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Before we lend your comment any credence, do you mind listing the projects you've worked on? Groundbreaking software engineering projects that advance the stat

Before we lend your comment any credence, do you mind listing the projects you've worked on? Groundbreaking software engineering projects that advance the state-of-the-art, like Google's Map-Reduce-based scaling architecture back in the day, or ones that provide some non-trivial edge or advantage, like the tight integration of hardware and software in iPhones (and the resulting responsiveness and battery life), or ones that provide high-assurance and provable correctness (Rust, Haskell, etc) actually do require CS knowledge. Whenever someone makes a comment like this, I just assume their work thus far has consisted of linking together pre-existing building blocks to make web or mobile apps, rather than anything completely original or state-of-the-art. And it's good that the industry has gotten to a point that such a job opportunity exists for so many people. But keep in mind it was only possible by decades of development of layers upon layers of abstracting away most of the CS into easily composable libraries, APIs, and other components. You many not need to know algorithms and datastructures yourself, but you're definitely using them by building on them and with libs that encapsulate them.

dilawar 6y ago
Well said.
SulfurHexaFluri 6y ago
There is a level between installing wordpress plugins and creating state of the art massive scale infrastructure. And its likely where most developers sit. I work on a project management application. Its pretty much entirely custom code with little external libraries but it also requires very little computer science theory. The problems I face are less "Find the fastest way to search this datastructure" and more "This code was designed for a legacy model of the system, how can we replace it with something modern without spending months on it"
0x008 6y ago
Well, the premise that computer science is needed to be an effective software engineer comes from the original link (and the way interviews are structured). We cannot blame caymanjim for the premise, can we?
zbentley 6y ago
> I just assume their work thus far has consisted of linking together pre-existing building blocks to make web or mobile apps, rather than anything completely original or state-of-the-art. ...otherwise known as the vast, vast majority of work in "most software engineering roles", as the parent commenter mentioned. They didn't say CS knowledge was unimportant. They said it wasn't directly used in most SWE work. That's entirely accurate. They did not comment on whether the products of computer science are involved in most software engineering (of course they are, but I don't need to remember A* to use a graph database). They did not comment on (rare) roles in which that knowledge is required to make groundbreaking advancements.

dilawar 6y ago

Well said.

SulfurHexaFluri 6y ago

There is a level between installing wordpress plugins and creating state of the art massive scale infrastructure. And its likely where most developers sit. I work on a project management application. Its pretty much entirely custom code with little external libraries but it also requires very little computer science theory. The problems I face are less "Find the fastest way to search this datastructure" and more "This code was designed for a legacy model of the system, how can we replace it with something modern without spending months on it"

0x008 6y ago

Well, the premise that computer science is needed to be an effective software engineer comes from the original link (and the way interviews are structured). We cannot blame caymanjim for the premise, can we?

zbentley 6y ago

> I just assume their work thus far has consisted of linking together pre-existing building blocks to make web or mobile apps, rather than anything completely original or state-of-the-art. ...otherwise known as the vast, vast majority of work in "most software engineering roles", as the parent commenter mentioned. They didn't say CS knowledge was unimportant. They said it wasn't directly used in most SWE work. That's entirely accurate. They did not comment on whether the products of computer science are involved in most software engineering (of course they are, but I don't need to remember A* to use a graph database). They did not comment on (rare) roles in which that knowledge is required to make groundbreaking advancements.