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Comment by droithomme | Hacker News Reader

I'm not even sure that CS is the best degree for software engineering. People with maths, physics, computer engineering and software engineering degrees seem to get more done and be more likely to be qualified.

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I'm curious. Why do you think that's the case? Do you have any evidence to back that claim?

I suspect it's anecdotal and based on experience. It wasn't even a claim, but more of a statement of how things seem.

One example: Google is known to have a lot of people with CS degrees. Yet often, their software is astoundingly lame. For example, their voice transcription seems to have no awareness whatsoever of the names of people in my contacts, data that Google has full access to. This results in a horrific user experience for anyone who attempts to rely on the results. The problem here isn't what degree the engineer had. The problem is more about conscientiousness. Whoever did that system, does not care.

Myself, not having a CS degree, am keenly aware that people perceive that to be a weakness. So, partly in order to make up for that, but also just because of my personality, I care a lot about the quality of what I do, and I assess quality from many different angles, not only the angle of am I using the most efficient algorithm. I'm not saying CS people can't care, but non-CS people do have more reason to.

    The problem here isn't what degree the engineer had. 
    The problem is more about conscientiousness. 
    Whoever did that system, does not care.

I can see how you might have gotten that idea but having worked at Google in the Past let me suggest an alternative explanation. Personally Identifiable Data is heavily policed at Google. It's possible that the problem was less how much the engineer cared and more a lack of access to that data for some reason.

Thanks. I actually did think of that explanation. But it doesn't hold up under scrutiny. Google Voice, of all services, is exactly the kind of service that should be able to access the user's contacts, for things like dialing and showing the names on incoming phone calls. Super hard to believe that's an issue. And if the permission isn't there, it's easy to ask for it. And if not, just use a generalized list of names.

Yes silly me for focusing on contacts. They could have just built a general name dictionary for various languages. If they cared to. But (judging by the poor recognition performance of the system) that doesn't seem to have happened, at least the last time I used the service, which admittedly was some time ago.

You can get the /impression/ people without a CS degree have great skills - but there's a selection bias because if they didn't have a CS degree they had to have those great skills to get into the industry in the first place.

I only speak English and 100% of my German friends have great English skills. But that doesn't mean 100% of /all/ Germans have great English skills - it just looks like that because my sample is biased.

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