in independent projects or (a surprising amount of the time) for money on the side. Many programmers in their late 40s-early 50s don't have ANY degree, because they learned on their own and then got a job early, without completing (or even matriculating to) college. This left large holes in what they knew, if measured by this list, but generally speaking they were still pretty fantastic developers. How this applies to someone in school NOW is absolutely unclear. I suspect the answer isn't "not at all," but I also doubt it's been possible to get hired in a professional developer job right out of high school for at least 20 years. It's hard for me to imagine how an 18 year old could know enough; the field is so much bigger now.
• bibbitybobbity 7y ago
  Your website isn't secured with a certificate, FYI
• kilo_bravo_3 7y ago
  CTRL-F "ethics". Not found. :-( I guess another generation of developers dark-patterning their users into giving up their personal info, and then exploiting them for stock options, a WRX (or Tesla if they've been around for a couple of years) and a Bay Area condo they can barely afford is upon us.
• nashahg 7y ago
  Having a portfolio showcasing your accomplished projects is very important https://finance.uonbi.ac.ke/node/123523 https://finance.uonbi.ac.ke/node/123523
• nashahg 7y ago
  The Portfolio is very important to have. For someone to be able to take you seriously, you need to be able to have proof of what you have done before https://finance.uonbi.ac.ke/node/121819 https://finance.uonbi.ac.ke/node/121819