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Comment by jiggy2011 | Hacker News Reader

jiggy2011

The purpose of a CS course is not necessarily to teach people to become developers. Indeed it would be interesting to know what % of CS grads even work as programmers post graduation, probably less than HN would imply. Based on the people I keep in touch with from my graduation class, I would put it somewhere near 30%.

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That's a common thing I didn't understand about my fellow CS majors. Many of them did not want to become developers and even took pride in the fact that they made it until the final exams without ever having to hand in a single programming assignment they did themselves.

Yes, these people have amazing careers in management and consulting ahead. Is this good for the industry? I doubt it.

For me, the purpose of a CS course is to make people reasonable at programming with an advanced knowledge about the remainder of the field. It's easier to teach a programmer formal CS methods than to teach a formal methods guy to program.

Funny, I always thought it the other way around. I struggle whenever I try to teach myself any formal/theoretical stuff because without the aid of a teacher checking my work I'm never sure if I really understand or not.

I never had a problem learning programming languages on my own by following examples though.

I think you'll find that in CS, there's often if not always a way to implement or approximate the theory in code. To me, that's the more interesting part, but it requires self-learning because there are very few teachers who can blend theory into practical terms. Like the original EE intuition examples, perhaps it's something you appreciate after 10 years in the field.

Ouch. Does that imply that finishing in the top 80% of your class then put you somewhere near the bottom 33% of developers?

Wouldn't that depend on the correlation between class grades and developer skill? I have no idea about that.

You are assuming that the best CS majors must obviously want to be commercial developers.

People go to grad school in other disciplines (sciences, stats, etc.) which can take advantage of computation, for one thing.

I'm curious - what do the remaining 70% do?

Various things, a common aspiration was to try and fast track to a management position at a consultancy or blue chip where things were are more about spreadsheets than code. Others do technical work, but not strictly development like Q&A or technical support.

Some went into academia and some did other things altogether, I know at least one person who became a tree surgeon and another who is a session musician.

If Q&A is QA then it should be considered development, in a specialized domain.

except you just click things on a GUI there.

I'm fond of developer-QA folks that automate most of their pointing and clicking. There is, absolutely, a skill in finding bugs by exploratory testing, but someone who can combine that with automating previous tests (thus building up a regression suite) in a way that's maintainable is a real keeper.

Unless you're writing test automation.

I think you mean "except when..." As others said, QA automation is a serious endeavor, and an important one.

Tech support and CS degree?!? It might just be me but I cant really see a person with a bachelor or masters in CS work in tech support.

There are more jobs available, especially in places without software companies. Or people take those jobs temporarily while they look for other jobs, get promoted and end up following a different career track.

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