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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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hells, Caltech still didn't have a CS degree in 1995.
Our "CS" undergrads had to slide in under the fairly broad "Engineering and Applied Science" umbrella or else stick out the more stringent requirements (EE151, AMa95, etc) of a straight EE degree with a focus on "Computing". There were CS courses and professors, but no degree plan.
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.