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I think the problem is an abundance of math skills. After all, as so many startup engineer blog posts have said, you don't really need math to write web applic

I think the problem is an abundance of math skills. After all, as so many startup engineer blog posts have said, you don't really need math to write web applications. We need to replace the math courses in a CS degree with something more useful. Maybe some classes on Javascript, NoSQL, and whiteboard coding.

nawitus 12y ago
There should be plenty of room for "theoretical" CS courses and practical software engineering courses.
StrLght 12y ago
Really? I mean math is something irreplaceable in CS. It would be replaceable if it was something like "web apps development" degree.
- Iftheshoefits 12y ago
  I'm hoping the parent is making a joke by riffing on the absurd technical requirements demanded by startups for working on what amounts to a glorified CRUD webapp. The math heavy analysis that a CS degree provides just isn't necessary for, oh, 95% of programming jobs. The people who design the systems for reliability or process "big data" at huge companies with real scaling issues (Google, Facebook) need to have such training. On the other hand, these companies do need talent who never the less have skills that are rleatively rare. They shouldn't need to pay engineers the $200k+ salaries of big companies, but expecting to get median quality engineering without paying more than $110k/yr is as ridiculous as a non-degreed "webdev" expecting $180k/yr because he can slap some customizations on bootstrap and poke around a Ruby codebase.
  - TimPC 12y ago
    It depends. If you have a large enough team on a project that you can shield someone from math oriented and efficiency sensitive tasks as well as the planning in place to do it then the math heavy analysis isn't needed. Many start-ups have teams of 1-2 working on entire web apps and need everyone to be able to take on any task. Many people without the math background end up writing n^3 solutions to O(n) problems in code that gets executed at high frequency. The core value of those math skills isn't their explicit use, it's the training the brain gets in writing efficient algorithms and having knowledge of how hard certain problems are. Even in CRUD apps I've often seen requirements that are equivalent to NP-hard problems on large data sets, and I've been able to discuss the efficiency tradeoffs allowing the business team to redesign features when they weren't happy with performance. Without the math background, we'd see build it, put it in production and when the data gets large enough cry about performance and lose users waiting forever for a page to load. The last piece is in many start-ups I've seen the programming team will own or co-own Analytics because of a lack of statistics skills on the business team. Again with a small team not having a solid math and stats background has huge implications on the data analysis portion of roles.
noir_lord 12y ago
Rather than altering CS which is a good course we should really look at creating an alternative for people who are going to be actual programmers and not computer scientists. For many (including myself) what we do is nearer to been builders than civil engineers and beyond a basic grounding time would be better spent on the other skills that make up a good developer.
tsuraan 12y ago
Absolutely wrong. You don't need a ton of math to wire up a house, so should electrical engineers stop taking math clases? Of course not, you'd be an idiot to hire an electrical engineer for that job. Likewise, if you're just cranking out CSS and javascript, you probably want somebody with a tech degree or a code camp certificate, not a CS degree. Aside from that, what the heck would you teach in a course on NoSQL? The theoretical underpinnings of key/value mapping? Proper denormalization of data? I'm honestly curious here.
vonmoltke 12y ago
Note to self: sarcasm on the Internet usually doesn't work. I'm not serious. The primary thrust hat people who have taken the math required by an undergraduate computer science or engineering degree can probably see at a glance that the typical startup salary offer is shit. Thus, I sarcastically suggested we should remove math from the CS curriculum in order to make graduates less able to understand this.[1] I did so in a way that was also supposed to caricature the "programming doesn't need math" crowd, but apparently I came off as a member of the crowd. I was hoping that my sarcasm would be indicated by throwing in "whiteboard coding" as something a degree should cover. That so many people thought what I intended to be caricature was serious worries me. [1] Hence the reason I said "abundance of math skills"; potential candidates know too much to be suckered.

nawitus 12y ago

There should be plenty of room for "theoretical" CS courses and practical software engineering courses.

StrLght 12y ago

Really? I mean math is something irreplaceable in CS. It would be replaceable if it was something like "web apps development" degree.

Iftheshoefits 12y ago
I'm hoping the parent is making a joke by riffing on the absurd technical requirements demanded by startups for working on what amounts to a glorified CRUD webapp. The math heavy analysis that a CS degree provides just isn't necessary for, oh, 95% of programming jobs. The people who design the systems for reliability or process "big data" at huge companies with real scaling issues (Google, Facebook) need to have such training. On the other hand, these companies do need talent who never the less have skills that are rleatively rare. They shouldn't need to pay engineers the $200k+ salaries of big companies, but expecting to get median quality engineering without paying more than $110k/yr is as ridiculous as a non-degreed "webdev" expecting $180k/yr because he can slap some customizations on bootstrap and poke around a Ruby codebase.
- TimPC 12y ago
  It depends. If you have a large enough team on a project that you can shield someone from math oriented and efficiency sensitive tasks as well as the planning in place to do it then the math heavy analysis isn't needed. Many start-ups have teams of 1-2 working on entire web apps and need everyone to be able to take on any task. Many people without the math background end up writing n^3 solutions to O(n) problems in code that gets executed at high frequency. The core value of those math skills isn't their explicit use, it's the training the brain gets in writing efficient algorithms and having knowledge of how hard certain problems are. Even in CRUD apps I've often seen requirements that are equivalent to NP-hard problems on large data sets, and I've been able to discuss the efficiency tradeoffs allowing the business team to redesign features when they weren't happy with performance. Without the math background, we'd see build it, put it in production and when the data gets large enough cry about performance and lose users waiting forever for a page to load. The last piece is in many start-ups I've seen the programming team will own or co-own Analytics because of a lack of statistics skills on the business team. Again with a small team not having a solid math and stats background has huge implications on the data analysis portion of roles.

noir_lord 12y ago

Rather than altering CS which is a good course we should really look at creating an alternative for people who are going to be actual programmers and not computer scientists. For many (including myself) what we do is nearer to been builders than civil engineers and beyond a basic grounding time would be better spent on the other skills that make up a good developer.

tsuraan 12y ago

Absolutely wrong. You don't need a ton of math to wire up a house, so should electrical engineers stop taking math clases? Of course not, you'd be an idiot to hire an electrical engineer for that job. Likewise, if you're just cranking out CSS and javascript, you probably want somebody with a tech degree or a code camp certificate, not a CS degree. Aside from that, what the heck would you teach in a course on NoSQL? The theoretical underpinnings of key/value mapping? Proper denormalization of data? I'm honestly curious here.

vonmoltke 12y ago

Note to self: sarcasm on the Internet usually doesn't work. I'm not serious. The primary thrust hat people who have taken the math required by an undergraduate computer science or engineering degree can probably see at a glance that the typical startup salary offer is shit. Thus, I sarcastically suggested we should remove math from the CS curriculum in order to make graduates less able to understand this.[1] I did so in a way that was also supposed to caricature the "programming doesn't need math" crowd, but apparently I came off as a member of the crowd. I was hoping that my sarcasm would be indicated by throwing in "whiteboard coding" as something a degree should cover. That so many people thought what I intended to be caricature was serious worries me. [1] Hence the reason I said "abundance of math skills"; potential candidates know too much to be suckered.