Comment by hckr_news | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hckr_news | Hacker News Reader

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I graduated with a degree in BioSciences a few years ago, and elected to not do grad school like my peers. I saw no point of losing thousands of dollars to do a master’s in Bioinformatics/Data just to get a jr level job. That summer after graduation from undergrad I attempted to learn CS and go through OSS Computer Science program and TeachYourSelfCS to break into the industry. The problem was a lot of it wasn’t job relevant and it felt very rigid, and sometimes even more complex than it needed to be. These University level courses aren’t really necessary. I like to view coding as a trade and skill, something that can be learned and applied right away rather than a mechanism for research, feel free to disagree with me. In any case, I just wanted to code and build software (sorry CS purists...). I slowly found myself less interested in CS theory and more in software engineering. Feeling disenchanted with CS, I decided to spend a few months learning web and software development fundamentals through online courses on Udemy and Frontend Masters. After that I did a certificate in fullstack development at my alma matter (cost me a couple thousand dollars, much cheaper than grad school). I will say I was pretty lucky that as soon as I finished the full stack program, I was hired by a small software shop.

I think that CS vs SWE thing happens with a lot of people, and I got caught there, too. Luckily, I ended up really liking CS and it introduced me to the field, whereas otherwise I would've gone for SWE. There really needs to be a 'teachYourselfSWE' for people who are into that.

How can you tell which one is right for you? So many computer scientist graduates I know ended up pursuing software engineering that I've mistakingly conflated the two.

it's really theory (CS) vs building things (SWE). As you want to build larger projects, or build them better, you rely on CS ideas to do that. So SWE is really engineering assisted by applied CS. I've been studying CS for about two years and am only now learning any real application development. You can study CS without ever touching a computer or building an application (though doing both those things will give you context for why CS topics matter).

It's kinda like if you want to build a rocket to get to space, you can tinker with propellant, metal, and fire, and be a hobbyist that eventually you build a rocket to go to space. Or you can be a physicist and calculate everything on paper. To get to space you really need both those people, but the physicist can learn to build and the engineer can learn theory.

> but the physicist can learn to build and the engineer can learn theory.

So is this why frameworks exist? To abstract away the theory that proves something more "performant" or "sufficient", and allow the builder to do their thing?

More or less yes. The idea is that a framework (ideally) does some feature A the "right" way and programmers using the framework gain the benefits of convenience and safety, often at the cost of flexibility. Frameworks will usually try and balance the power or depth of the domain its abstracting with ease of use.

A good framework will stop beginners from making critical mistakes, decrease the amount of code its users have to write, and offer professionals well-constructed ways around its handholding as needed.

If your aim is to do some less demanding programming, e.g. using a framework without fully understanding how things all work together, then focusing more on practical projects could definitely help. However, this dichotomy between "CS" and "SWE" is a very dangerous idea. Once you have a solid grounding in CS, the software you write will be of much higher quality, you'll ship code faster, and you'll avoid many mistakes since you have a clear idea of what you're doing instead of just trying to blindly copy recipes.

Particularly helpful I would say is a solid idea in programming language theory and I can't recommend the MOOC by Dan Grossman from the University of Washington highly enough. As he said, even if you never get to program in the languages used throughout the course, you will become a much better programmer after finishing the course.

> The problem was a lot of it wasn’t job relevant and it felt very rigid, and sometimes even more complex than it needed to be.

CS was born out of a time when computers were very limited. How do you write a word processor with a spell checker, when the dictionary alone won't fit on a floppy disk, or fit in memory?[1] How do you draw rounded rectangles on your GUI when they take too many CPU cycles to draw?[2]

CS people managed to carve out paths through problem spaces that could be done on the computers of the day. These days, you put everything you need into a hashtable and it looks up in microseconds and you don't have to care anymore.

[1] https://prog21.dadgum.com/29.html

[2] https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Round_Rects_Are_...

Interesting. I believe much of CS is practical now, and much is forward-facing and not relevant yet.

Curious to know: do you feel that you are at any disadvantage to peers who came to your role who went through a traditional CS or computer engineering undergrad program?

On the job, not really. Plenty of resources online that allow me to commit to continuous learning.

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