Nope. Pure math people are significantly worse devs in their first jobs. Significantly. Why? They just don't have the language or training so you can't really

Nope. Pure math people are significantly worse devs in their first jobs. Significantly. Why? They just don't have the language or training so you can't really give direction that assumes anything. And interns are raw enough anyway, this lack of shared language hurts. My experience is based off of interns though. I'm sure given 2-5 years, it will depend on the person/continuous learning, blah blah rather than what courses they took in college. Now, another aspect of the question seems to be: are pure math grads smarter than cs grads? Nope again. Put a pure math and CS guy in the room together and I'm sure either could flummox the other with arcane jargon/an exercise. We choose what to do in college based on our interests at that time rather than only basic ability. I have CS, Stats, and Math degrees from college and I didn't notice any difference in raw mental horse power or work ethic or work load amongst those 3 majors. Aside: there was a marked difference in work load when comparing my engineering/math/stat classes and my econ minor classes though: weekly assignments for econ took 30 mins before class whereas cs/math assignments easily took a whole day or two of the week each. Aside2: And no, you can't generally say philosophy or physics grads make better software devs too.