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Comment by fgonzag | Hacker News Reader

Trade school? What kind of college did you attend? Most CS curriculums I've seen are full of math (science), computer science (compilers, algorithms, etc) and engineering (computer architecture, etc).

It's a mixture of science and engineering, leaning towards the science. Far far away from a trade school which would teach you practical skills (java, git, web development) and try to get you into the labor force ASAP

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OP said "software engineering." This is a separate field of study from CS.

Can you point to some schools with programs in software engineering, distinguished from their CS program?

You'll find google a useful tool for locating software engineering programs, but okay, here are a couple:

https://engineering.csuohio.edu/eecs/master-science-software... https://mse.isri.cmu.edu/

You'll find Software Engineering degree programs are often connected to schools of EE, CS, or more generic Engineering if you dig into this more. And of course things sometimes work in a different way - I think maybe MIT folds EE, CS and SE all together into the same department, possibly even the same degree.

I believe ABET recently deprecated their accreditation of undergraduate programs, and I don't have any idea what the implications of that are for SE licensure, but there's a possibly out-of-date list of ABET-accredited SE undergrad programs here:

https://www.softwareengineerinsider.com/abet/abet-software-e...

> You'll find google a useful tool for locating software engineering programs, but okay

Not the question asked, but the quality of the answer is about what I expected (based on what I suspected). Glad not to have made an upfront overinvestment taking the discussion too seriously.

What question did you ask that you feel went unanswered? You spent more words crafting a wordy disparagement of the reply than you would have spent asking for a clarification or making an actual contribution.

And that would be the difference between a CS curriculum and a Software Engineering course that someone might attend anywhere other than a Top 100 university. They are discrete curricula and the criteria to get on to SE tend to set a lower bar.

That's pretty interesting. I wonder if sitting for the PE exam were a legal requirement for calling oneself a "software engineer" in the United States, they'd raise the bar for admittance to those programs. (and honestly, improve the SE curriculum somewhat) As it stands, the trend towards licensing software engineers seems to have reversed itself recently. [1]

https://www.nspe.org/resources/pe-magazine/may-2018/ncees-en...

I was discussing this with my dad earlier today. Neither he nor I have a degree. He started a course in the 70s that he never finished, and I didn’t apply to university, for numerous reasons, but I was application age when fees were tripled to £9k, and the loan repayment structuring made it apparent that 80% of these degrees weren’t worth the money.

My current role title is Software Engineer, but I don’t go by it outside work very often because Engineer means something outside the technobubble. I have a friend with two degrees in aeronautical engineering, and he clenches every time he hears someone refer to me as an engineer. I agree with him too, but earning that title should be about more than a degree, engineers in industry almost always have to work under a supervising engineer for a significant period of time before acceding to the title themselves.

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