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If you go into computer science, you will: * Work with a lot of socially underdeveloped people. Hey, they spend their time fighting compilers, not reaching co

If you go into computer science, you will: * Work with a lot of socially underdeveloped people. Hey, they spend their time fighting compilers, not reaching consensus. Soft skills are largely irrelevant. * Probably work in one of a very few technology hubs around the world. This is all the more painful when you realize how little interaction you actually need with your team, and you could be doing your job from a shack on a Thai beach. * Never have your job understood by anyone. Unless your S.O. is also a geek, he/she will have no deep understanding and appreciation of your work, beyond the decent salary. Random strangers will have no idea what "software engineer" or "researcher" means. * Spend your life in front of a computer. If you are in a certain percentage of the population (which you won't know), you may suffer debilitating physical pain from this which curbs or ends your career. * Experience a significant uptick in ageism around your mid-thirties. Just when you're gaining some wisdom to go along with your sponge-like learning ability, you'll suddenly find yourself devalued for no objective reason. You can go into finance and become a millionaire, or at least hob-nob with a few. You can become a doctor, lawyer, or (to a lesser extent) a CPA, probably make better money, and get significantly more respect. You can become a teacher, cop, or join the military and make less, but be labeled 'hero'. Why would you want to be a professional geek? My advice to young people is to pursue your interest in CS, but major in something else. Being in a non-CS field with outstanding computer skills makes you very special. Those same computer skills are merely so-so in tech centers, and you have no additional versatility.

Meai 15y ago
Social interactions are trivial compared to computer science. Truly smart people have no difficulty talking to others, because their knowledge propelled them to understand how little sense it makes to be impolite in face of all that is to know. I would wager that it's others who have difficulty talking to us programmers in a clear, calm and efficient way, not the other way around. If you care about how others perceive your job, then you have underlying character problems that should be solved by measures other than acquiring an illustrious job. Almost everyone spends their life in front of a computer nowadays, and this percentage is only going to grow. If I may presume as much: We are in computer science / engineering because we want to stop having to deal with bullshit. Every fabric of life seems to be pervaded with it. Have you actually talked to graduates from other courses? They retain little to nothing of what they learnt. Their knowledge is useless trivia. Doctors know nothing of how their medications actually work.They are glorified nurses.Lawyers deal with abstract, hilariously overcomplicated laws and loopholes. Computer science is about the last bastion of sanity in this world.
- billybob 15y ago
  "Doctors know nothing of how their medications actually work. They are glorified nurses." My wife is a doctor, still in residency, so I know the kind of training doctors go through. She has taken in an inhuman amount of information during her training. No, she hasn't retained it all, but that's impossible. Geeks understand that we're working with a very deep stack, and for nearly all of us, there are parts of the stack we don't understand. Say you're making a web app. Complete understanding would include include psychology and user interaction theory, color theory and screen resolutions and graphic design, the inner workings of browsers, markup, CSS and Javascript, the whole networking stack from electrical pulses up to HTTP, public/private key encryption, the many nuances of well-factored code, compilers and interpreters, databases, operating systems, memory managent, and chip logic down to the logical gates and the low-level physics of electricity. What parts can go wrong and how? What security risks exist in this stack? There is too much for one person to know it all, and that's in a system that people designed, where there are specialists who can fully understand at least part of it. Doctors have an even deeper stack, from chemistry and DNA and cell biology up to organs and systems and disease processes, all the way up to the psychology of patient interactions. Nobody understands the parts of this stack. People spend their whole lives studying things like cellular metabolic processes and immune system biochemical cascades and don't fully understand them. How can a doctor know more than all the specialists combined? Clearly there are good doctors and bad ones. But it's ludicrous to say that they "retain little to nothing of what they learned" or "their knowledge is useless trivia." It's arrogance. If someone tells you their monitor doesn't work and they think it's because they have a computer virus, you could hardly begin to tell them how wrongly they understand their computer. You would not appreciate having your objections dismissed by this person who does not know your field at all. Please don't do the same to people who are experts in other highly complex fields.
  - Meai 15y ago
    Thank you, I didn't think of it this way. You are right.
walrusty 15y ago
> My advice to young people is to pursue your interest in CS, but major in something else. This sounds like a big mistake. I did not major in CS but instead later learned on my own and found that there's a shit-ton of holes in my CS-know-how to fill in -- and they're very difficult to fill in on your own. It's easy to learn a language, or how to admin Apache on your own; it's far more difficult to learn algorithms or compilers on your own. > Being in a non-CS field with outstanding computer skills makes you very special. Disagree here too. I got my degree in physics. So now I can program pretty well, have an undergrad in physics, and am basically qualified for PHP or Java dead-end jobs.

Meai 15y ago

Social interactions are trivial compared to computer science. Truly smart people have no difficulty talking to others, because their knowledge propelled them to understand how little sense it makes to be impolite in face of all that is to know. I would wager that it's others who have difficulty talking to us programmers in a clear, calm and efficient way, not the other way around. If you care about how others perceive your job, then you have underlying character problems that should be solved by measures other than acquiring an illustrious job. Almost everyone spends their life in front of a computer nowadays, and this percentage is only going to grow. If I may presume as much: We are in computer science / engineering because we want to stop having to deal with bullshit. Every fabric of life seems to be pervaded with it. Have you actually talked to graduates from other courses? They retain little to nothing of what they learnt. Their knowledge is useless trivia. Doctors know nothing of how their medications actually work.They are glorified nurses.Lawyers deal with abstract, hilariously overcomplicated laws and loopholes. Computer science is about the last bastion of sanity in this world.

billybob 15y ago
"Doctors know nothing of how their medications actually work. They are glorified nurses." My wife is a doctor, still in residency, so I know the kind of training doctors go through. She has taken in an inhuman amount of information during her training. No, she hasn't retained it all, but that's impossible. Geeks understand that we're working with a very deep stack, and for nearly all of us, there are parts of the stack we don't understand. Say you're making a web app. Complete understanding would include include psychology and user interaction theory, color theory and screen resolutions and graphic design, the inner workings of browsers, markup, CSS and Javascript, the whole networking stack from electrical pulses up to HTTP, public/private key encryption, the many nuances of well-factored code, compilers and interpreters, databases, operating systems, memory managent, and chip logic down to the logical gates and the low-level physics of electricity. What parts can go wrong and how? What security risks exist in this stack? There is too much for one person to know it all, and that's in a system that people designed, where there are specialists who can fully understand at least part of it. Doctors have an even deeper stack, from chemistry and DNA and cell biology up to organs and systems and disease processes, all the way up to the psychology of patient interactions. Nobody understands the parts of this stack. People spend their whole lives studying things like cellular metabolic processes and immune system biochemical cascades and don't fully understand them. How can a doctor know more than all the specialists combined? Clearly there are good doctors and bad ones. But it's ludicrous to say that they "retain little to nothing of what they learned" or "their knowledge is useless trivia." It's arrogance. If someone tells you their monitor doesn't work and they think it's because they have a computer virus, you could hardly begin to tell them how wrongly they understand their computer. You would not appreciate having your objections dismissed by this person who does not know your field at all. Please don't do the same to people who are experts in other highly complex fields.
- Meai 15y ago
  Thank you, I didn't think of it this way. You are right.

walrusty 15y ago

> My advice to young people is to pursue your interest in CS, but major in something else. This sounds like a big mistake. I did not major in CS but instead later learned on my own and found that there's a shit-ton of holes in my CS-know-how to fill in -- and they're very difficult to fill in on your own. It's easy to learn a language, or how to admin Apache on your own; it's far more difficult to learn algorithms or compilers on your own. > Being in a non-CS field with outstanding computer skills makes you very special. Disagree here too. I got my degree in physics. So now I can program pretty well, have an undergrad in physics, and am basically qualified for PHP or Java dead-end jobs.