Meanwhile over in the mechanical engineering department, someone is complaining that they have to learn physics when they just wanted to build cool cars.
this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2023
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I took engineering for a year before I realized it had nothing to do with trains.
Yeah that's why you go into physical training. That physically has trains... Right?
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...then don't study computer science. I study CS and it's annoying when someone in a more math/logic oriented course is like "If I get a job at a tech company I won't need this". All that IS computer science, if you just wanna code, learn to code.
The problem is a lot of people who want to learn to code, and are conditioned to desire the college route of education, don't actually know that there is a difference and that you can be completely self-taught in the field without ever stepping foot in a university.
I always wanted to believe this, but, at least in my country, not even a specialized high school degree is enough to get me anywhere for months, it's crazy.
Maybe you could even make it without formal education, but everyone's always looking for those sweet 3+ years of experience in the field (ಥ﹏ಥ)
I certainly experienced this at the start of my career. Everyone wanted me to have at least bachelors degree despite the fact that I was able to run circles around fresh college graduates. It wasn't until someone gave me a chance and I had real world experience that people stopped asking me about my college education. In fact later into my career when they learn about the level of experience I have and that I'm entirely self-taught, it's often seen as something positive. It's a shitty catch-22
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We're not closing schools despite having libraries and the internet, having (good) teachers is useful to learn faster and get pushed further. There are some good programming schools that can make it more efficient for you. I think the main problem is rather the insane cost of higher education in the USA which create anxiety about being certain that you can repay it in the future it may open for you. It is sad.
It is really difficult to get a good job being self taught.
Can you get well paying coding jobs with upward mobility without at least a BA in CS?
It's harder to break into but I make 150k and barely graduated high school. Software engineering is largely a field that doesn't care about degrees but about ability. It's harder these days to break into the field than it was 10 years ago when I did but it's absolutely still possible
When I was looking for coding jobs with a decent portfolio, but no computer science degree I got 1 interview out of 300 applications. They absolutely will not look at you if you don't have the CS degree, or already know someone at the company who can force you in.
This is also just the reality of the job market, especially in this industry. Dev positions get hundreds if not thousands of applications which all vary widely in quality.
I have 20 years of experience and a six figure salary, the last time I went looking for work and was putting out applications I sent out easily over 100 applications and only had 4 interviews. I've found it's best to form a relationship with a competent recruiter, and work with them anytime you're back on the market. They're incentivized to find you a decent position so that they can make their commission. Of course finding one that is decent is almost as hard as the process of sending out applications, but once you do it's a relationship worth maintaining.
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I have a fine arts degree and I'm a lead dev 🤷♂️
You must write beautiful code
It's all ASCII art, but it runs like shit ;P More seriously; what constitutes beautiful code is very open to interpretation. Someone would say that a single line of list comprehension expression is beautiful while another would say the same thing expressed over several lines making the logic abundantly clear is beautiful.
Maybe not what you're asking but people with a non-CS M.Sc or PhD commonly switch to coding, especially in the data fields.
Anecdotally, I have an associates degree in horticulture and am currently the engineering lead for a team of six
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I would have done CS if every math class at my school didn't have 500 people in it. Even college algebra. They basically made everything a weed-out class
I do think many of the CS concepts are pretty cool :)
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4 years later: "this button is the wrong color. fix it ASAP"
I was interviewed with complex logic problems and a rigorous testing of my domain knowledge.
Most of what I do is updating copy and images.
This hurts so much because it's my life :(
A few failed exams later you end up programming cyberpunk and since you're so oblivious to algorithms' complexity it becomes a meme not a game.
But it's ok because now Nvidia has to deal with your garbage code due to Cyberpunk being the only game that supports the latest graphics tech.
I wonder how many in that class will ever need to think about multitape Turing machines ever again.
The point of these lectures is mostly not to teach how to work with Turing machines, it is to understand the theoretical limits of computers. The Turing machine is just a simple to describe and well-studied tool used to explore that.
For example, are there things there that cannot be computed on a computer, no matter for how long it computes? What about if the computer is able to make guesses along the way, can it compute more? Because of this comic, no — it would only be a lot faster.
Arguably, many programmers can do their job even without knowing any of that. But it certainly helps with seeing the big picture.
Arguably, a much more important thing for the students to learn is the limits of humans. The limits of the computer will never be a problem for 99% of these students or they'll just learn on the job the types of problems they're good at solving and the ones that aren't.
The limits of computers would be the same as the limits for humans. We have no reason to think the human brain has a stronger computation power than a Turing machine.
So, in a way, learning about the limits of computers is the exact same as learning the limits of humans.
But also, learning what the limits of computers are is absolutely relevant. You get asked to create an algorithm for a problem and its useful to be able to figure out whether it actually is solvable, or how fast it theoretically can be. Avoids wasting everyone's time trying to build an infinite loop detector.
The "limits of humans" I was referring to were things like:
- How long can you push a deadline before someone starts to get really mad
- How many dark patterns you can cram into an app before the users stop using it
- The extremes of human stupidity
👍
..none of which would be relevant for most people working in back-end, which would be most people that take compsci.
I would hate to go to a compsci study and learn management instead. It's not what I signed up for.
University also shouldn't just be a job training program.
I didn't go to university, because I wanted to learn useful stuff, but because I'm curiousity driven. There is so much cool stuff and it's very cool to learn it. That's the point of university that it prepares you for a scientific career where the ultimate goal is knowledge not profit maximisation (super idealistically).
Talking about Turing Machines it's such a fun concept. People use this to build computers out of everything - like really - it became a Sport by this point. When the last Zelda was Released the first question for many was, if they can build a computer inside it.
Does it serve a practical purpose? At the end of the day 99% of the time the answer will be no, we have computing machines built from transistors that are the fastest we know of, lets just use these.
But 1% of the time people recognize something useful... hey we now found out in principle one can build computers from quantum particles... we found an algorithm that could beat classical computers in a certain task... we found a way to actually do this in reality, but it's more proof of concept (15 = 5×3)... and so on
Never used a Turing machine, but I have a project that generates NFAs and converts them to DFAs so they run faster.
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... and then you program games and you do the least performant bogosort you can ever think of
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But you can make games that much more interesting if your algorithms are on point.
Otherwise it's all "well I don't know why it generated map that's insane". Or "well AI has this weird bug but I don't understand where it's coming from".
Abstruse Goose!! 🖤
I’m grateful to this strip because reading it caused me to learn the correct spelling of “abstruse”. I’ve never heard anyone say the word, and for some reason I had always read it as “abtruse”, without the first S.
I did games technology at university. We had a module that was just playing board games and eventually making one. Also did an unreal engine module that ended with making a game and a cinematic.
It was awesome.
My favorite subject at engineering school !
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