Computer Science or Info Tech?

An anonymous reader writes "I am currently completing my final year of secondary schooling, and in the next few weeks I need to submit my university (or college to all you Americans) preferences for processing. I've decided that I want a career in the IT industry, but am unsure of whether to apply for a Computer Science course or an Information Technology course. I understand the difference between the two courses (CS being the study of the principles and concepts involved in Computing at a more fundamental, and often more sophisticated level, and IT being a more practical, application based approach to computing), but would like to know from anybody who has studied either or both of the courses what kinds of careers each course would lead into and what would you recommend for someone such as myself, having a broad range of interests and wishing to dabble in everything before deciding where to specialise?"

Comments

CS vs IT

[pentalive]

So which do you prefer being - A system admin (follow IT) or a programmer (follow CS). They are not mutually exclusive. As a system admin I do a lot of programming. My boss in my last job favorite question was - "How can we automate this?". I like being a system admin myself - I get out of the cubicle more that way.

p.s. first post and actually fairly on topic :^P

Re:CS vs IT

[Stormx2]

Actually this isn't quite correct, at least not where I live (UK).

IT is drudgery. It involves looking at how people use computers in everyday tasks... The fact that you read slashdot shows that you will find IT hugely boring, seriously. I've done two seperate IT courses, one for GCSE and one for A-Level. Both were as bland and meaningless as eachother.

During coursework I tried my hardest to get down to some technical points, but the specification doesn't allow for that kind of thing. It is more of a kind of "look how magic computers are? they run on magic!" kind of course, you never get down to the nitty gritty.

CS on the other hand is a level-up. The social sides of computing is less studied, and computers themselves are more studied. ICT is a general "I can do computers, me" course, whereas a CS degree is a) more interesting b) more challenging c) employers will recognise b :)

Re:CS vs IT

[Anonymous Coward]

I was an IT major and switched to CS for several reasons:
* CS is more dificult, that's why I originally chose IT! I feared the math (IT requires 2 math courses while CS was closer to 9 but all ultimately most courses had a math background. CS is more math centric but you appreciate the inner workings of the field
* IT is more high level and you never quite dwelve in deep enough to appreciate things
* A good CS major can do any job an IT major can, but an IT major can not do everything a CS major can, so don't limit yourself!
* Whether you want to do sys admin or programming CS is a good choice, you'll learn how things work and you'll be better at troubleshooting advanced concepts.
* CS teaches you the theory. It's less practical application oriented but once you understand and appreciate the theory you can easily lean anything.
      - Consider: A job might require you to program in visual basic to interface with an Oracle DB. If you went in IT, they might have taught you to use VB and Oracle, so you're all set. In CS, it's unlikely you did either but you took a programming languages course and a DB theory course which enables you to learn almost any language in a day. Now consider you get asked to switch from VB to C# and a mysql db. In IT you never touched either and you don't understand the basic language concepts so its harder for you to pick up both. With CS you still have the theoretical background with enables you to pick it up in a day. The same analogy trancents multiple areas (not just programming) like networking, operating systems, etc. This also applies to those who don't get a degree and just get a bunch of certs, eventually those certs become obsolete and its harder for those without a CS degree to adapt.

The only thing IT has over CS is some basic business courses, but if you get a CS degree, getting an MBA is trivial.

Re:CS vs IT

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

While you could well be right, the one absolute in university-level computing courses is that everything is relative.

Some places have an old-school CS course that teaches strong theory and is quite mathematical. This is probably good for someone who wants to deal with challenging programming work in the future: the kind of person who wouldn't just be writing a web front-end to use a database, they'd be writing the compiler and the database engine. These courses probably won't teach you to program in this week's greatest programming language or web/DB framework. What it will give you is a solid understanding of the principles and exposure to a broad range of ideas. With that sort of perspective, a CS grad should make short work of getting up to a reasonable level of competence in any industrial languages and technologies.

Sadly, it seems like an increasing number of places now run a "computer science" course that is basically just the latest industrial buzzwords. If you're looking at a course that teaches things like VB, XML, Windows/Linux system administration, business studies, web design, and the like, then IMHO that's not really computer science at all, it's just vocational training.

The potential scopes of other courses, such as "Information Technology", "Information Systems", "Software Engineering", are similarly wide-ranging, so it's hard to give advice about which course is best for someone without being able to see the details of what each really covers.

Re:CS vs IT

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I don't think it's so sad that there are relatively few places that teach the more theoretical forms of CS. Relative to other disciplines, there was an imbalanced excess of programs teaching skills that only a small number of people would need, and the kind of invention you describe will probably be done by people with a graduate education, anyway.

The thing is, I don't think a CS education is something only a small number of people would need. Sure, it provides a deep understanding of some areas that little else does, but it also provides a broad base on which to build anything else you need in less specialised areas.

Put it this way: people who go into writing software without the kind of understanding of database construction and system design that a good CS course would teach are often the reason we get ludicrously slow applications, with ever-increasing hardware requirements, littered with security flaws, and the design behind the code — if it has one at all, instead of misunderstanding the buzzwords and thinking a set of tests is a substitute — is such a mess that no-one can fix it, and you have to either live with it or throw it all away and start from scratch.

(Before anyone replies, please note that I wrote "the kind of understanding ... that a good CS course would teach". Studying a formal CS course is certainly not the only way to gain this understanding.)

Get a job

[also-rr]

For most people qualifications only serve to prove a minimum standard of competence. Yes, a degree is both necessary and a good choice - it helps develop your skills, and also makes you eligible for jobs where someone has made a degree a check box requirement - but other than getting past the first round it makes little difference to the prospect of being hired.

So instead of worrying exactly which degree to take, just get the one that you think you will enjoy most. It's going to be your life for years - if you don't enjoy it, it'll kill you. I did engineering, because it was fun, and I got offers from the IT industry when I graduated as well as elsewhere. There were plenty of people with maths and physics degrees heading into IT as well.

Much more important is to get employment in the right field. Even if it's an unpaid weekend job, or summers doing network admin stuff. Steady employment and a track record is much more impressive than anything most of your competitors will have at the start of the mad rush to hire graduates. The closer it is to your field the better, and if you can pick a company that will keep having you back and give you more impressive things to do that's great.

Even if they (or you) don't want to turn things permanent after college, then you will already have a headstart on networking in your field, proof you can work for a week in an office without putting laxative in the coffee and good things to talk about at interviews.

so...

[nomadic]

Double major.

Essentially correct

[nyteroot]

The above is a little inflammatory, but essentially correct. There is no job you could get as a IT major that you could not get as a CS major. There are many, many jobs you could get as a CS major that you would _not_ get as an IT major. Additionally, you may find yourself _interested_ in the science-y aspects of CS, and perhaps even go on to graduate school -- an avenue which would not only be blocked off as an IT major, but of whose existence you would not even be aware.

Choose scientist over technician.

Re:Essentially correct

[ziggyboy]

You're a student aren't you? If you actually tried applying for jobs, you'd realize that most recruiters actually care about your majors and the type of subjects you took. Sure a CS grad (like myself) may get the opportunity to get into IT positions but from personal experience most financial IT recruiters have had to reject me for the simple reason that I don't have any IT subjects in my degree.

I love technical/programming work so this doesn't bother me but just letting you know that all the moolah are in financial/business IT nowadays. Not all IT graduates end up in technician type jobs, in fact compared to CS grads they probably have more of a chance climbing up the corporate ladder. I know of a few IT grads who have started out as junior business analysts and worked their way up to project managers in years. Of course these aren't research/technical companies but in an IT department of your average bank.

Re:Essentially correct

[I_Love_Pocky!]

How often do you see a classically trained computer scientist (with no IT experience) hired to design and implement worldwide data center operations for an international Internet company serving hundreds of millions of users per day?

I hope you aren't suggesting that someone fresh out of school with an IT degree would be suited for this task either. We are talking about entry level jobs here, and there really isn't an entry level IT job that a CS grad couldn't do that an IT grad could based solely on their educational background.

I'm certainly not saying that getting a degree in CS is better per-say, but it does without a doubt open more doors at the entry level. If someone is absolutely sure they only want to do IT, I hardly see anything wrong with focusing their education on it. The education will be easier, but that doesn't mean the real world work will be. Serious IT work requires experience and bright people. There is nothing shameful about doing this sort of work, and the people who are really good at it are incredibly valuable to society.

Liberal Arts

[bennomatic]

Personally, I would recommend neither. Get yourself a liberal arts degree. Understanding a broader range of science, language, history, literature, politics, sociology, business and communication skills will make you a happier person in the long run.

It may be harder to land that killer job at your dream company right out of school, but if you're like most people, you'll grow and change over the years, and you'll look back and think to yourself that you're so glad you didn't get that job, or even better, how funny it is that you're now running the company that didn't take you as an entry level employee.

Liberal arts are severely underappreciated in this world. The more bright, interesting people who refuse to over-focus too early in their careers, the better the world will be; please do your part.

So study your technology. But this is an undergraduate degree; treat it like a beginning, not an end. The race is a long one, and you really don't need to be going full speed out of the gate.

Think 15 years down the road

[alexhmit01]

I graduated from school 6 years ago, and don't remember any of the details from my studies... however, the process (math heavy) of CS remains valuable. The MBA I picked up later rounded out my skill set, but if I had taken an accounting course or two plus a general management course or two, I could have saved the time and cash and gotten it later.

Right out of school, IT may be the more useful degree. Why CS grads can get any IT jobs easily, if the outsourced HR recruiting firm is looking for IT, you'll struggle, because if you can't check the boxes, you don't get the interviews. However, your first job should be on-campus recruiting, so if you're careful, it won't make a difference.

Ten or fifteen years out, we'd all like to think that nobody cares about degrees, but it isn't true. Once you move up the food chain a bit, management LIKES degreed people. They are happy to hire programmers with high school degrees or even drop outs that can sling code, but once they need a technical lead, they don't want the gut without the degree. Sure, plenty of people will post here about how they are just fine without the degree, but it is a limitation, and the original poster has already decided to get the degree.

In 15 years, the IT degree will seem like a slightly upgrade Vo-Tech degree, and the CS degree will seem like a real engineering degree. This shouldn't matter, but it will. When you start dealing with managers with Ivy League (equivalent in your case) degrees and pedigrees, they'll see the CS-guy as one of them but more technical, they'll see the IT guy as below them.

Think nobody will care in 15 years what you did in your early 20s? Most people are unimpressive, they don't really do much during their life... for those people, their MOST measurable accomplishments are schooling, so they trade on it, and respect others that do as well. Hell, my high school, that I went to for three years, remains on my resume, because it's the top school in my area, and most of the people I interview with are trying to send their kids there (or are sending their kids there), and after fighting with the increasingly draconian admissions process, figure anyone that went there must be top notch.

You never know what will help in the future, so run with it.

Re:Think 15 years down the road

[scoove]

One option if you can make the time for the investment is to add either a minor, double-major or emphasis in a non-technology field, especially if you're looking at the IT path. This approach will set you apart from other candidates and puts you in a position to be able to communicate and understand problems in specific business domains.

For example, while the Fortune 250 firm I work for is shedding programmers and analysts like mad for outsourced options, it is also hiring project managers, auditors, information security analysts and risk managers who have a non-IT specialization like finance, marketing, legal/regulatory in conjunction with the IT foundation. These multi-domain specialists are critical in moving projects forward, especially when the programming staff is outsourced and someone has to relate business requirements to the outsourcing resource.

Having come up in telecom and IT, I went back and added a finance degree a few years ago and am now completing a masters in economics. I went from having a tough job competing over scarce network engineering positions to a senior position in operational risk. The key was mastering more than one business domain so my employer found I could work between different business units. Many of my friends who've been successful have taken the same approach and it is a great way to reach into a six-figure salary pretty quickly.

If you find you're quantitatively inclined, you might consider getting a double major in finance or statistics to complement that IT degree, rather than focusing on a CS degree. The quant can be harder and the job market is significantly different. Countless firms have a shortage of IT analysts in finance, data mining and other corporate decision-making fields.

As long as you're a replaceable commodity, you'll be at risk to outsourcing and low salary issues. Become someone who can help management understand their problem area and relate it to a technology solution and you'll do very well.