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Persons who are interested in software development probably got started in their teens whilst still in school. So faced with taking on a huge student debt and d

Persons who are interested in software development probably got started in their teens whilst still in school. So faced with taking on a huge student debt and delaying their career or start earning a good income straightaway makes the latter far more appealing. Besides, CS is seen to be a theory heavy course rather than practical software engineering.

morkalork 3y ago
Having done all the theory and math, the pain is real when trying to explain a cool concept or why a piece of tech did something the way they did to a junior-ish dude who did some other degree or a boot-camp who doesn't care and doesn't need to care either. Worse is doing grad studies in CS, unless you are willing to move to one of a few specific locales for your area of specialization, there is no point at all in continuing.
- AdieuToLogic 3y ago
  > Having done all the theory and math, the pain is real when trying to explain a cool concept or why a piece of tech did something the way they did to a junior-ish dude who did some other degree or a boot-camp who doesn't care and doesn't need to care either. This is a really underappreciated perspective. Few things are more disheartening than wanting to share understanding of a neat CS concept and have it fall on deaf ears. Given enough experience and depth of knowledge, there comes a time where the gulf becomes insurmountable.
  - bruce343434 3y ago
    I have a good dynamic with my dad for this, I share theoretical CS stuff which he never studied with him, and he shares OOP design pattern stuff which always went a bit over my head with me.
MiddleEndian 3y ago
Anecdotally, pretty much everyone in my CS degree program also started programming in their teens.
re-thc 3y ago
> Besides, CS is seen to be a theory heavy course rather than practical software engineering. The theory is important. You can often tell the difference between someone that's been through it and someone that hasn't. It's not just a copy and paste job without implications.
- zelphirkalt 3y ago
  I would slightly modify the statement: Someone who has been through it can often tell the difference between someone who has been through it and some one who has not. To the outside it is often a case of: "But this works too!"
zeroonetwothree 3y ago
IME people who learned the theory can adapt to new situations much better. Those that just learned a single set of skills like, say, Python web backends become lost quickly if they need to do something different, like optimise some multithreaded C++ service. And often in our jobs these types of things do come up, you can’t always get a specialist to cover every single type of work. Of course this could be mostly correlation, perhaps the type of people that seek degrees also enjoy learning more broadly in general.
- JSavageOne 3y ago
  > like optimise some multithreaded C++ service. And often in our jobs these types of things do come up What are the jobs where this kind of thing comes up? I've never had to do anything with multithreading or C++, and I'd estimate that the jobs where that stuff comes up is a tiny minority. I think it'd be cool to encounter these kinds of problems, but it just seems more like a niche thing to me these days.
  - TillE 3y ago
    Game development, and really anything that needs fast native code.

morkalork 3y ago

Having done all the theory and math, the pain is real when trying to explain a cool concept or why a piece of tech did something the way they did to a junior-ish dude who did some other degree or a boot-camp who doesn't care and doesn't need to care either. Worse is doing grad studies in CS, unless you are willing to move to one of a few specific locales for your area of specialization, there is no point at all in continuing.

AdieuToLogic 3y ago
> Having done all the theory and math, the pain is real when trying to explain a cool concept or why a piece of tech did something the way they did to a junior-ish dude who did some other degree or a boot-camp who doesn't care and doesn't need to care either. This is a really underappreciated perspective. Few things are more disheartening than wanting to share understanding of a neat CS concept and have it fall on deaf ears. Given enough experience and depth of knowledge, there comes a time where the gulf becomes insurmountable.
- bruce343434 3y ago
  I have a good dynamic with my dad for this, I share theoretical CS stuff which he never studied with him, and he shares OOP design pattern stuff which always went a bit over my head with me.

MiddleEndian 3y ago

Anecdotally, pretty much everyone in my CS degree program also started programming in their teens.

re-thc 3y ago

> Besides, CS is seen to be a theory heavy course rather than practical software engineering. The theory is important. You can often tell the difference between someone that's been through it and someone that hasn't. It's not just a copy and paste job without implications.

zelphirkalt 3y ago
I would slightly modify the statement: Someone who has been through it can often tell the difference between someone who has been through it and some one who has not. To the outside it is often a case of: "But this works too!"

zeroonetwothree 3y ago

IME people who learned the theory can adapt to new situations much better. Those that just learned a single set of skills like, say, Python web backends become lost quickly if they need to do something different, like optimise some multithreaded C++ service. And often in our jobs these types of things do come up, you can’t always get a specialist to cover every single type of work. Of course this could be mostly correlation, perhaps the type of people that seek degrees also enjoy learning more broadly in general.

JSavageOne 3y ago
> like optimise some multithreaded C++ service. And often in our jobs these types of things do come up What are the jobs where this kind of thing comes up? I've never had to do anything with multithreading or C++, and I'd estimate that the jobs where that stuff comes up is a tiny minority. I think it'd be cool to encounter these kinds of problems, but it just seems more like a niche thing to me these days.
- TillE 3y ago
  Game development, and really anything that needs fast native code.