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I'd say just the opposite, and not just because I have a degree in CS. My reasoning is: in the next 50-100 years, there will be a ton of breakthroughs in other

I'd say just the opposite, and not just because I have a degree in CS. My reasoning is: in the next 50-100 years, there will be a ton of breakthroughs in other fields brought about by sheer number crunching. Biology is seeing this with bioinformatics, physics is seeing it by being able to process the humongous amounts of data thrown off by modern equipment like the LHC, etc. Having a CS degree allows you to work in any of those fields, applying your knowledge of computation to help others achieve decidedly non-useless breakthroughs. To give an example, the biology department at my alma mater is recruiting CS grad students as fast as it can to help implement some distributed system to simulate protein interaction (or something like that, I know so little about biology that it's embarrassing). I'm not saying CS should be the default choice of every technical person, but it's not utterly useless to other fields. In fact, I'd say CS is _more_ useful in this case than it is to cubicle software jobs, because in the average Enterprise Doohickey, you aren't doing anything complicated enough to care if your algorithm is O(n^2) vs O(n).

endtime 17y ago
Agreed. I've seen people in both linguistics and bio looking for CS RAs in the past few months. If you have a BA in Software Engineering then I agree it's probably useless for anything but programming, but a good BS in CS can get you a job in finance or a spot in law school (and some of my fellow CS majors from undergrad are doing those very things right now). It's definitely not a limiting degree.
bbuffone 17y ago
Your still doing CS - not biology and that was my point. The article seemed to be saying if you are not sure about what to do choose CS. I think that is the wrong choice. I love software and can't imagine doing anything else but if I had a CS and didn't like it I would need to go back to school and get another degree to do something else. That isn't true with say a math degree.
- Xichekolas 17y ago
  I guess I fail to see how math prepares you better to do biology than CS does. Neither major contains the domain specific knowledge that a biology degree would impart, so it seems like neither would prepare you better than the other. I'd also imagine that both involve more math than biology, so they are both sufficient in that department. And as I pointed out in my last paragraph, I'm not saying I agree with the article either... I was just pointing out that CS knowledge is useful outside of CS.

endtime 17y ago

Agreed. I've seen people in both linguistics and bio looking for CS RAs in the past few months. If you have a BA in Software Engineering then I agree it's probably useless for anything but programming, but a good BS in CS can get you a job in finance or a spot in law school (and some of my fellow CS majors from undergrad are doing those very things right now). It's definitely not a limiting degree.

bbuffone 17y ago

Your still doing CS - not biology and that was my point. The article seemed to be saying if you are not sure about what to do choose CS. I think that is the wrong choice. I love software and can't imagine doing anything else but if I had a CS and didn't like it I would need to go back to school and get another degree to do something else. That isn't true with say a math degree.

Xichekolas 17y ago
I guess I fail to see how math prepares you better to do biology than CS does. Neither major contains the domain specific knowledge that a biology degree would impart, so it seems like neither would prepare you better than the other. I'd also imagine that both involve more math than biology, so they are both sufficient in that department. And as I pointed out in my last paragraph, I'm not saying I agree with the article either... I was just pointing out that CS knowledge is useful outside of CS.