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Comment by korijn | Hacker News Reader

I am not aware of anyone with a software engineering degree. Is that really a thing?

At least in the UK, "Software Engineering" degrees are just Computer Science degrees with a different name and a restricted subset of course options. From what I can tell, they're a marketing gimmick, but even respectable universities will offer them. The more questionable universities will also offer actual specialised courses under that moniker (in the same vein as "games design" degrees), but they aren't great.

Some Unis also offer different tracks for Masters degrees - MA (Master of Arts) in Software Engineering, or MSc (Master of Sciences) in Computer Science. Those differences are a bit more meaningful. The MA will be softer, with less research focus, and is (ostensibly) explicitly designed as preparation for industry.

My uni offers both a one-year MSc SE, and a two-year MSc CS. For organisational reasons, the 2 yr program is basically SE+MSc Information Science.

Students can pick their final subject; there is no difference in subjects between the two programmes, though we obviously expect some difference in result. After all, you should show some proficiency in both masters if you're doing the 2yr programme.

I'm currently supervising a student (SE) on file recovery, to whom I'll definitely forward the link. It's right up his project's alley.

Side remark: had he been enrolled in the 2yr programme, the subject would have been the same. I'd just expect him to extend his current work with a research question towards information science.

Yep, I'm the software engineer with diploma. I have master degree in Computer Sciences (Software Engineering Department). I'm from Ukraine.

Was where I went. Two separate degrees:

https://www.newcastle.edu.au/degrees/bachelor-of-software-en...

https://www.newcastle.edu.au/degrees/bachelor-of-computer-sc...

Looks like there's even a "computer systems engineering" as well.

https://www.newcastle.edu.au/degrees/bachelor-of-computer-sy...

The Computer Science college at Oregon State University offered both CS and Software Engineer degrees. The CS degree focused more on theory and technology, SWE more on management strategies (Agile, etc) and project architecture. I was really frustrated hitting the workforce and not knowing much about the "flow" of large team software projects.

It was interesting seeing what the EE's and ME's were learning about, standardized practices, vs what CS was taught, the "figure out a system" method.

At the Oregon Institute of Technology we start with three terms of C++ for Software Engineering and code all four years in several languages. We might not go as deep into the theory, but we can safely use a pointer and understand what the NullPointerException actually is in managed languages. By the time we graduate we have worked on a lot of code and two large projects, one of which is with a team of other students.

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