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The History of the CompSci Degree
Esther Schindler writes "Young whippersnappers might imagine that Computer Science degrees — and the term "computer science" — have been around forever. But they were invented, after all, and early programmers couldn't earn a college degree in something that hadn't been created yet. In The Evolution of the Computer Science Degree, Karen Heyman traces the history of the term and the degree, and challenges you on a geek trivia question: Which U.S. college offered the first CS degree? (It's not an obvious answer.)"
I want to see how long it takes a site specializing in guys good at CompSci in the age of Google to find that answer!
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
The first taught computing course in the world was at Cambridge University, UK in 1953. Why not be a little more international in outlook?
Well you certainly didn't graduate with an English degree!
Astronaut. Must have experience with moon landing.
early programmers couldn't earn a college degree in something that hadn't been created yet.
And yet, recruiters would still think so.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
I would say my Uncle is/was a "computer Scientist". He graduated with a BS in Math in 1962 or so. Then did 6 years in the Marines(on AWACs). I'd say he fits the bill. No degree in CS though...
âoeAt an academic level, it's a very different background,â says Bobby Schnabel, Dean of the School of Informatics at Indiana University and chair of the ACMâ(TM)s Education Policy Committee. "The calculus and differential equations that underlie engineering are not what underlies computer science. It's really discrete mathematics."
That was true a few decades ago. Today, though, all that discrete math isn't as useful. Today, you need calculus and Bayesian statistics for machine learning. You need differential equations and computational geometry for game development and robotics. Number theory, mathematical logic, graph theory, and automata theory just aren't that important any more. Most of what's needed from those fields is now embodied in well-known algorithms.
I got all the classic discrete math training, but over the years, I've had to use far more number-crunching math.
Purdue was first in 1962... and no I'm not THAT old and I didn't have to RTFA. I went there.
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
Every person I know who has a Computer Engineering degree makes less money than I do. I also work with people who have nothing more than tech school diplomas who make more than I do and frankly can run circles around myself.
When you graduate you will realize your degree is not what is important to be successful in the workforce. It is all about hard work, connections, raw talent, and a bit of good luck sprinkled in.
Signed, someone with a BCS degree.
Exactly what I was about to point out. I have a PhD in EE (microelectronics), and a bachelor comp sci, the two things could not be more far removed.
The PhD in EE was all about things like the physical properties of materials (especially silicon), chemistry, properties of plasmas in a vacuum, etc. the comp sci degree was more about coding algorithms,apis, multitasking and other operating systems concepts.
Both things are useful to me, and gave me completely different skill sets.
You can never know everything, and part of what you do know will always be wrong. Perhaps even the most important part.
Bullshit you aren't. If you're earning a PhD you're towards the top of the capable list of people who earned bachelors degrees. Some of the capable people will go off and get real jobs that pay 70 or 80k a year after graduation (which is now all of my former students from a course that finished at the end of 2011 who left academia), but you cannot get into a PhD programme without being well above average. Different fields have differing skill levels and outlooks, but you can't get a PhD in any of the sciences unless you have well above average reasoning and maths skills. You have be passionate about being dispassionate and you have to be able to look at evidence and analyze it properly. Those are extremely rare skills. Even amongst people with undergraduates in science or engineering.
In physics to get a graduate degree you have to be in the top 70% of graduates from a bachelors more or less, but to pass in physics at all at the undergraduate level is quite hard. You're not all that much more special than people in say, medicine or engineering but when you're in academia and everyone you see over 30 you call "doctor" you forget that only about 10% of the US population has a graduate degree, let alone a PhD.
Engineering and comp sci are a bit different. They're harder to get into to start with, but it's easier to get into grad school once you pass, because most of your compatriots like money more than they like being able to investigate some novel, as yet unsolved problem that may remain unsolvable. Why is physics easy to get into but is proportionally so hard? Because as part of the regular science faculty they don't really care. If you can get into 'science' in general you can enroll in any of the physics classes. Not enough people are interested in physics for it to be a huge problem. I'm in canada and in my graduating year there were, I think it was about 170 BSc grads in the whole country, and about 2000 in the US. But there were also about 1800 or 1900 PhD's in canada and the US. In comp sci we have about the same, today (a number of years later) number of PhD's as physics, it's up over 2000 ish but not far off. But something like 50k undergrads in comp sci in canada and the US combined.
I'll grant you, that getting a PhD puts you 'only' the top 10% or so of the population at all, and within that much of the distinction is more interest than specific skill set. But you can't get a PhD without being really good in your area, and really good in general. You can get a BSc and be mediocre, and that's as much about luck and opportunity as anything else. But once you get stuck in a room full of computer nerds universities can pick and choose who they take for PhD degrees. I know where I am they have about 300 qualified applicants a year for about 40 spots in grad school (and it costs about 100 bucks to apply so you don't just fling applications about wildly, but you that doesn't mean only 40 of those 300 will go to grad school at all).
I grant that there's a lot to be said for when you're born and luck, especially in being financially successful in life, but Academia in north america and europe are very much merit based. It may be luck and opportunity that determines which field you go in, and whether or not you end up a professor of computer science making 130k a year or bill gates making 130k an hour, but in both cases you can be in the top 1% of the population if you manage your money and don't do anything catastrophically stupid professionally.
TL:DR. I call bullshit. Luck and temporal factors will get you a bachelors and contribute to what field, and how much money you make. But to get even accepted to a PhD programme you have to be in the top quarter or so of graduates from comp sci or engineering.
Comp sci grew very much out of different departments, some places (like waterloo) it's an extension of maths, some places it's physics, some places it's engineering. But you're right, as a discipline comp sci is concerned much more with what is theoretically computable and how complex that is, how you logically envision that problem and how you organize and represent information. Computer engineering is much more about the problem of building all of the components and how they get soldered together.
Though I grant there are computer scientists who do research on what is computable on real hardware only, and engineers (and physicists) who think about hardware that could be used to solve problems not normally regarded as computable or computable in a particular time. Part of doing research is that you solve a problem and what discipline it happens to be belong to is secondary.
I don't know about Phd's, but I made $236k as a programmer last year, no high school diploma, no GED, no degree. So how impressive can a Phd be? That mean I beat out that 10%?
Depends, how many hours did you work, how much experience do you have, how many hours did you have to work to get there, how much vacation do you get, what's your pension like, what's your job stress like, where do you have to live etc. etc. etc. I know lots of professors who pick up their kids at 3pm every day, take 2 months at home in the summer (they still have to work some of that, but they are at home at least) taking care of the kid. You get to meet this constant stream of interesting people in academia etc. If you go off into industry with a PhD you can easily start at 100k a year at 26 years or 27 years old, and have all the vacation time, pension plan etc.
PhD's aren't about the money, you are guaranteed enough to be reasonably successful in life, but how much effort you want to put into it is up to you.
Oh, and where would you be without a bunch of PhD nerds inventing the languages who programmed in, the IDE's you used (or the command line compilers) the OS schedulers etc. Being able to program well is a skill, but computer scientists aren't programmers. You could have made 236 being a welder for all it matters, lots of scientists need to know how to weld, lots need to know how to program, but they don't do it well.
You could well be in the top small fraction of the population intelligence wise. Which means it's unfortunate you didn't go to school, because you'd be making 350k a year not 236k. One of my buddies is about 50 years old, making about 450k a year working part time. The joys of being able to teach people how to program.
Like I said, luck and opportunity can get you into a BSc and it can get you money, but it won't get you a PhD. Maybe if you'd paid attention in school you'd be better at reading comprehension than programming, though from the sounds of things this plan worked out better for you.
Very true. If you're getting a PhD you're trying to do actual science, not just be an IT guy. hell if you want to be an IT guy you don't even need a BSc.
I did see a help desk job with masters preferred listed.
I work whenever I want, when I want and how I want.... I'll give you compilers, although I wrote my own x86 assembler in 1986...
Before there was degrees, there were those of us that just did it for fun.
Money came into it later. Phd's, never.
I don't want to argue about public school systems. I said I didn't get a diploma or a GED, and sure if I'd gotten either it wouldn't make me better at what I do now.
It's not luck. We pick out the ones with the best averages, and the best letters of recommendation and all that relatively quantitative stuff. Letters of recommendation have a blurb of fairy bullshit about how 'Sir_sri is very talented and would make a barf barf barf' the important parts are the questions that let us judge what the raw numerical stuff actually means. What quartile of your graduates is this person in, would they qualify for graduate school where you are, on a scale of 1 to X how would you rate their leadership/technical skill/research potential/work ethic etc. That in conjunction with marks is a remarkably good indicator of how capable someone is at being a scientist. Not at being a programmer, but as has been hashed out a few times here last week, comp sci trains scientists, not programmers.
I think had mozart not been exposed to keyboarding until he was 20 he would have still excelled by the time he was 25. Just as we take kids who are 17 who've never even used a computer in african countries, some of whom never even had regular electricity (especially in from the indian sub continent and china), and by the time we're done with them they actually know something about how to be a computer scientist. Education exists to identify talent and build on it, which is why a broad public education includes a diverse range of things. I would say that it hasn't always been this way. Having the good fortune to be born rich made a huge difference 70 years ago and earlier. Since then we have made a massive coordinated effort to make sure everyone gets a shot in north america and europe at least.
Luck can elevate anyone talented to riches sure. But getting a PhD is an entirely achievement and demonstrable skills driven system luck only gets you so far. It can get you into a BSc, it can make you a billionaire, but it can't have you magically outperform 75% of the other people in the same programme for four years. You can certainly be talented and successful and *not* get a PhD, but you can't get a PhD without being talented. If you are bad we have 4 years to discover that you suck, and kick you out, we have every reason to turf out people who are bad (because that would ultimately negatively impact our reputation as a school) and we have every reason to only pick the talented ones from the undergrad lot.
I really do believe, from everything I've seen, that true intellectual talent is biological. You can direct it into a particular area. But I've seen 10 year olds doing grad school level maths because they really are that smart. At 10 years old most kids are still struggling with logarithms. Or multiplication tables. "Luck" or opportunity and environment can't take an average 10 year old and have them doing partial differential equations, nor can a parent (least of all if the parent can't do it themselves). There isn't a single kid in public school in the southern populated part of canada who, at 10, is denied the chance to do PhD level maths if they're capable.
Again though, you can have talent and be successful and not earn a PhD. But if you don't have natural, above average talent in the right area you won't get a PhD in that area. I'd bomb out completely in an drama doctorate just as they would mostly bomb out of comp sci. But if Mozart was born today, and never touched a piano until he was 17 he could certainly have earned a PhD if he wanted to and understood enough of the theory (which I don't, so I'm not qualified to judge how well his work would fit in that area). Which, incidentally, is the story with a lot of the people who have PhD's in comp sci who are in their mid to late 30's, because they didn't really get home computers, and only really got access to one in university.
Many moons ago, I was a junior in college and chasing down CS as my bachelor's degree. One day, I decided I'd had enough arguing with machines. Now, as a firefighter, I love coming to work, and make more than most of my friends who continued on to CS degrees.
Today?
I'm doing the IT / programming / database / GIS work for my fire department...still arguing with machines, but now its enhanced by arguing with bureaucrats.
Computer science now has "routes", "track", or "emphasis". C.S. with emphasis on Web, or Security, or Artificial Intelligence, or Crypto, or Machine Learning, or Software Engineering, or General/Mathematics, or Foundational/Theoretical. So I can tell an employer, "Yea, I am a computer scientist. But only the kind that works with web tech. I don't know enough about Embedded systems to get your water pumps working in sync, sorry!" I've even seen a "Developer" track offered. Hmm.
What's going on is these degrees are really just teach the current industry and market. Theory is shoved aside to make room for immediately practical skill, so the uni. can say "last year 98% of our c.s. grads got jobs". But 98% of their c.s. grads can only write Android apps or work with Joomla templates, so wtf does that mean for the future of our digital era? Not shit. I shouldn't have to commit myself to the Crypto track to get insider knowledge on Information theory, right? Shouldn't that be general knowledge to any C.S. grad ?? So I say put those "industry now" topics into survey courses as track electives, or assign them to a different degree altogether, or perhaps as a double major or minor. Then I can graduate with a B.S. in C.S. with a A.S. in web tech, or a double B.S. in CIS security, right?
I am going back to school this fall to finish my B.S. in C.S. degree after switching from religious studies to philosophy to C.S.. Can you imagine I only need 2 upper level math classes to graduate from this particular university? I have to double up with a maths major to get what I think is sufficient material for what I imagine a professional computer scientist ought to know .... it's ridiculous the way this stuff is run these days...
To show aptitude? Because it's not, as that guy was talking about, the 1980's when there weren't a wide availability of degrees. Today if you go for a fresh starter job you're competing with people who have degrees and demonstrable skills.
Sure, if you can get an entry level job you can work for minimum wage for a few years until you pick up the skills, and be at constant risk of being replaced by someone who has a degree and doesn't make mistakes you don't even know you're making.
Much beyond a BSc in something is a matter of what sort of problem you want to solve, and what sort of job you want to do. If you want to solve high risk mostly theoretical problems that will only be useful if you can get a positive result then maybe you want a PhD. If you want to just make money a PhD definitely isn't the route to go. If you want to have a job where you can't be fired after you've worked for 4 years, and where you get to meet a long string of interesting people every year, then working at a university has its perks.
Certainly compared to people I went to high school with, who didn't even try and get degrees, I'm worse off. I've had 10.5 years of school where they've been earning money. But they're making 40-50k a year. For the last 6 I was making about 20 and breaking even. But then a PhD starting salary can be 80-90 easily, and 70k if you want to be a prof. If you can't do the math to figure out what the breakeven point is then you probably shouldn't even try and get a degree.
Even then though. Computer science isn't programming. If you're happy being an IT guy your entire career then and assembling computers and writing webpages in PHP you can get by quite well with even a 1 year college course, and that can be quite lucrative since half of those graduates are dumb as rocks.
EE is more towards the hardware side while Comp Sci is more on the software side
It's more than that. Engineering disciplines are different than the science disciplines. Engineering majors will be required to take courses on the engineering process that are merely optional for a student of computer science.
Years ago I found myself with a BSEE and no job. At the time it seemed like every job interview ended with, "Thanks for your time but we're looking for someone with more programming experience." It didn't take me long to realize that I needed to go back to school.
I talked to a student counselor about my options and it quickly became a choice between a major in computer science or computer engineering. The computer science course took me on the path of a lot of math courses, computer architecture, and (since it was a major in the Liberal Arts college) things like public speaking, foreign languages, and such. In the computer engineering program, and electrical engineering program, I was offered courses on software design along with the other courses on programming languages.
Where I went to school it was possible to take a nearly identical set of courses while majoring in either the electrical engineering or computer science. The difference was that the courses on the design process, good engineering practice, and so on, were required in electrical and computer engineering where in computer science the mind set was more on gaining a wide knowledge set in programming languages, mathematics, and theory.
In other words, computer science focused on the "what" while engineering focused on the "how".
At the time I recall hearing people talk about how recruiters were looking for electrical engineers to be programmers. This was because electrical engineers were taught good design practice along with a lot of computer theory. The computer science majors typically knew the language the recruiters were looking for but it was much easier to teach someone a programming language than teach them good design practice after getting the job.
I believe this is where the software engineering program came from where I went to school. There was a demand for people that both knew the programming languages and good design practice. The computer science program was not teaching people this. Rather than turn the computer science program into something it was not intended to be they created a new program to fill in the hole.
I realize my experience may be somewhat unique. Some colleges have treated computer science more like what we now know as software engineering for a very long time.
Also, don't think that I'm knocking the computer science majors out there. We need computer scientists. The problem was that people were going into computer science thinking they were going to learn how to engineer software. Employers found out quickly that students in computer science weren't being taught good engineering practice. I feel sorry for all of those people that were essentially duped by so many about what computer science meant, both the students and the hiring managers.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
I don't know about Phd's, but I made $236k, no high school diploma, no GED, no degree.
That's excellent, you have done very well for yourself.
PhD's aren't generally about the money. Having one, especially in a useful area can lead to very comfortable well paid jobs, but that's not what they are.
A PhD is an educational degree. One learns a lot about a specific field, but more than that, one learns how to do original research. One of the main (and often ignored goals) of a PhD is to learn how to effectively do research: how to direct it, how to choose appropriate paths, how to descover new things about the world, how to be reasonably sure that you're right about them and how to communicate those discoveries to others.
So how impressive can a Phd be? That mean I beat out that 10%
Depends on the PhD, depends on the person. Not all PhD's are equal. People in the know (i.e. in the same area as the PhD acquirer in question) generally won't accept the existence of a PhD at face value, they will go more on the contents of the PhD, the research group and advisor as indicators of how good the PhD is. If you're not in the right area, it's very hard to find out that information.
The important thing is not to get a chip on your shoulder (comments like "how impressive can that be" indicate that maybe you have).
If you're making 236k, then you're well above the top 10%. Just because you are higher up than people who have more qualifications doesn't mean you should discount those qualifications or assume that they are de-facto worthless.
SJW n. One who posts facts.