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Comment by lumost | Hacker News Reader

I switched into Software Engineering following a physics undergrad and had to self-teach the majority of what I know.

10 years in, I find that many individuals fall into a trap of having forgotten many concepts while also thinking that they weren't useful in practice and a bad memory of having to learn/crunch the topic.

This was a significant difference from my experience where most concepts I only picked up as I found them useful/interesting to my work. As such I generally have a sense of pride/enjoyment from seeing an optimal algorithm or simplification of a problem based on concepts in the literature.

I think the 4 year CS curriculum could be revamped to focus on semi-practical projects with less focus on individual topics. Crunching algorithms for 2 semesters probably makes aspiring engineers feel that they are simply memorizing pages from a book which are trivially indexed by google.

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> Crunching algorithms for 2 semesters probably makes aspiring engineers feel that they are simply memorizing pages from a book which are trivially indexed by google.

I realize that the majority of engineers will never need to use any of the more advanced topics taught in an algorithms class, but I hope you recognize the irony in this comment; the “trivial indexing” performed by Google is anything but, and, in fact, is only enabled by those very algorithms, implemented dozens of times, in multiple languages, with subtle variations and optimizations and under non-obvious reinterpretations, at every level of the stack.

For the uninterested, it's easy to think or claim that a library or service will do the heavy lifting for you. If someone's goals with a comp-sci program are SaaS apps, web development or other topic which they perceive as [Not Hard], then it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking these topics don't matter.

I've generally found that most new or novel projects require a strong understanding of the fundamentals.

Yea, I kind of took a similar route. I was so bored near the end of my business major and tacked on a comp sci minor at the end. Those few classes I took were amazingly interesting then and most are still with me now. I was lucky enough to have a business internship while in school where I was exposed to the tech side of things and that got me extremely interested in and motivated by computer science. I'm often curious about what a full degree would have given me or if I would have had a better career if I went the comp sci route from the start. At least for me, I feel like I've learned close to 99% of what I know now from work and from learning in my free time after school. I feel so lucky to genuinely enjoy my job and be interested in learning more and expanding on my skills even to this day.

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