Comment by alphazard | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alphazard | Hacker News Reader

CS degree is starting to become a bimodal distribution. There are enough people who thought they could buy a high-salary job by getting a CS degree, and universities advertising to that effect, that the market is now flooded with candidates who have degrees on paper, but don't have the mojo.

Their brain doesn't work like a hacker's, and they would have to work very hard to compensate, but they got into this for the easy high paying job, they don't want to work hard.

Somehow other degrees seem to be better predictors of competency. A lot of physics/math folks, and various non-software engineers realized that they have a hacker's brain, and programming pays more than what they were doing, so they got into software.

One thing that I always observed is that there is a huge difference between people who enrolled in a CS program to learn programming, and people who learned programming years before enrolling in CS.

Programming requires a brain that's wired a certain way. In my career I saw highly intelligent people struggle writing simple, maintainable code for years without getting any better. It's all sort of orthogonal to college, too.

I hadn't noticed, but you are right.

When I went to school, all the non-CS engineering tracks involved two years of bootcamp. Harsh weeding out of underperforming students, not always in a responsible way.

In my fourth year I was in a CS OS class (my own pedigree was EE/CE). A group behind me was talking, and someone openly expressed concern that they really liked CS, but they were unsure about their ability to program. Oh, ... man.

I think the fact that any real CS talent had an easy time getting great employment for a long time, left some schools with less than the most ambitious grads as professors. Talent just self taught themselves past that, or had already done so before enrolling.

I wouldn't say it's a recent phenomenon. Hackers have been making unflattering jokes about mediocrity in corporate programmers at least as far back as the 1970s.

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