Hacker News Reader

Comment by AnimalMuppet | Hacker News Reader

What I want is for universities to offer a degree in Software Engineering. That's a different field from Computer Science.

You say that belongs in a trade school? I might agree, if you think trade schools and not universities should teach electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, and chemical engineering.

But if chemical engineering belongs at a university, so does software engineering.

View on HN

Many do. Though, the one I'm familiar with is basically a CS-lite degree with software specific project design and management courses.

Glad I did CS, since SE looked like it consisted of mostly group projects writing 40 pages of UML charts before implementing a CRUD app.

Plenty of schools offer software engineering degrees alongside computer science, including mine ~20 years ago.

The bigger problem when I was there was undergrads (me very much included) not understanding the difference at all when signing up.

Saying this as a software engineer that has a degree in electrical engineering - software "engineering" is definitely not the same as other engineering disciplines and definitely belongs in a trade school.

Right, because the guy sitting next to me and is designing a PCB for next copy of rPI is so much more for an engineer than the other guy designing a distributed computing algorithm? It shows that you only dealt with the trivial things in SE. There are very complex areas in both disciplines and as much as I can find trivial things in SE I can do the same for EE. Let's just not pretend it's a science fiction when it's not.

Developing a distributed computing algorithm I think would squarely fall into CS. Engineering is the application of stuff like that.

Last I checked ASU does, and I’m certain many other universities do too.

My university had Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Software Engineering and Computer Science degrees (in additional to all the other standard ones.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com