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

I would avoid IT

[MikeRT]

What you may want is a Software Engineering degree. I went into Computer Science since my university didn't offer SWE, and occasionally I took a CIS/IT course. What I noticed was that the students were typically very low quality students and had little interest beyond what was right in front of them for the assignment. The course material was also very superficial, even where we had overlaps. Our CS networking classes could actually train you to be an entry-level admin. Not at all true of the IT program. Programming? Our freshman entered CS with almost as many credits as their seniors graduated with.

You can focus on whatever you want in CS, so take it if you like IT work. It'll pay a lot more than an IT degree and carry more weight when you switch jobs.

Re:choose scientist over technician

[2.7182]

OK I know the above is flamebait, and is bad because it obscures a true issue. Namely, that I teach senior IT majors at a decent engineering university and often they don't know how to do even some of thesimplest stuff I would expect, even for windows users. They are often confused about what bits and bytes are, and when I asked them some basic operating system things they were pretty confused (like the fact that the operating systems allocates memory). If I ask them to write a 10 line C++ or Java program they moan. I actually think some of them may have been computer phobic, as crazy as that sounds.

Re:choose scientist over technician

[morgan_greywolf]

That's because many IT majors I have encountered went into IT because they wanted to be business majors, but didn't want to do as much with accounting or finance. On top of that, many go into IT because they think it can make them a lot of money "working with computers" (ha!) and computer science looked "too geeky".

I've met both UNIX and Windows sys admins in the real world who are products of some of these courses -- and let me tell you, they leave a lot to be desired. Even UNIX admins often fail to understand fundamental UNIX concepts like awk and sed; they find vi confusing; and they can't fathom how pipes work. These are the same ilk who write shell scripts that look like they were written using some poorly-written DOS .bat -> shell script converter, including plenty of UUOCs and UUOEs.

It makes me wonder: how do these people even get these jobs?

1) aim high and 2) learn a profession

[wwwillem]

Starting with number two, ask yourself the question: "do you want to know everything about nothing or nothing about everything". The best illustration I guess about these two extremes are getting a degree/masters in nuclear physics and on the other side doing an MBA. The former falls for me in the category 'learn a profession'. Now the interesting thing is that people can move in their career (and most will) from being a specialist to becoming more generic, like moving into management. But I don't see that happen the other way around.

Translating this to CS/IT: a programmer can easily become a sys-admin, but I don't see that happen so quickly the other way around. BTW, I'm saying all this with 25 years experience behind the belt. I've even been a short while on the other side of the fence, teaching CS/IT at the university.

The other part --aim high-- is simple. Which of your two options would be the biggest challenge to complete. Pick that one!! You can always downgrade, it's much tougher to upgrade.

Uh, no. Study CS if you want a career.

[TheMCP]

I've got... uhm... 19 years working in the industry by now, and I've been both a lead programmer and an IT director, so I say all of this with some assurance:

A degree in IT requires the study of how to use and apply computers. A degree in CS requires the study of how to program computers.

If you get a degree in IT, you'll be able to get jobs in IT. If you get a degree in CS, you'll be able to get jobs in CS or IT. So, that CS degree gives you a lot more job options. Further, a lot of people in IT burn out on it, so if you got a degree in IT, you could end up stuck doing a job you hate, while if you get a degree in CS, you can transition back and forth between IT and programming jobs as you like.

To clarify further, while a programming manager won't hire an IT person as a programmer at any level (they didn't study it, after all, so theyd have to learn years of programming experience on the job), an IT director will generally hire a CS person as an entry level IT person, and then once you have that job experience it's easy to move up the IT ladder as you change jobs. (I went directly from lowly IT grunt in a larger company to IT director in a smaller one.) You really can learn how IT is done on the job, and since there are few barriers to moving up in the field (with so many burnouts there isn't as much experienced competition as you'd expect) it's much better to have that CS degree and then if you want to do IT, work your way up in it.

Re:Essentially correct

[The Clockwork Troll]

This is bullshit; thinly veiled elitism, and I say this as an honors graduate of a top 5 CS program with 10 years of experience utilizing the education that could supposedly get me any IT job. Have you ever spent any time with quality, experienced IT staff? The reality is they are just as hard-to-find as quality, experienced software engineers. For some reason, though, software engineers suffer more from delusions of grandeur.

What you are saying may hold some truth at the entry level and that is only because entry-level IT jobs have a fuzzier skill requirement than entry-level CS jobs. And that may largely be a function of IT being more of a trade field with many specializations possible; CS jobs tend to share the same horizontal underpinnings.

The hard parts of IT are learned on the job, much like the hard parts of software engineering. A fresh CS Ph.D. could be equally worthless as a software architect or IT architect.

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?

About as often as you see a CIO hired to design the search algorithm that's going to be deployed in those data centers.

Any interchangeability of IT and CS for IT jobs goes away after you move up from grunt work. A key difference is that it's easier to bullshit your way into higher-level CS work because society has been conditioned to accept inferior software as the norm. In contrast, when IT doesn't work, companies can't do business, and when the company can't do business, people get fired.