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

[Fubar420]

Parent is absolutely correct -- I work in IT, though I studied CS. The difference is in what you tend to code:

  At the end of the day, CS writes the big applications, but you only write a couple at a time. IT/IS writes glue -- they take every service they need to run and make it run together - various directory services, authentication engines, web services, etc, etc..

Ask yourself, ultimately, do you want to write code that others rely on, or do you want to make a programmers code work the way it's supposed to? ;-)

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.)

Plan for Them Both, Take Your Time & Pick One

[eldavojohn]

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? Well, I've never been through the British education system, only the American one. So I'll give you the advice I would give anyone I know in America.

If you're planning on doing a two year technical college kind of thing then I recommend you to do otherwise. The auxillary courses that a four year technical college gave me have to a great extent been useful (possibly more so than the technical courses I took).

Assuming you've got a four year college plan, I would recommend you make two separate plans from your college's website. Take the IT path and pick out all your generals & then all your electives (it doesn't have to be accurate, just a rough guess). Then do the same with computer science. I'll bet you'll see that a lot of general electives overlap so take mostly those your first semester. While you're there, I think you'll be exposed to more students in the same and other realms. How do you so easily discount electrical engineering when IT & computer science are your obvious choices?

In America, there would be absolutely nothing wrong with changing from one to the other in the middle of your college career. It might mean more work but that's better than a lifetime of regret. In fact, it's almost expected you change your mind five or six times in college where I went to school. Sure, it'd take people five or six years to graduate but it's their choice.

I would recommend you do the above for not only IT & CSci but also EE & Computer Engineering (kind of a cross between CSci & EE). In my undergrad, I took CSci, Math & Music Theory courses to a heavy extent. I finished one class away from a math minor and one class away from a music minor. I'm really happy that I was able to take those diverse courses that were often a refreshing break from Computer Science. But, in the end, I almost wish I had committed to the Computer Engineering course even though it would have edged out the extra math and music I took because it is such a demanding program.

In the end, there's jobs in both these fields. I can't argue for one over the other because I don't like IT/Business people. Why do I hate them? Because I don't think they really care about anything other than money and they're often performing trivial jobs ... so maybe I feel sorry for them more than I hate them. I'm sure you're a very different person than I am, so it would be pointless for me to recommend you take CSci because in all likelihood, we have different values of different kinds of work.

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

[Organic Brain Damage]

Consider Software Engineering if you like to write programs. Computer Science if you like to discover new algorithms. And IT if you like to golf and sit in the corporate box seats of your Fortune 2000 companies' vendors.

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

[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.

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.