Ask HN:Can a CS guy survive in electronics work? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN:Can a CS guy survive in electronics work?

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I was a long time Computer science fan. At the age of 14 I started with programming in C and quickly graduated to socket programming and experimenting with other languages like Ruby. But before I joined college I attended a seminar on basic electronics and liked it a lot. I changed my plans of majoring in CS and went for a electronics degree instead.

After some time I suddenly started to wonder if I made a wrong choice. First of all is that in my college in an electronics degree they focus mainly(and rightly) on circuit designing and micro controller design and management. To be honest I miss courses like algorithms and theory of computation. But on the other hand I feel much much re leaved that I dont have to study in the more proprietary software they use, like for GUI programming they just emphasis on microsoft windows and for object oriented programming they limit themselves to whatever is included in java only. Also there are no "interesting (as i want)" stuff like a course on functional programming.

Fortunately in my electronics course they have interesting things like AI and image processing (and electives for bio informatics).

So would it be too hard to survive in a world without algorithms and data structures for a CS guy?

Take the degree that provides you with material you wouldn't otherwise learn. In your case, this would be electronics, because I strongly suspect you will pick up on the CS stuff on your own. My experience is similar to yours. I was enrolled in the CS program at a pretty big engineering school. I became somewhat disenchanted by it, as there were all sorts of interesting classes out there, but I only had free slots in my degree for 2. In most of the CS courses I enjoyed the stuff, but frequently had already learned it on my own. So I switched majors to Geography. (Such a degree is nice, because it allows many random courses, so I could learn stuff I would have otherwise not learned). I minored in CS and continued it as a hobby. This has had no noticeable impact on my career, and I now work as a researcher at a university, writing and evaluating software.

HTH

That is really an excellent idea.

Take the intro CS courses, math, statistics. The GUI and Java and whatnot seem to be more about learning to program than about learning CS.

I did ECE (Electrical and Computer Engineering; there's no separate EE degree) and this stuff was actually required.

Can you post links to curricula?

There is no such thing as an intro CS course in our college, but on the other hand math and statistics have been my hobby for a long so i think i have already covered what you would call intro. Actually here courses are pretty much fixed my college is an exception for providing "real" electives 6th and 7th semesters (others just tell you what elective you have to study so that is more like the choice of the institute).

If you would like here is a link to my curricula

http://www.uvpce.ac.in/departments/ec/index.php?file=contain...

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