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Comment by mp05 | Hacker News Reader

I foresee a future where industrial engineering and CS are combined into some super-degree. There is currently a surprising amount of overlap in the OR side of things, but I'm shocked by how few IE grads can program their way out of a box. It's a shame, really.

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Operations Research is basically Industrial Engineering + Mathematical Optimization + programming familiarity. It's super useful.

I mean, it helped win WW2, so I think its utility is already demonstrated. :)

Thanks for the comment. I was thinking more about linear programming and related techniques that mostly came about after the war with Dantzig and when computers could be utilized (I know Kantorovich independently also developed the technique before the war). I went ahead and skimmed some articles on OR in WW2. Cool stuff. Thanks for expanding my knowledge.

> but I'm shocked by how few IE grads can program their way out of a box. It's a shame, really.

These days, you could replace the "IE" in your sentence by any of many, many disciplines and still be correct.

As much as mathematicians will hate to hear this, CS is a new and more tangible/practical way to do maths and should therefore hold a spot in a general education as central as maths has in the last few centuries.

I view mathematics (as in, proving theorems) as one of the professions that's most likely to succumb to automation. We like to think there's some mystical human intuition involved, but that's just us putting things the brain isn't all that good at on a high pedestal.

CS already is the super-degree.

How so?

It qualifies you for an opinion on any subject.

A CS degree also qualifies you for on-the-job training in writing code, that odious task that your professors find trivial but somehow are also terrible at it.

We just don't have time. Incentives are elsewhere. Any time devoted to writing good code for a paper is time we cannot use to work on the next paper, (shudder) grant application, or a plethora of other things that we are either forced or incentivized to do.

I miss coding from when I was in a more junior stage of my career and could afford time for it, and I think my fellow professors mostly feel the same, I don't think many would dismiss it as trivial or odious.

I’m inferring “odious” from the priority that is applied to it. Maybe “irrelevant” is better?

But when those junior engineers hit my company, they can do homework problems and that’s about it. “CS fundamentals” aren’t useful when you can’t quit vi or debug a regex. They get to be useful 2-3 years later, after the engineer has shaken off being a student.

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