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Master of Software Engineering: CMU or Elsewhere?
nestea247 asks: "I graduated from CMU 3 years ago and have since worked in a very good company and gained quite a lot of solid software development experiences. Now I'm thinking of moving on, to learn more about software engineering i.e. management/methods/processes. CMU has a very good program. I have been comparing it against other schools like MIT, Stanford, Berkeley...etc., and it seems like only CMU has very specific concentration on software engineering and a tailor-made cirriculum. Other schools are just general masters degree in CS that might require me to re-learn or polish a lot of concepts in undergrad. So CMU sounds like a good choice, but I hope if someone could tell me what's good about the other schools. What should I take into consideration (academically) when I select a grad school for MSE?"
Wait a minute... you got out of Pgh alive and now you're thinking about going back?!? Are you insane?
Here's a tip for anyone considering CMU - STAY THE HELL AWAY!
Let's see, a CS dept. based more upon weeding out than teaching (if you don't know all of this shit already, then learn it by yourself fast enough to compete with your classmates, who have no life and *do* know this shit). Um, courses taught via video conference 'cause the prof spent the semester in Switzerland (or Sweden, whatever - great learning going on there, let me tell ya!) Gloomy weather almost every day. Miserable yinzers... and plenty of suicides, every year!
Oh yeah, such a great place!
whoah, got a little worked up. I just know too many people (myself included) who've sworn to *never* return to that hellhole.
On another note: it appears as though a lot of the slashdot crowd is comprised of coders, not computer scientists. Two things: software engineering is the life support system that allows a group to figure out what exactly needs to be written and how it's going to be written on-time, under budget, and to everyone's utmost satisfaction (quality). Otherwise it's just the forrest for the trees... and the other thing: coding is just the translation from ideas to the machine, almost any monkey can do it. The real art is in the system designs, *algorithms*, and the large amounts of domain knowledge to be grogged if anything useful is to be written.