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?"

Comments

Probably not much

[MerlynEmrys67]

Experience matters...

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.

Re:Probably not much

[c]

I don't care if you have a minor in CS, a partial degree, or a degree in animal husbandry.

Translation: Knowing how to deal with bullshit is a heck of a lot more important than being able to write Hello World in Java.

c.

Maybe, I think

[sribe]

I don't have good experience to answer from. But as a business owner with a highly technical background, I would indeed value a CS minor for sales, marketing and support type of positions. I think it would be quite helpful to have people in those not-strictly-technical positions who could have an understanding of the technology that was deeper than the typical "salesworm" grasp. I don't know what your job plans are, but I think I remember reading somewhere that people with psych degrees can often be successful in sales.

Of course if I were hiring you to be my shrink, I wouldn't give a flying one whether or not you had a minor in CS ;-)

Re:Maybe, I think

[bladesjester]

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.

Re:Maybe, I think

[c0reboarder]

I recently graduated with a major in CS and a minor in Mathematics from a not so major university. But, I did manage to land a great job at a major healthcare software company. I know quite a few people in my same position that did graduate from big name universities that don't have majors in related fields, but minored in CS. My company looks for BRIGHT individuals with at least SOME background in CS, and then trains you for your role. This is because so many roles are things that are new to the industry and no matter who you are you probably wouldn't have much experience (exceptions are of course GUI programmers with tons of VB experience etc), but there are plenty of roles in a company like mine where a minor in CS could get you the job.

*Sigh*

[lbmouse]

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.

Re:*Sigh*

[cperciva]

the degree does not matter as much as the person

Absolutely. On the other hand, if you don't go ahead and get the minor in computer science, what do you answer when someone asks "so, you claim to be really interested in computers... why didn't you take more computer science courses at university?"

Go for it.

[HotNeedleOfInquiry]

It will mean next to nothing in a small to medium company, but might make a big difference someday in government or a large corporation.

Re:Go for it.

[tverbeek]

I can't see a person's "minor" making much of a difference beyond their first job out of college. It's kind of like how no one looks at your high school GPA except college admissions departments and maybe your first post-college employer, how you might as well drop the extra-curricular college activities from your resume when you go shopping for your second or third job, and after 10 years in the working world they might not even bother looking at your college GPA at all.

I was on track for a Math minor as an undergrad, but flunked a class (didn't bother doing the homework, which turned out to be essential to passing the tests), and suddenly had to think about whether I really needed to dig myself out of that hole and struggle through the last couple courses. I didn't. They really didn't interest me enough. And no one has cared. My employers have all been far more interested in my work experience and abilities, not whether I took Differential Equations.

I also didn't major in Philosophy, but was only a few courses short of that as well. I don't regret that either... both taking the classes and not taking them all. The point is that I took the non-major classes I took because I wanted to learn the material (and I mentioned them in my interviews to make sure my potential employers knew that). Getting a formal minor to put on my resume didn't really matter.

Human factors

[molo]

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

Re:CS minor better than CS major

[douthitb]

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.

Re:CS minor better than CS major

[bladesjester]

"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"

Who cares?

[John Harrison]

At this point, if you enjoy it, take it. I have never used my minor and I have never regretted it. You will probably actually use yours given that it is more useful than your major. :)

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.

just a little joke

[Bill Dog]

For a few dollars (and about a semester) more, I can also minor in CS.

For a few dollars more, you can learn about C++ (the good), Java (the bad), and Perl (the ugly), get a job, and barely make from it all a fistful of dollars.

If you major in CS, minor in logic

[QuietRiot]

Offtopic I know, but certainly pertinent to many I'm sure...

A must read : Undergraduation. ( and feedback from anon professors on this essay )

Yet Another College Advice Essay

Grab some microeconomics before you leave.

The following is from http://www.paulgraham.com/hiring.html

...
Have you ever noticed that when animals are let out of cages, they don't always realize at first that the door's open? Often they have to be poked with a stick to get them out. Something similar happened with blogs. People could have been publishing online in 1995, and yet blogging has only really taken off in the last couple years. In 1995 we thought only professional writers were entitled to publish their ideas, and that anyone else who did was a crank. Now publishing online is becoming so popular that everyone wants to do it, even print journalists. But blogging has not taken off recently because of any technical innovation; it just took eight years for everyone to realize the cage was open.

I think most undergrads don't realize yet that the economic cage is open. A lot have been told by their parents that the route to success is to get a good job. This was true when their parents were in college, but it's less true now. The route to success is to build something valuable, and you don't have to be working for an existing company to do that. Indeed, you can often do it better if you're not.

When I talk to undergrads, what surprises me most about them is how conservative they are. Not politically, of course. I mean they don't seem to want to take risks. This is a mistake, because the younger you are, the more risk you can take. ...

Actually college is where the line ends. Superficially, going to work for a company may feel like just the next in a series of institutions, but underneath, everything is different. The end of school is the fulcrum of your life, the point where you go from net consumer to net producer.

The other big change is that now, you're steering. You can go anywhere you want. So it may be worth standing back and understanding what's going on, instead of just doing the default thing.

All through college, and probably long before that, most undergrads have been thinking about what employers want. But what really matters is what customers want, because they're the ones who give employers the money to pay you.

So instead of thinking about what employers want, you're probably better off thinking directly about what users want. To the extent there's any difference between the two, you can even use that to your advantage if you start a company of your own. For example, big companies like docile conformists. But this is merely an artifact of their bigness, not something customers need. ...

A Public Service Message

I'd like to conclude with a joint message from me and your parents. Don't drop out of college to start a startup. There's no rush. There will be plenty of time to start companies after you graduate. In fact, it may be just as well to go work for an existing company for a couple years after you graduate, to learn how companies work.

And yet, when I think about it, I can't imagine telling Bill Gates at 19 that he should wait till he graduated to start a company. He'd have told me to get lost. And could I have honestly claimed that he was harming his future-- that he was learning less by working at ground zero of the microcomputer revolution than he would have if he'd been taking classes back at Harvard? No, probably not.

And yes, while it is probably true that you'll learn some valuable things by going to work for an e

Is a CS MAJOR even worth anything?

[pyite]

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.

I had a CS Minor and now have a job in Tech.

[sho222]

Quickly breezing through the replies to your post, it looks like I might be the first person to reply who can actually speak from experience.

I graduated during the downfall of dot-coms with a BA in Economics/Finance, and a minor is CS. Being stubborn, I shunned the i-banking jobs my fellow Econ majors were taking and still went for a job in technology (even though they were in scarce supply). I ended up finding a great company that was more interested in hiring smart people than what letters they had on their degree. The one requirement my company has when evaluating candidates (besides high GPA) is that candidates must show a passion for technology. I can safely say (because I confirmed it after getting the job) that the CS minor on my resume, along with the related work I had done during my time at school, was the element that put my resume near the top of the stack and landed me the interviews. A CS minor is not where it ends -- you'll have to prove your skills and knowledge during interviews, for sure, but having a CS minor can be a huge boost to your overall package and help get your foot in the door.

Once you are in the real world, the difference between having a CS Major and CS Minor will fade pretty quickly, IMHO. In my experience, the basics that you learn from earning a CS minor (software design principles, data structures, etc.) are enough to put you in a position to learn the specific software design practices of the company that hires you. Chances are pretty good that everyone that starts at the same time as you will be learning a whole new set of company-specific tools and practices anyway. CS majors may have an upper hand just from their experience with how to solve CS problems, but if you have the passion, you'll put in the extra work it takes to catch up. It's also good to befriend the smartest you meet in your first week - if your company isn't highly competitive (and I think most tech shops aren't), you'll be able to learn a lot just by sharing experiences and get a little help once in a while when you're stumped.

So, the bottom line from my perspective is that if you seriously want a job in technology, go for the extra cs minor. Don't worry about the extra 12% in student loans that some other poster pointed out - you'll have those paid off way ahead of schedule if you're successful. If technology is where you want to make your succuess, a CS minor will do a hell of a lot more to get you there than just a Psych degree.

Re:CS minor better than CS major

[srmalloy]

What a typical, moronic CS reply. Actually, don't you mean "hack", (as in done blindly with an axe) like a CS person trying to do math.

Depends on the CS people. When I was in college, I was one of two undergrad CS majors who spanked an entire class of EE majors in an upper-division/graduate EE class that was essentially 'programming for direct hardware control' (i.e., writing code to control SIO chips). The professor had to give the two of us 'A's and grade the rest of the class on a curve so he wouldn't have to fail 3/4 of the class. (Having the department undergoing accreditation probably affected his decision in that regard...)

Well, we have tried to use CS people, and I have seen the code, too.

And I saw the code of the EE majors in that class; I'd never seen someone screw up a bubble-sort function before... And these were upper-division and graduate EE students

People with "real degrees", like engineers, tend to pick-up very sophisticated programming concepts and can write very good code.

Whether a CS major has a 'real' degree depends more on the CS program than the person; where I went to college, the difference in course requirements between a BA in CS and a BS in Math with an emphasis in CS was nine units of upper-division math; three upper-division classes isn't going to make much of a difference in your ability to write good code.

Lots of CS people cannot multiply without firing up a copy of the Python IDE, and you wonder why I want someone with a "real degree" that can program.

Aside from the pitfalls associated with sweeping generalizations like this, I wonder how much of the semicompetent CS people you've seen have been people who went into CS because it looked like they could make a lot of money at it, not because it was something they wanted to do.

Also, I am not exaggerating. We wasted 1.5 years with a programmer writing code under the direction of some engineers. Out of desparation, I gave the project to some engineering grad students to work on. They were done in a month!

So either the programmer wasn't able to write code, or the engineers weren't able to communicate effectively with non-engineers. Either conclusion is viable, and your experiment didn't rule out the second option.

--
"Four years ago, I couldn't even spell engineer, and now I are one!"