Wow, that is a real shame. I have to agree that far too much is
lumped into the CS major in many programs, and that it is entirely
possible to graduate with a degree in CS without being really good at
modeling and solving problems. I may be a little partial, but the
sharpest people I've known professionally in this field have had
Masters Degrees with specializations in algorithms and data
structures or the like. The key is then taking this textbook stuff
and finding ways to apply it to the real world. Many of the best
students go on to academic careers in the field and write esoteric
papers that will never have any practical consequence ever.
But really, if I were writing a database server or compiler, I would
want someone with some formal training in the field. Like before
messing with YACC and LEX, might it be easier to write a recursive
descent parser for the language at hand? Or knowing that disk access
is typically way more expensive than memory access. Those sorts of
insights can save man-years and yield workable systems. Too often, I
see good programmers without theoretical training completely clueless
about them ;-).
-Brad
On Sep 29, 2005, at 8:40 PM, Ethan Rutter wrote:
Which is why every one of the best software engineers I've known
(19 years in the industry) is not a CS major. They studied math,
engineering, physics,...areas in which you learn to solve very
difficult problems and really hone your analytical skills. Sadly,
it appears that few of our CS programs are really concentrating on
this, which is one of the reasons we (ST locally) rarely consider
CS graduates for positions or internships in our automation
software engineering group. The candidates from engineering and
mathematical fields are simply much better.
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