OT: CS studies (was: Re: Let Go, Standard Library From Community)

[Lars Ivar Igesund]

Bill Baxter wrote:
> 
> If all you know is CS, then I think you're restricting the kind of work
> you can do.  It's not too tough to figure out how to be a competent
> programmer coming from a hard science or engineering discipline.  But
> going the other way is pretty much impossible.  My tack was to take a
> lot of CS courses, because they were fun and relatively easy, but go
> with EE as the major.  It was much more difficult, but I'm glad I did it
> that way.  The decent grounding in calculus, linear algebra, Fourier
> analysis etc that I got from that has allowed me to do things I never
> would have been able to consider had I just gotten the CS education.

I have a CS master degree myself (is that what you call a major?), and I had
all of the subjects you mention above. Over 5 years, I had calculus, linear
algebra, the fourier stuff, laplace and friends (this was actually a math
course especially for the computer students), statistics, physics, a tad
chemistry, discrete mathematics, basic electronics, and some more digital
techniques, molecular biology, pencil drawing (!), tree/wood facade project
and introductory philosophy. In total, this amounted to almost 2 years, I
think. The rest was CS related, the basics (computers, programming, etc),
intermediate (software engineering/planning, databases, programming
languages, etc) and my chosen subjects/projects (natural languages,
algorithms, graphics, and a whole year spent on projects (including the
master thesis) for privately held companies).

All in all, I think this is as good as it will get at a university. Most of
my fellow students ended up as consultants in Accenture and friends, very
clever people, but at least a few chose their route more from the career
outlooks back when we started, rather than a true interest in computers.
Those of us who chose due to the latter, mostly have jobs in other areas,
and quite a few have started their own companies.

> I've heard that CS departments at schools these days are suffering from
> a big drop in the number of majors.  But that seems to me to be as it
> should be.  The IT boom brought on a lot of silliness.  You really don't
> need a CS degree to do most IT jobs.  Yes, *everybody* needs to know how
> work with computers these days to varying degrees.  Just like everyone
> needs math to varying degrees.  But that doesn't mean there need to be a
> lot of math majors, or CS majors.   Almost everyone takes a class or two
> from the math department, but very few major in it.  Likewise, pretty
> much everyone these days should have a class or two from the CS dept,
> but we don't really need that many majors.

At my university, they are seeing a little bit lower levels on the incoming
students' grades, but they're far away from having empty seats. Norway
seems to be in a somewhat special situation these times though, companies
sucking up all technical engineers coming out of Norwegian institutions.
Also, Trondheim being a small city, and still having major employers like
Google, Yahoo, Sun, ARM and Atmel, make CS majors a highly sought after
group of employees.

-- 
Lars Ivar Igesund
blog at http://larsivi.net
DSource, #d.tango & #D: larsivi
Dancing the Tango