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Computer science is to programming what materials science is to construction. It produces really interesting new building blocks that actual practitioners can p

Computer science is to programming what materials science is to construction. It produces really interesting new building blocks that actual practitioners can put to amazing uses. But research scientists aren't necessarily great engineers, and engineers aren't necessarily great research scientists. That's OK though, it's why we have separate disciplines.

cmrdporcupine 4y ago
I mean, it's more like "woodworker" vs "carpenter." We don't ask people framing houses to plane their own wood. Most practitioners in our industry don't apply much fundamental CS knowledge. After graduating most CS grads seem to forget foundational CS stuff anyways. I never got a CS degree. So I trained myself. While working and also a lot of a year when I was unemployed during the .com crash. Which only made me more frustrated to find that most jobs are just "you nail these two boards together" and most programmers are clueless about things like what the "relation" in "relational DBMS" means.
- gerdesj 4y ago
  Your woodworker analogy needs a bit of work 8) In construction - in the UK - there are first and second fix "chippies". First fix do the big stuff and second fix do everything after the plaster is dry(ish). There are also cabinet makers and furniture makers, turners and several more wood related trades. Here, woodworker is a synonym for carpenter and carpenter is rarely used as a job title. Generally a specialisation is used. I happen to own an IT firm and I prefer to see engineering qualifications on CVs (resumes). I'm a rather shabby Civ. Eng myself! I graduated just before the shit hit the fan in the UK in 1991 - recession, >10% unemployment (in Devon and Cornwall) etc. Can't recall what inflation was up to at the time but I think it was worse than now. ... So I ended up in IT
squeaky-clean 4y ago
The CS program at my university, and most people I've spoken too, wasn't research oriented. At least not until the graduate level. Maybe at really respected places like MIT. Yes there were algorithms classes and such, but it was more about memorization than actually studying how they were made or how you would make a novel one. Final projects were always about building a real-world-ish application on a team. But I'd say about 20% of the students that graduated still didn't understand things like references very well. They'd write their code with "foo.bar" and when it didn't compile they'd randomly change "." to "->" or add random asterisks around until it compiled. (Classes were primarily in C++. We did some classes Java as well, and in my 3rd year Microsoft came in with a big sponsorship to change all the Java classes to C# classes.)

cmrdporcupine 4y ago

I mean, it's more like "woodworker" vs "carpenter." We don't ask people framing houses to plane their own wood. Most practitioners in our industry don't apply much fundamental CS knowledge. After graduating most CS grads seem to forget foundational CS stuff anyways. I never got a CS degree. So I trained myself. While working and also a lot of a year when I was unemployed during the .com crash. Which only made me more frustrated to find that most jobs are just "you nail these two boards together" and most programmers are clueless about things like what the "relation" in "relational DBMS" means.

gerdesj 4y ago
Your woodworker analogy needs a bit of work 8) In construction - in the UK - there are first and second fix "chippies". First fix do the big stuff and second fix do everything after the plaster is dry(ish). There are also cabinet makers and furniture makers, turners and several more wood related trades. Here, woodworker is a synonym for carpenter and carpenter is rarely used as a job title. Generally a specialisation is used. I happen to own an IT firm and I prefer to see engineering qualifications on CVs (resumes). I'm a rather shabby Civ. Eng myself! I graduated just before the shit hit the fan in the UK in 1991 - recession, >10% unemployment (in Devon and Cornwall) etc. Can't recall what inflation was up to at the time but I think it was worse than now. ... So I ended up in IT

squeaky-clean 4y ago

The CS program at my university, and most people I've spoken too, wasn't research oriented. At least not until the graduate level. Maybe at really respected places like MIT. Yes there were algorithms classes and such, but it was more about memorization than actually studying how they were made or how you would make a novel one. Final projects were always about building a real-world-ish application on a team. But I'd say about 20% of the students that graduated still didn't understand things like references very well. They'd write their code with "foo.bar" and when it didn't compile they'd randomly change "." to "->" or add random asterisks around until it compiled. (Classes were primarily in C++. We did some classes Java as well, and in my 3rd year Microsoft came in with a big sponsorship to change all the Java classes to C# classes.)