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Comment by smt88 | Hacker News Reader

I took OP's question to mean, "What parts of your CS degree are actually useful in practice?" That may be wrong. Perhaps OP wanted to know what is interesting, or they wanted an abbreviated CS curriculum.

While some of these are very useful in practice, a lot of the content covered is abstracted away in the stack in the languages most programmers use (Java, JavaScript, Python, C#, etc.)

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The way you interpreted my question is correct.

In which case, the grandparent’s comment is likely not useful advice.

Unless they’re writing Ruby, where unsorted arrays are faster than sets for everything, it is still very good to understand algorithms and apply them.

I found most courses I did as being useful. Many people can write code but only a few can understand how a machine running that code works, what the code they wrote does in the background , how can you write efficient and correct code, how can you better express business domain.

It's good to have a higher level of understanding, learning languages, frameworks and libraries is of course necessary but not enough if you want to be one of the best.

My advice is to read on CS topics as much as one can. Are you interested in databases or work with them? A bit of algebra will help explain how they work. Some of the introductory courses on databases I did had some algebra because that was necessary to explain relations, normalization and other topics. You can't do much AI and ML unless you learn some statistics.

As for algorithms, data structures, complexity I find them invaluable in any kind of programming.

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