Ask CompSci: Are you actually using your CS degree?

clone00 · 1 year

Yes holy crap. I don't write compilers for a living or anything but I use network theory, algorithm analysis, language theory every day just to name a few. (Iama senior dev team lead)

gamlidek · 1 year

I'm not necessarily using what I learned so much as I am using the skill to research and apply knowledge to solve new problems. I learn new things every day and the #1 skill I received through my studies was how to find information to solve problems.

Emore · 1 year

I use it for not having to explain that I have a basic problem solving capability.

o0o · 1 year

vermicin · 1 year

Directly? Not a lot. It's useful for a few things:

Proving to people you can finish a big project (college)
Proving to people you have a basic programming competence
Getting past the education filter
Knowing big-o and how to evaluate algorithms.
Knowing when to call bullshit on stupid claims
Expanding your knowledge outside of normal development (I'd have never written a shell if it weren't for school. or modified the linux kernel. or programmed an ir-capable robot. or written a compiler. or designed a computer chip. or learned about functional programming)

A lot of people see "need a bachelors in cs" as a crappy elitist requirement, but it's not. I have been involved in interviewing candidates for 4+ years now, and it's very clear who has been exposed to formalized education and who has not. The people who have not usually have huge, HUGE holes in their knowledge. I may not apply A* or neural nets or semantic analysis every day (or even more than maybe once a year), but I know when to apply it. I can also evaluate frameworks quicker. When someone brings Spring to me in Java, and I look at the IoC container and DI in general, you can just say, "oh, that generally amounts to partially-applied functional programming," and you know a huge library's worth of knowledge on how it should be used as well.

Your entire job as a developer will probably be knowing which algorithms to apply when, and then stitching them all together to fit business rules. If you haven't even studied graph theory or automata or recursion or optimization or analysis or formal proofs, you will be at a serious disadvantage. If your only learning is from blog posts and "self study," you'll be at a serious disadvantage. You need a heavy-handed book (no good computer book weighs less than 2 pounds, except maybe the dragon book and the pragmatic programmer), and people/mentors who can give you the why and when, not just the how.

So yes, I use it. Not applying everything all the time, but it's one of the best things I've ever followed through on.

otakucode · 1 year

Oh hell no. I'm a software engineer working on a big-ass system (law enforcement related) and the only time I get to delve into anything that actually relates to computer science as an academic pursuit is on my free time. I'd love to get into a position involved in creating software to perform research in other fields and see how bringing some computer science to bear on their problems might produce some insights they might not otherwise realize... but the chances of that are slim.

rabidstoat · 1 year

Sure am. Currently getting a Masters in CS while I work. Using that too -- not always directly, but the knowledge and discipline and structured thinking is useful. Though, oftentimes there is direct utility.

EDITED TO ADD: I work in a research lab, so that might be why.

emelski · 1 year

I'm the architect for a high-performance parallel distributed make replacement. I use the stuff I learned about algorithmic analysis and computational complexity all the time. It's critical to be able to understand why things are slow and how to improve them, and to be able to identify problems that simply cannot be solved practically.

calico_cat · 1 year

Absolutely I do. There's nothing funnier than watching engineers who didn't take algorithmic theory describe a variation of the Halting Problem and then swear that they can solve it.

namcor · 1 year

For reference, I'm a software engineer at a large-scale networking and security company (a fortune 500 homonym). I use what I learned in:

Operating systems
Networking
Algorithm and complexity analysis
Data structures
Databases

Every day.

Sometimes, rarely, I find the things I learned in these classes useful:

Formal language / automota theory
Compilers

For the inexperienced, a CS degree separates those who do and those who understand.

periodic · 1 year

You'll use it just as much as you want to use it. I'm always going to be a computer scientist because I like to approach computers scientifically and I love knowing more about the systems I work with.

I spent about 15 years learning computers on my own. I taught myself to program in many languages, and I was gainfully employed as such. But no matter what I did, I knew there were things I lacked. I couldn't name them all, but I knew it from all the things that didn't work quite like I expected.

Now I'm working on getting my MS in CS while I work as a programmer/sysadmin. Now things are making a lot more sense than they used to. Why is this program so slow? I'm misusing caches. How do I read in a configuration file, regexps? With a parser. Why is this operating system running so slow? Because the VM hypervisor interacts poorly with the systems virtual memory.

There are so many things I didn't know I didn't know until I learned them. That's the power of a CS degree. It ensures that I have all my bases covered and I'm not going to make a lot of naive mistakes with problems that have already been solved.

solyanik · 1 year

Are you using what you learned in your CS degree at your job? And I don't mean just programming, because I am currently a programmer without a CS degree. If I pursue a CS degree, I don't want it to be a waste of time. I want to do more than simple web app development, but are they many jobs out there that utilize higher level CS concepts? Thanks.

EDIT: some more background: I work on web-applications in C# / SQL and I find it pretty boring/tedious. I have an MIS degree that was mostly business-oriented, and I've taken a few CS classes at a local college. I am really interested in algorithms, and possibly embedded programming. I want more out of my career than just learning a new web framework or API and being a "plumber" if you will (which is basically what I do now). I have the opportunity to go back to school to get a BS in CS from a top-10 school. Will this degree be beneficial to me?

tl;dr: working as a programmer. Should I get a CS degree, and will I be able to use it?

llimllib · 1 year

yes, every day. I couldn't do my job if I didn't know data structures, algorithms and algorithm analysis.

skitch · 1 year

"Physics is like sex. Sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it." - R. Feynman

I'm not using what I directly learned in classes very often (though occasionally I actually do write what one would call an algorithm). But, I still like CS and I keep abreast of what's new in programming languages and fp just for fun.

And the name on my degree helps me get taken seriously as I am self-employed now.

So, if your question leads you to think "Is my CS degree worth it?", rest assured that if you enjoy pursuing it, it will be worth it to you for the rest of your life.

takeda64 · 1 year

Seems to me that most people who aren't using their degree are doing web development...

Interesting...

dugmartin · 1 year

Yes. In the last year (17 years after getting my bachelors degree) I built a full lexer/parser/optimizer/code generator for work. I even used my now yellowing copy of the Dragon Book from undergrad to do it.

Randolpho · 1 year

I'm gonna go with yes on this one. Hell yes. A lot, in fact. There are many, many that things I learned as part of my CS degree that I still frequently use today, such as:

How to normalize a database
How to model a problem and/or solution (flowcharts and UML and its precursors for example)
How design object-oriented software. I didn't exactly learn the SOLID principles -- those came after -- but many of the basic things that SOLID espouses were part of the object-oriented analysis I learned in school; SOLID just explains it in a different way.
How to analyze an algorithm. And yes, I still use Big O notation.
How to handle a software project from requirements to design to execution to deployment. Sure, there wasn't anything called "Agile" then, but everything in that course has helped lay a foundation for software projects now.
How networks are structured and how to program for communication over a network.
How to program in (almost) any imperative language. C, C++, Java, Pascal, C#, Python, Javascript, Perl, Ruby: these imperative languages all have a set of basic principles on which they rely. An if statement might have a different syntax from language to language, but the fact of an if statement is the same across nearly all of them.

That said, I know folks who took the same CS courses I did who don't use any of that stuff. They sit in their cube typing away in the same way they always have without thought to the bigger picture. I guess whether or not you use the techniques you learned in college depend a lot on you.

tl;dr: CS degrees are definitely worth it, but what you get out of it depends on you.

OEP · 1 year

No degree yet, but I often scoff at stuff I used to write years ago. Hell, I can hardly look at some of the stuff I wrote less than a year ago.

Some stuff that comes up:

Programming paradigms
Some lexical analysis (nothing too fancy)
Teamwork <-- that'd be a big one
Data structures for sure

But nothing has been more helpful than actually doing, and being in school for CS forced me to see some stuff that I was not previously seeing.

potentialPast · 1 year

Nope. If I could go back, I would just major in something like math or a science subject I like (physics) instead of CS.

Current job didn't even care that I had the degree. Sort of sad, but at least I didn't have to go into major debt for it.

RobotBuddha · 1 year

Nope. Code monkey doing web development. On a day to day basis I probably use more of the psychology classes I took than the CS.

BrainInAJar · 1 year

All the time. When I learned how a compiler works (by writing one) it completely changed the way I code from shotgun hope-for-the-best to actually understanding what the machine was doing with what I gave it.

Being able to understand why your program is slow (algo analysis) is great also

[deleted] · 1 year

No.

My specialization was in Theoretical Computing science, mainly Computational Geometry.

I'm working on LAMP stacks, mostly on the UI side.

I really, really wish I could use my degree; this pedestrian programming is lifelessly dull and simple.

[deleted] · 1 year

Weird timing, Tim Burgland of Augusta Consulting, presented on the topic of decision making in development last night. One of the points he brought up that stuck with me the most was that debugging is best accomplished using the scientific method: Have an idea of what's causing the bug, develop a test plan to prove the idea, resolve the bug... results may differ.

Most of my CS studies revolved around technologies and application, leaving very little theory or best practice approaches. In fact it would be 4 years AFTER my last CompSci class that I was introduced to TDD, agile, or any other methodology.

jeargle · 1 year

Definitely. In bioinformatics and computational biophysics there's a lot of hardcore computation going on. Graph theory, dynamic programming, covariance models, asymptotic bounds analysis, crazy data structures, machine learning, databases, and some stuff is moving closer to hardware (CUDA, FPGAs, and the like). It's pretty damn fun!

dakk12 · 1 year

I guess I don't actually have a CS degree yet (2 classes away), but I'm writing robotics AI for a small company, so yes I use most the knowledge I've gained pretty extensively.

sanguinoso · 1 year

every day to wipe my ass.

FugitivePuppeT · 1 year

Edit: What kind of "non-app" programming do you want to do?

hella_bro · 1 year

Only to automate little tedious tasks, like calculating a monthly rent/utilities breakdown for my roommates...

arcticlobo · 1 year

Ok, let's say there are 2 parallel universes. You get fired from your job. In one universe you have a CS degree from a reputable program. In the other universe you do not. Which resume is going to attract more attention?

nofrak · 1 year

You'd be amazed at the applications it has for public policy, which is what I'm studying now.

melink14 · 1 year

I work in an industrial CS research lab. So I guess it comes in handy.

cypherx · 1 year

I didn't get a CS undergrad degree but now I'm in grad school working on just-in-time compilation-- so yes?

froderick · 1 year

I'm using it to decorate my wall, if that's what you mean.

OEP · 1 year

Great conversations at parties!

Oppis · 1 year

nope. But I am broke, in debt, and unemployed! Sure glad I studied in the US.

sk3tch · 1 year

I'm using the certificate; however I learnt more in a month at my first job than I did throughout 3 years at university.

benjiballin · 1 year

If it were not for my Computer Science Degree I would be flipping burgers and living with my parents.

dmead · 1 year

does grad school in CS count?

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