Comment by coned88 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by coned88 | Hacker News Reader

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I'm really not sure what you mean. I have a CS degree from a ~50th ranked US University. It is not considered a math degree, but instead a CS degree from an engineering department. My education was engineering focused. My degree says I am a graduate from the Engineering school. I can write assembly, program a fpga, write OO programs, OS drivers and System calls. Shoot, I even wrote My own file system. I learned java and C++, in the first 2 weeks of 2 classes, and that was all the programming instruction given. Though I had good experience in MIPS Assembly, Java, C, C++, Scheme, Lisp, ML, Haskell,Prolog, C+ and Fortress.

I designed my own soda machine, calculator and even designed/created a real world solution which companies were interested in, though I cant mention because it would be me not anonymous.

I was not a computer engineer, I was a CS student. My school also had computer engineering, but I was not really interested in the EE stuff.

I took all of the Math that engineers take, and I took the Engineering Chemistry and Engineering Physics.

Due to my CS dept being a subset of the engineering dept, the goals were the same. Everything was problem solving. Every class had its set of rigorous problems, which students had to succeed at or they simply would not pass.

I learned Algorithms, internal Operating systems, Complexity, Computation, fundamentals of Programming languages, distributed systems, organization, Computer Architecture, VSLI/HDL, etc. Im sure you get the point.

I personally think I bring a good bit to the table, as do the other few graduates that survived the curriculum.

You very well may find a more well rounded candidate than myself from the non traditionally educated pool, but they will be few. If you lump all CS graduates in the same pool, you are doing yourself a disservice. While yeah, somebody from a Java school may suck. What do you say to a candidate like myself, who really can bring what you need to the table. Do you just cross me off the list because I have a CS degree. If so, I think its you who may need to recalibrate.

Sure pure engineers and physicists may be good programmers, but do they understand the inner workings of a computer? Do they understand complexity, even the basic data structures. I assume you want efficiency?

That sounds exactly like the sort of degree I mean. It's not all that common though, in my experience, to find a CS degree with that sort of curriculum.

Do you just cross me off the list because I have a CS degree.

That's silly :) You may have noted from my post that I do hire CS majors.

but do they understand the inner workings of a computer? Do they understand complexity, even the basic data structures.

Yes, usually a lot better than most CS graduates. Because generally speaking in the real world these are engineering problems rather than pure problems.

This is just my observation, but I don't think I am wrong - CS majors are generally worse programmers (and usually more full of themselves, but that's another matter) than CS engineers.

I would consider you (based on your post) an engineer; as you explain, you were part of the engineering dept.

(that's not to say CS majors are all bad - I've met some extremely good ones. The problem is that the majority of CS is taught as a pure subject with a smattering of applied theory. There is a distinct lack of problem solving involved. Traditional disclaimer: YMMV)

Also I should point out that being an engineer does not automatically make you a great programmer. Clearly you need an interest, an amount of aptitude and the ability/willingness to learn the pure subjects (if they were not part of your degree). The last of those isn't all that important - to be a good programmer you only need the amount of pure theory that is required (and you learn to pick it up as you go) - this is a common trait of all engineering.

So what on earth do they teach in CS courses these days? That course sounds similar to the one I did in the 80s in the UK - especially the bit about not really getting that much instruction on languages, you were expected to be able to largely pick that kind of stuff up by yourself.

A lot of them tend to be just "java schools" plus a load of pure CS.

> you were expected to be able to largely pick that kind of stuff up by yourself.

I think the main problem lies here; because a lot of people are possibly too lazy to do this...

The problem is that the majority of CS is taught as a pure subject with a smattering of applied theory.

Curriculum wise UIUC actually does an excellent job of addressing this issue. I imagine other schools are similar. We basically have our three core theoretical courses and everything else involves programming. Every course that isn't a theory course involves several significant programming assignments. For example, in our networking course the final programming assignment (in C) is to implement TCP over UDP. We have a seperate course called Programming Studio that is required. The entire course just focuses on learning programming well. And students can opt to do a large software engineering project instead of a thesis their senior year (the vast majority do software engineering, not a thesis).

I think all these measures help, but despite the heavy emphasis on programming, a lot of graduates are still horrible programmers. I think the root cause is that we are still learning how to teach programming well; we've had a much larger head start on learning to teach mathematics.

Im not really sure how you the employer, knows what schools teach CS like mine did and which schools are Java schools. is it just a trial and error process? Should somebody like me, say that their CS degree is from an engineering dept on their resume?

It would efnitely be useful IMO to highlight engineering type skills alongside the cs ones on a cv.

In our particular case we would check out the degrees people had done (just Reading the websites) to get an idea of what they had learned - I only really do that for new graduates though, it's less relevant to more experienced people.

Well that is good to know, thanks.

This pretty much matches my university experience. I went to a public university which ranks in the top ten for computer science programs. It appears there is a large divide in the quality of computer science education.

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