Hacker News Reader

Comment by Oculus | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone know if companies view soft-eng grads vs. compsci grads from uw differently? The school says it's the same, but I'm hoping to hear some first hand experience. Asking as a prospective undergrad next year :)

View on HN

Having done > 70 interviews in my time at UW, most companies don't understand or care about the difference between Soft-eng and CS programs. I'd highly recommend CS over Soft-eng, unless you like pain.

That may be true, but for a Canadian a big advantage of taking software engineering is that it makes it much easier to work in the US later. An engineering degree lets you easily qualify for the "engineer" category of the TN visa, but with a CS degree it's considerably harder.

I don't think it's that much harder as CS can easily apply under the computer analyst category for the TN visa.

CS grad here, I've obtained multiple TN's and it's no different. You just have to avoid telling the agent that your job involves "programming". It's just a technicality really, the language was drafted at a time when terminology was different.

The degree doesn't matter if your employer is hiring you for a position with "Engineer" in the title. This works both ways between Canada and the US.

Software jobs are usually categorized with soft-eng, compsci, comp and/or elec eng and sometimes even other engineering disciplines. So they most probably don't view them differently. It really depends on the candidate and their capabilities. I have worked at places where the previous coop students were in compsci whereas I am a compeng student. For most of my interviews so far, the other candidates have been from softeng/compsci/ece. Answering as a second year undergrad :)

If you want to write nuclear shutdown routines for AEAC, or work on something else safety critical in Canada, there may be a difference. (Strictly speaking, you can get your P. Eng by doing CS, if you take the right set of courses, but nobody in their right mind would subject themselves to this.)

If you want to work on something relatively harmless (buttons on a web page) then it won't matter.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com