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I have a CS degree. The degree has been watered down year after year so my university can get more students. They don't care about the quality of their graduate

I have a CS degree. The degree has been watered down year after year so my university can get more students. They don't care about the quality of their graduates, only the quantity. Because the CS degree was shit, it required almost no effort at all and didn't really teach me much. This seems to be a growing trend among institutions that are starting to care more about money than their students. The liberal arts electives I picked up taught me critical thinking, which I think were worth more to me than all the CS components combined. Some people still seek out education as a way to be taught how to learn and think, rather than just a 3+ year job investment.

jbaiter 14y ago
I wholeheartedly agree. I recently finished a 4-year B.A. in History (in Germany, mind you, so my decision wasn't hard on me in a financial way). I didn't double-major in CS or anything, but kept programming and IT stuff as a hobby, contributed to Open Source projects, helped with IT-related problems at university and generally tried to learn something new all the time (The recent surge in online classes like Coursera and Udacity has helped a lot). Now I'm fully employed, directly from University, as a software developer. Is/was my degree useless? No way. Those 4 years of studying history and doing lots of research (I think I wrote around 15 papers in those years, around 70% of which were on subjects with little previous research done before) have taught me to choose my sources wisely, to reflect on my own thinking critically (this is a prime asset as a historian, you cannot uncritically let your own preconceptions of the world direct your decisions) and to generally try to see things (and especially abstractions and thought-systems) from as many different sides as possible. All great skills to have if you code for a living. I might not be as well versed in theoretical computer science as a CS graduate from a good(!) program, but I am familiar enough with the territory that I can pick up new areas/technologies/algorithms rather quickly and it prevents me from getting the "I graduated in CS, I know everything and do not have to make any effort any more"-attitude that I've e.g. seen in my predecessor at the current job I have (he used unsalted md5-hashes for passwords, wrote Java classes that are >10k lines long and used a mix of zip-archives of his Eclipse-workbench and hundreds of commented-out LOCs as a form of version control)

jbaiter 14y ago

I wholeheartedly agree. I recently finished a 4-year B.A. in History (in Germany, mind you, so my decision wasn't hard on me in a financial way). I didn't double-major in CS or anything, but kept programming and IT stuff as a hobby, contributed to Open Source projects, helped with IT-related problems at university and generally tried to learn something new all the time (The recent surge in online classes like Coursera and Udacity has helped a lot). Now I'm fully employed, directly from University, as a software developer. Is/was my degree useless? No way. Those 4 years of studying history and doing lots of research (I think I wrote around 15 papers in those years, around 70% of which were on subjects with little previous research done before) have taught me to choose my sources wisely, to reflect on my own thinking critically (this is a prime asset as a historian, you cannot uncritically let your own preconceptions of the world direct your decisions) and to generally try to see things (and especially abstractions and thought-systems) from as many different sides as possible. All great skills to have if you code for a living. I might not be as well versed in theoretical computer science as a CS graduate from a good(!) program, but I am familiar enough with the territory that I can pick up new areas/technologies/algorithms rather quickly and it prevents me from getting the "I graduated in CS, I know everything and do not have to make any effort any more"-attitude that I've e.g. seen in my predecessor at the current job I have (he used unsalted md5-hashes for passwords, wrote Java classes that are >10k lines long and used a mix of zip-archives of his Eclipse-workbench and hundreds of commented-out LOCs as a form of version control)