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> Outside the CS bubble, being a PhD physicist has more prestige and status than being a PhD computer scientist. I disagree with this take. Just as there is mo

> Outside the CS bubble, being a PhD physicist has more prestige and status than being a PhD computer scientist. I disagree with this take. Just as there is more “applied” physics and “theoretical” physics there is similarly “theoretical” computer science and more “applied” computer science. The former camp are similar to the theoretical physicist as many of them are mathematicians with a computer science bent. Even within the “applied” CS camp you have experts in number theory and algebra that apply their skills to cryptography, whereas in the “theoretical” camp you may find theorist using mathematics like homotopy type theory, category theory and the like in their research. Number theory, graph theory, combinatorics, abstract algebra, category theory and the like can get really hardcore in the pure math world. Similarly, theoretical physicist also have to know a lot of mathematics. I think your optics of what a computer scientist is and does is a bit removed from reality and that PhDs in CS are highly respected (I didn’t even mention the folks working in AI or quantum computing or the other important areas of the field).

bonoboTP 6y ago
I'm talking about the perception by general people like business managers and HR etc. I think it's silly that there's this purity contest or practicality contest going on. I studied CS but at a more engineering focused university, so the curriculum was closer to electrical engineering than to math and physics. Many engineering profs had a weird distaste for physicists/natural scientists and vice versa. They were both "elitist" just from a different view of the world. I like Feynman's take on this kind of bickering among fields: https://youtu.be/f61KMw5zVhg?t=137 https://youtu.be/f61KMw5zVhg?t=137
- ghaff 6y ago
  CS is a bit weird in that, partly for historical reasons, it straddles science and engineering more than most university majors. So at some schools, it's closely tied to the math department while at others it's associated with electrical engineering. Which unsurprisingly affects the curriculum in various ways. (And, of course, there's also the matter of how applied the curriculum is--i.e. software development vs. underlying theory.)
  - Maursault 6y ago
    As it is a subset of math, CS belongs in the Math Department this better reasons than historical ones. It is too easy to mistake CS for what it is not due to it's name including "computer." Suggested to me a long time ago, it makes it easier to understand what CS is if instead it is thought of as "Reckoning Science." The computer in Computer Science is "one who computes or reckons." Also what helps conceptually is the famous analogy that a computer is to a computer scientist what a telescope is to an astronomer. Astronomy is not the science of telescopes, and likewise, Computer Science is not the science of computers, nor even as the word is most commonly understood (as "using a computer"), "computing." Programming is a subset of CS, and Software Engineering is elevating that part of CS to match the monumental interest it attracts, to the extent of placing it fully into the Engineering Department. Some universities have CS degrees that are merely programming degrees compared to the better CS programs, which are usually made up of an equal amount of strictly advanced mathematics courses and CS courses which incidentally may involve programming, but learning to program whatever is merely a requisite of that course. CS is relative to Physics as a well-exploited tool. A lot of physics wouldn't be possible if not for computer science. Whatever the job title may be, programming is an occupation, and salaries can range from median to lucrative. With the most lucrative salaries, programming is often a small part of a larger solution, but a fully necessary feature of the service of solving some big problem or related group of smaller problems. When you think of a computer scientist, you should not think of a coder, yet coding is a tool they may exploit to achieve some goal, and that goal may or may not be entirely dependent on what is actually a telescope, an underlying physical computer. The really exciting rock n' roll computer science seems to be anything whiz bang, graphics and games, digital audio processing, AI, etc., and whatever language skills support those, so it is easy to confuse the goal being able to parse and generate various amounts of code with what all that coding work is helping to accomplish. IMO, weather modeling, modeling anything, satellite tracking, as well as informatics, are massively more interesting applications of CS. Help Desk, Desktop Support, Networking, Programming, Database construction and maintenance, and the rest of IT are all narrow and rather droll practical applications of CS, entirely practical, and they can pay well, a lot of the work is reasonably important (hospitals and air traffic control, really everything relies on computers). Web design is usually kept within a company's graphics or marketing department, yet many designers have escalated their job title to "developer." Classifications can blur because CS is so damn useful, even without computers, but CS is not just the one thing it is most popularly applied to. It is all the things. I think of a legit lettered and experienced computer scientist as the penultimate problem-solver, and they only add a computer as needed.

bonoboTP 6y ago

I'm talking about the perception by general people like business managers and HR etc. I think it's silly that there's this purity contest or practicality contest going on. I studied CS but at a more engineering focused university, so the curriculum was closer to electrical engineering than to math and physics. Many engineering profs had a weird distaste for physicists/natural scientists and vice versa. They were both "elitist" just from a different view of the world. I like Feynman's take on this kind of bickering among fields: https://youtu.be/f61KMw5zVhg?t=137 https://youtu.be/f61KMw5zVhg?t=137

ghaff 6y ago
CS is a bit weird in that, partly for historical reasons, it straddles science and engineering more than most university majors. So at some schools, it's closely tied to the math department while at others it's associated with electrical engineering. Which unsurprisingly affects the curriculum in various ways. (And, of course, there's also the matter of how applied the curriculum is--i.e. software development vs. underlying theory.)
- Maursault 6y ago
  As it is a subset of math, CS belongs in the Math Department this better reasons than historical ones. It is too easy to mistake CS for what it is not due to it's name including "computer." Suggested to me a long time ago, it makes it easier to understand what CS is if instead it is thought of as "Reckoning Science." The computer in Computer Science is "one who computes or reckons." Also what helps conceptually is the famous analogy that a computer is to a computer scientist what a telescope is to an astronomer. Astronomy is not the science of telescopes, and likewise, Computer Science is not the science of computers, nor even as the word is most commonly understood (as "using a computer"), "computing." Programming is a subset of CS, and Software Engineering is elevating that part of CS to match the monumental interest it attracts, to the extent of placing it fully into the Engineering Department. Some universities have CS degrees that are merely programming degrees compared to the better CS programs, which are usually made up of an equal amount of strictly advanced mathematics courses and CS courses which incidentally may involve programming, but learning to program whatever is merely a requisite of that course. CS is relative to Physics as a well-exploited tool. A lot of physics wouldn't be possible if not for computer science. Whatever the job title may be, programming is an occupation, and salaries can range from median to lucrative. With the most lucrative salaries, programming is often a small part of a larger solution, but a fully necessary feature of the service of solving some big problem or related group of smaller problems. When you think of a computer scientist, you should not think of a coder, yet coding is a tool they may exploit to achieve some goal, and that goal may or may not be entirely dependent on what is actually a telescope, an underlying physical computer. The really exciting rock n' roll computer science seems to be anything whiz bang, graphics and games, digital audio processing, AI, etc., and whatever language skills support those, so it is easy to confuse the goal being able to parse and generate various amounts of code with what all that coding work is helping to accomplish. IMO, weather modeling, modeling anything, satellite tracking, as well as informatics, are massively more interesting applications of CS. Help Desk, Desktop Support, Networking, Programming, Database construction and maintenance, and the rest of IT are all narrow and rather droll practical applications of CS, entirely practical, and they can pay well, a lot of the work is reasonably important (hospitals and air traffic control, really everything relies on computers). Web design is usually kept within a company's graphics or marketing department, yet many designers have escalated their job title to "developer." Classifications can blur because CS is so damn useful, even without computers, but CS is not just the one thing it is most popularly applied to. It is all the things. I think of a legit lettered and experienced computer scientist as the penultimate problem-solver, and they only add a computer as needed.