4 ms·

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 w

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.
- glangdale 7y ago
  Then either you're a genius who has worked exceptionally hard, or you don't know all that much about most of the items on the list beyond a 'whirlwind tour' type intro. I don't doubt that someone could touch on most of this stuff, especially in a degree that is heavily specialized to turn out someone exactly like the author or the author's idea of a 'computer science major'. But I'm very sceptical that this enormous list constitutes a reasonable knowledge base for a "computer science major" who is also meant to know some other subjects; we're talking "major", not "quadruple super-specialized CS major". One might even know subjects that aren't just existing as early feed-in service courses for the CS (i.e. the way he discusses physics, maths and statistics). I certainly can't imagine someone meeting this guys list and uttering the phrase "I majored in CS and biology" or "I majored in CS and economics" or something like that.
dlkf 7y ago
> It would be a more interesting approach to try to define a minimal set. Agreed. One way to represent this would be a collection of clusters of the technical skills listed in the article. If you're interested in statistics and machine learning, you should get good at SQL and visualization. By contrast, graphics and networking are much less important. If you want to work in operating systems, ANSI C will probably be a lot more helpful than Javascript. I that every CS student should read the sections on resumes and communication. They're so powerful because unlike the rest of the article, they're not strictly prescriptive. They describe the goals are rather than the implementation details, and suggest a few ways you might get there.
Nokinside 7y ago
> And, perhaps, in a class of 100 people, why should everyone come out with the same laundry list? I fully agree with this point. People here argue that minimum for scientist should be cut down to something that fits into strictly vocational degree that scores them a well paying job. Every scientist in any STEM field I know knows "the minimum" that is larger than what fits into masters degree in their field. Someone with PhD is basically still scientist in training, a junior. 8-10 years of basics then very special knowledge above that sounds about right. My background is in EE, so I think that being an engineer has prestige but it's not the same as being a scientist. Good EE engineer knows different things than research scientist in the field. You need to know enormous amount of theory and math to design modern circuits and radio interfaces but designing them is engineering.
- Konnstann 7y ago
  Would the Scientist equivalent to EE be related? In a lot of fields the engineering and problem solving aspects are pretty removed from the science driving progress. Even then the term "scientist" just means someone using the scientific method to solve problems, and good engineers involved in research fit that description.
winternett 7y ago
Agreed. Advice about career paths should always be personalized to each individual. I'm someone who has not had a traditional CS education, I am totally self taught and I don't have many certs at all, actually, I had taken a few courses and not taken the tests, and for all of those courses, the only reason I had taken them is that my employers paid for them. I've had over 13 different jobs in the past 20 years and that's helped me to really figure out how the IT world works. I primarily work as a Gov contractor on the East coast, and rarely had a job I could not grow into provided I had basic knowledge of development, customer service, and project management. I am not a genius by any standard, but I have accomplished a lot over my career that has made me worth the money they pay me. People used to tell me to not "hop around" and that there would be unemployment eventually after doing that, but IT changed the traditional rules of employment. I am lucky to have been where I was in history because now there is a serious lack of supply for people who do what I do (Full Stack Dev, Dev Management, Cloud Architecture, Technical Project Management, Application architecture). I have also greatly benefited salary-wise within the past 4 years as I move into more management roles, and the only time I get substantial raises is when I switch jobs, not when I stay with an employer for an annual bonus. Actually, my salary growth year over year has been about +$20k on average for the past 5 years as the East coast begins to climb to West Coast standards, so I don't need to move to Cali and deal with Earth Quakes :P. I started out learning the Internet and simple HTML in college (around 1995) when the Internet was just going public... That positioning probably helped me a lot. My first CS job out of school was making CD-Roms based on early JS, HTML, and graphics (pre-CSS) for a software development company that was making a tool which would later be killed off by message board software like PHP BB. I worked around real developers and learned their habits, and it made development in C less intimidating to me, back then development seemed like rocket science. The Dot Com boom (even citing it's collapse) convinced me that IT was a new industry I could stick with... It was really an amazing time. I interviewed with MTV, Microsoft, The Motley Fool, and turned them all down because they were offering lower salaries than small IT companies nearer to my home. I graduated through many different companies as a web developer as sites got more complex, I embraced Google-Fu, which helped me to solve some really complex challenges, Learning concepts like Waterfall, Scrum, Rup, and Agile helped me to work my way into management. I will agree though, maintaining personal (portfolio) web sites was what got me into the door ahead of my competition most times where no one knew me, it was shocking how so many people even now that I interview for jobs don't have any portfolio links in their resumes, or even a profile on linked in. If you're a developer, it's an easy way to bypass a code test on an interview to just be able to explain how you set up your personal portfolio. I used to have to back out of interviews that sent me code tests because they were never related to what actual company jobs were like anyway, and the tests were often geared towards people who were CS degree holders. There is no substantial personalized advice someone can give you online that will be properly suited to your needs in a general format. The advice that works better is based on the process you follow rather than the programming language or specific decisions you should make career-wise. I've seen big companies and ideas grow and fail, like IBM and Adobe Flash... That is always guaranteed. For people embarking on their career journey, I suggest that they take notice of the successful people around them and invite someone they really respect out to lunch and pay the bill (to compensate them for their time and so that you aren't remembered as a "mental burden" by them). Talk with that person intently, and tell them your ideas and goals (you should be able to trust them at that level of course, so choose wisely). Ask them for their take and listen intently without shooting their ideas, advice, or methods down, and then take all you learn from those conversations and design your own path in your mind, and follow it. If a path doesn't work, be sure to pivot to a new path before you're invested too far/deep... If a path that you're on does work, follow it for as long as it works, but also diversify your efforts, time IS money, never put all of your eggs in one basket. Eventually you'll succeed in time if you take note of what works, mirror that in your actions, and learn to negotiate money and your career properly. That's what has worked for me thus far.

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.
glangdale 7y ago
Then either you're a genius who has worked exceptionally hard, or you don't know all that much about most of the items on the list beyond a 'whirlwind tour' type intro. I don't doubt that someone could touch on most of this stuff, especially in a degree that is heavily specialized to turn out someone exactly like the author or the author's idea of a 'computer science major'. But I'm very sceptical that this enormous list constitutes a reasonable knowledge base for a "computer science major" who is also meant to know some other subjects; we're talking "major", not "quadruple super-specialized CS major". One might even know subjects that aren't just existing as early feed-in service courses for the CS (i.e. the way he discusses physics, maths and statistics). I certainly can't imagine someone meeting this guys list and uttering the phrase "I majored in CS and biology" or "I majored in CS and economics" or something like that.

dlkf 7y ago

> It would be a more interesting approach to try to define a minimal set. Agreed. One way to represent this would be a collection of clusters of the technical skills listed in the article. If you're interested in statistics and machine learning, you should get good at SQL and visualization. By contrast, graphics and networking are much less important. If you want to work in operating systems, ANSI C will probably be a lot more helpful than Javascript. I that every CS student should read the sections on resumes and communication. They're so powerful because unlike the rest of the article, they're not strictly prescriptive. They describe the goals are rather than the implementation details, and suggest a few ways you might get there.

Nokinside 7y ago

> And, perhaps, in a class of 100 people, why should everyone come out with the same laundry list? I fully agree with this point. People here argue that minimum for scientist should be cut down to something that fits into strictly vocational degree that scores them a well paying job. Every scientist in any STEM field I know knows "the minimum" that is larger than what fits into masters degree in their field. Someone with PhD is basically still scientist in training, a junior. 8-10 years of basics then very special knowledge above that sounds about right. My background is in EE, so I think that being an engineer has prestige but it's not the same as being a scientist. Good EE engineer knows different things than research scientist in the field. You need to know enormous amount of theory and math to design modern circuits and radio interfaces but designing them is engineering.

Konnstann 7y ago
Would the Scientist equivalent to EE be related? In a lot of fields the engineering and problem solving aspects are pretty removed from the science driving progress. Even then the term "scientist" just means someone using the scientific method to solve problems, and good engineers involved in research fit that description.

winternett 7y ago

Agreed. Advice about career paths should always be personalized to each individual. I'm someone who has not had a traditional CS education, I am totally self taught and I don't have many certs at all, actually, I had taken a few courses and not taken the tests, and for all of those courses, the only reason I had taken them is that my employers paid for them. I've had over 13 different jobs in the past 20 years and that's helped me to really figure out how the IT world works. I primarily work as a Gov contractor on the East coast, and rarely had a job I could not grow into provided I had basic knowledge of development, customer service, and project management. I am not a genius by any standard, but I have accomplished a lot over my career that has made me worth the money they pay me. People used to tell me to not "hop around" and that there would be unemployment eventually after doing that, but IT changed the traditional rules of employment. I am lucky to have been where I was in history because now there is a serious lack of supply for people who do what I do (Full Stack Dev, Dev Management, Cloud Architecture, Technical Project Management, Application architecture). I have also greatly benefited salary-wise within the past 4 years as I move into more management roles, and the only time I get substantial raises is when I switch jobs, not when I stay with an employer for an annual bonus. Actually, my salary growth year over year has been about +$20k on average for the past 5 years as the East coast begins to climb to West Coast standards, so I don't need to move to Cali and deal with Earth Quakes :P. I started out learning the Internet and simple HTML in college (around 1995) when the Internet was just going public... That positioning probably helped me a lot. My first CS job out of school was making CD-Roms based on early JS, HTML, and graphics (pre-CSS) for a software development company that was making a tool which would later be killed off by message board software like PHP BB. I worked around real developers and learned their habits, and it made development in C less intimidating to me, back then development seemed like rocket science. The Dot Com boom (even citing it's collapse) convinced me that IT was a new industry I could stick with... It was really an amazing time. I interviewed with MTV, Microsoft, The Motley Fool, and turned them all down because they were offering lower salaries than small IT companies nearer to my home. I graduated through many different companies as a web developer as sites got more complex, I embraced Google-Fu, which helped me to solve some really complex challenges, Learning concepts like Waterfall, Scrum, Rup, and Agile helped me to work my way into management. I will agree though, maintaining personal (portfolio) web sites was what got me into the door ahead of my competition most times where no one knew me, it was shocking how so many people even now that I interview for jobs don't have any portfolio links in their resumes, or even a profile on linked in. If you're a developer, it's an easy way to bypass a code test on an interview to just be able to explain how you set up your personal portfolio. I used to have to back out of interviews that sent me code tests because they were never related to what actual company jobs were like anyway, and the tests were often geared towards people who were CS degree holders. There is no substantial personalized advice someone can give you online that will be properly suited to your needs in a general format. The advice that works better is based on the process you follow rather than the programming language or specific decisions you should make career-wise. I've seen big companies and ideas grow and fail, like IBM and Adobe Flash... That is always guaranteed. For people embarking on their career journey, I suggest that they take notice of the successful people around them and invite someone they really respect out to lunch and pay the bill (to compensate them for their time and so that you aren't remembered as a "mental burden" by them). Talk with that person intently, and tell them your ideas and goals (you should be able to trust them at that level of course, so choose wisely). Ask them for their take and listen intently without shooting their ideas, advice, or methods down, and then take all you learn from those conversations and design your own path in your mind, and follow it. If a path doesn't work, be sure to pivot to a new path before you're invested too far/deep... If a path that you're on does work, follow it for as long as it works, but also diversify your efforts, time IS money, never put all of your eggs in one basket. Eventually you'll succeed in time if you take note of what works, mirror that in your actions, and learn to negotiate money and your career properly. That's what has worked for me thus far.