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Comment by pklausler | Hacker News Reader

It's a lot harder to fake one's way to a mathematics degree if one lacks or cannot acquire rigorous reasoning skills, and those are critical to the construction of quality software. Whereas I interview a lot of CS graduates who have degrees from fine schools and can't solve simple analytical problems or write a straightforward predicate expression to test for a well-defined condition.

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My experience is mostly counter to this. At least with respect to engineers (fewer mathematician and scientist types that I've encountered professionally). My office prefers engineers of computer scientists, to such an extreme they'd hire a civil engineer over a computer scientist.

The consequence is a lot of people that know nothing beyond basic algorithms and data structures who try to code their own geographical databases using arrays/linked lists and wonder why queries like find the nearest neighbor to X and find all objects within this shape take forever. The answer is, they used the wrong data structures. But convincing them of that is like pulling teeth. Also, according to several of them, C = C++, and every language gets compiled to C so why would you use anything else...

But you said "everything else being equal", so I'm confused why you're highlighting the extreme negative examples. If you interview a math major and a CS major and they both do equally well on those simple analytical problems - would you still rather hire the math major?

I'd make offers to both, of course, once I've moved on from the simple question to the hard ones and observed good answers! Good candidates are rare.

yes, his point is that he could be wrong about the hire decision, and going with the mathematics degree is more likely to be right.

Whether or not that's true is another discussion, but that's the point he's making.

I have a degree in CS & Math, so I'm guessing I'm good to go :)

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