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Computers have been a hobby all my life. I well remember the epiphany I felt while learning Logo in elementary school, at the moment I understood what recursion

by ylee 3y ago

Computers have been a hobby all my life. I well remember the epiphany I felt while learning Logo in elementary school, at the moment I understood what recursion is. I don't think the fact that the language I have mostly written code in in recent years is Emacs Lisp is unrelated to the above moment. Yet I have never desired to work as a professional software developer. I majored in history and Spanish at Columbia while working for the university's Unix systems group. Before graduation I interviewed and got offers (including one explicitly as a developer) at various tech startups. Of my offers I chose an investment banking job where I worked with tech companies; my manager was looking for a CS major but I was able to convince her that I had the equivalent thereof. Thank goodness for that; I got to participate in the dotcom bubble without being directly swept up in its popping, and saw the Valley immediately post-bubble collapse. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34732772 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34732772> I'm glad, for the sake of civilizational and economic progress, that others are able and willing to program for pay. Meanwhile I will continue to putter around with Elisp at home.

theGnuMe 3y ago
If you like the theory of computing and thinking like a computer scientist, aka computational systems and algorithms, then a degree in computer science makes sense. It has two sides, a logic/math background and an experimental side (systems building). It also blurs with math, physics, statistics at the edges where you see cross collaboration. Computer scientists like to take things from different fields and push them to extreme scale. Deep learning is one example. Graphical models are another (taken from Bayesian stats) and applied to graphs. But in some sense a liberal arts degree is more useful.

by ylee 3y ago

theGnuMe 3y ago

If you like the theory of computing and thinking like a computer scientist, aka computational systems and algorithms, then a degree in computer science makes sense. It has two sides, a logic/math background and an experimental side (systems building). It also blurs with math, physics, statistics at the edges where you see cross collaboration. Computer scientists like to take things from different fields and push them to extreme scale. Deep learning is one example. Graphical models are another (taken from Bayesian stats) and applied to graphs. But in some sense a liberal arts degree is more useful.