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How Valuable is a Minor in Computer Science?
DenmaFat asks: "I'm an IT person finally finishing my BA (in Psych) at a big state U. For a few dollars (and about a semester) more, I can also minor in CS. I'll probably do it anyway, because I love the subject matter, but I'm wondering what the value of a CS minor is in the job market. Are there any CS minor holders who can speak from experience on this one?"
Having 5 years of experience matters more than what the exact degree is.
That said - having something that says CS on your resume will get you through a lot of HR screens. Remember for each job a company posts, 100s of resumes come in. They might phone screen 4-5 candidates and bring in 1-2. The job of your resume is to get you from the door to the phone screen.
Once you are past the HR droid - your degree doesn't matter, your technical skills do... And trust me - I can tell if you have what I am looking for, and I don't care if you have a minor in CS, a partial degree, or a degree in animal husbandry.
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
This comes up on slashdot all the time. As a relatively long time (15+ yrs) non-pointy-haired boss who hires developers, the degree does not matter as much as the person. Some of my best programmers barely finished secondary school.
Common sense, the ability to work with others *gasp*, work habits, and organization skills are more important than the quality of a piece paper you bring into my office. We can teach any other skills that are required if someone is passionate enough about technology.
You should look into studying human factors engineering/human-computer interaction. Having both psych and CS/programming skills makes you pretty quickly employable, especially if you have a master's. Good luck.
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
This is a huge problem that I see happen all the time, at many different companies that I do contract work for.
Instead of paying someone who really does now how to program (which includes being able to create a well thought-out design and actually implement it), the managers think they can save a few bucks by having an engineer who "knows" how to program hack something out real quick. It may be a few months down the road before it is realized that the program is crap and has to be completely redone. Then the company has to pay big bucks for someone like me to come in and fix things - much more than it would have cost them to hire someone with a CS degree to write the program in the first place.
"For example, just about every engineer can hack out a FORTRAN or C program, but almost no CS people can do engineering."
and "hack" (as in done blindly with an axe) would be an appropriate description of the way many of them "program".
Trust me. I've seen code from people with what you call "real degrees"
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
I encourage every college student I know to take as many courses as they can in CS. Not because they will use them, but because almost any job these days requires interacting not only with computers but with computer people and it is good to have some clue as to what the computer is really doing and what the computer people are doing as well.
Lasers Controlled Games!
It may just be that he only has another semester left in order to get the minor. This seems more likely since he said he enjoys the subject material.
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
Sadly, I don't even consider a BS in CS to be worth much these days. My feeling in talking with graduates is that the dot com bubble watered down most Universities' CS programs... and I say that coming from a pretty highly ranked CS school. In my opinion, CS programs should focus on less programming and more CS/Math as they seem to just be churning out programmers, not scientists.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman