I'd say it was 75% math, 24% programming, 1% other junk they force you to fill your required credits.
It was hard. I didn't really know what to expect going into a CS program that gave you a degree that read "Bachelor of Mathematics", but those math courses were some of the most difficult things I ever took. Some of the third and fourth year courses which combined both math and algorithms were the litmus test of a true computer science student. We had a third year course (345 or 360?) that was focused on exactly what I just mentioned. We just to joke (grimly, downwardly) that if you could pass this, you were basically a CS major. The count of false fire alarms/bomb threats/suicide notes during the examination period of that course indicated how hard it was. My exams got rescheduled 3 times just for that one course. 2 bomb threats, 1 suicide note.
I don't remember programming anything interesting or useful or dot-com like. The algorithms and problem solving techniques were pretty interesting but only here and there. A lot of it was a lot of grunt work through very obscure material 99.995% of the human population does not care about. And you will not use in your future job. I think I used recursion once, and a binary search once in the 5 years since I left the university. And both tasks were easier than the first year homework assignments they gave us (and also everyone in the industry would know about it i.e. manufacturing bill of materials, and calculating the COGS in financial applications).
I felt a lot of the material was very academic in nature and unless you went all the way to a Ph. D, you weren't going to be able to leverage the material in a job. Interesting in it's own right if you are into these kinds of things.
That being said, my interest from computers originally came from doing little programming things on my spare time and playing computer games, which I'm assuming most guys get their thing for computers. But it doesn't translate into being a CS major. I'd say CS majors were people with an affinity for mathematics, and not very much interest in why Linux is better than Windows. Sure there were those kinds of people in my class, but out of a class size of 50-80, I'd say only 5 fit that bill. I managed to make it through the curriculum but if I had to do it again, I'd major in something like law and do a minor in information technology which is a lot more useful.
The worse part is, I think CS majors now have exceptionally difficult times landing a first job with little job experience. When I graduated, outsourcing was already moving ahead and many fellow graduates were being sent down to the states, Mexico, India or China to train their own replacements. I can only imagine what the situation is now.
As far as job security, a bachelor CS is pretty bad unless you have a well-established set of technical skills. A CS job != comfy Linux admin job with 3 monitors and a free reign to abuse your peon users. This you can get from any technical college. If you are really interested in the material itself, go all the way to Ph. D and consult big firms who will pay for your brains.
I'll bite... I'm in a IT shop doing consulting for data warehouses. I usually have to dig in deep to the technical work myself as we are simply short living breathing humans. My position is a manager.
What I find most difficult is keeping schedules on time when I'm doing technical work. It's easy to get lost in one issue after another, clients usually don't know what they want until you present what you've worked on, and they want changes. When I'm not responsible for a task I can usually put things into perspective and get my team to be mostly on time. When I'm on a technical task, I find a billion + one ways to push my own deadlines.
It's hard to draw the line between what is agreed upon, and what is required (us vs. client), and a "complete requirement study" is an illusion I've yet to see turn into reality.
I also find difficult to distinguish between "design" and "technical" work. What becomes the responsibility of the programmer, and what is the responsibility of the designer? My current interpretation is that design is focused on what the user wants and the required outcome of a program. More often than not I nitpick on designs & methodologies. I sometimes ask about implementation specifics (believe it or not, when you're dealing with 2 million+ records even a slightly misplaced linear loop of size N can kill run time) but I don't latch like a hawk on those details, and I don't have time to do it either.
It'd be nice to simply say to my team "this is what has to happen, make it happen". I find that without discussion, lots of whiteboard doodling and people sitting down on the same table with lots of food etc... only bad things will result. I also find that until I've talked my ass off and people have had their say and all opinions have been discussed (i.e. silence, notes have been taken, people start getting that zombie stare...) only then is a common objective agreed upon. E-mail discussions are open to too much interpretation. I actually find 5 minutes on the phone will save me hours and hours of back & forth through email.
What ends up happening is I manage to tangle myself in just about everything, usually I have to do this anyways during testing & acceptance as the users are demanding, and the people writing the cheque want to see you in the midst of things doing everything they want. However at the same time I'm more than happy when I can offload tasks to my team so I can go back to staring at my schedules and budget trying to balance both.
My team is mostly happy I think. We're usually under a great deal of client pressure and it's not something that's easily fended off. They deal with the clients too and the flak gets spread around. It does bring the team closer together in a us vs. them attitude, but at the same time we want to make them happy. Burnout I think is inevitable under these conditions but there's some nice downtime between projects that sometimes I let them just stay at home and do nothing (paid).
Just sharing some current experiences. I've yet to find a good balance and I don't think it'll happen any time soon. I think it's just a matter of time & experience, and those can't be rushed.
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I'd say it was 75% math, 24% programming, 1% other junk they force you to fill your required credits.
It was hard. I didn't really know what to expect going into a CS program that gave you a degree that read "Bachelor of Mathematics", but those math courses were some of the most difficult things I ever took. Some of the third and fourth year courses which combined both math and algorithms were the litmus test of a true computer science student. We had a third year course (345 or 360?) that was focused on exactly what I just mentioned. We just to joke (grimly, downwardly) that if you could pass this, you were basically a CS major. The count of false fire alarms/bomb threats/suicide notes during the examination period of that course indicated how hard it was. My exams got rescheduled 3 times just for that one course. 2 bomb threats, 1 suicide note.
I don't remember programming anything interesting or useful or dot-com like. The algorithms and problem solving techniques were pretty interesting but only here and there. A lot of it was a lot of grunt work through very obscure material 99.995% of the human population does not care about. And you will not use in your future job. I think I used recursion once, and a binary search once in the 5 years since I left the university. And both tasks were easier than the first year homework assignments they gave us (and also everyone in the industry would know about it i.e. manufacturing bill of materials, and calculating the COGS in financial applications).
I felt a lot of the material was very academic in nature and unless you went all the way to a Ph. D, you weren't going to be able to leverage the material in a job. Interesting in it's own right if you are into these kinds of things.
That being said, my interest from computers originally came from doing little programming things on my spare time and playing computer games, which I'm assuming most guys get their thing for computers. But it doesn't translate into being a CS major. I'd say CS majors were people with an affinity for mathematics, and not very much interest in why Linux is better than Windows. Sure there were those kinds of people in my class, but out of a class size of 50-80, I'd say only 5 fit that bill. I managed to make it through the curriculum but if I had to do it again, I'd major in something like law and do a minor in information technology which is a lot more useful.
The worse part is, I think CS majors now have exceptionally difficult times landing a first job with little job experience. When I graduated, outsourcing was already moving ahead and many fellow graduates were being sent down to the states, Mexico, India or China to train their own replacements. I can only imagine what the situation is now.
As far as job security, a bachelor CS is pretty bad unless you have a well-established set of technical skills. A CS job != comfy Linux admin job with 3 monitors and a free reign to abuse your peon users. This you can get from any technical college. If you are really interested in the material itself, go all the way to Ph. D and consult big firms who will pay for your brains.
I'll bite... I'm in a IT shop doing consulting for data warehouses. I usually have to dig in deep to the technical work myself as we are simply short living breathing humans. My position is a manager.
What I find most difficult is keeping schedules on time when I'm doing technical work. It's easy to get lost in one issue after another, clients usually don't know what they want until you present what you've worked on, and they want changes. When I'm not responsible for a task I can usually put things into perspective and get my team to be mostly on time. When I'm on a technical task, I find a billion + one ways to push my own deadlines.
It's hard to draw the line between what is agreed upon, and what is required (us vs. client), and a "complete requirement study" is an illusion I've yet to see turn into reality.
I also find difficult to distinguish between "design" and "technical" work. What becomes the responsibility of the programmer, and what is the responsibility of the designer? My current interpretation is that design is focused on what the user wants and the required outcome of a program. More often than not I nitpick on designs & methodologies. I sometimes ask about implementation specifics (believe it or not, when you're dealing with 2 million+ records even a slightly misplaced linear loop of size N can kill run time) but I don't latch like a hawk on those details, and I don't have time to do it either.
It'd be nice to simply say to my team "this is what has to happen, make it happen". I find that without discussion, lots of whiteboard doodling and people sitting down on the same table with lots of food etc... only bad things will result. I also find that until I've talked my ass off and people have had their say and all opinions have been discussed (i.e. silence, notes have been taken, people start getting that zombie stare...) only then is a common objective agreed upon. E-mail discussions are open to too much interpretation. I actually find 5 minutes on the phone will save me hours and hours of back & forth through email.
What ends up happening is I manage to tangle myself in just about everything, usually I have to do this anyways during testing & acceptance as the users are demanding, and the people writing the cheque want to see you in the midst of things doing everything they want. However at the same time I'm more than happy when I can offload tasks to my team so I can go back to staring at my schedules and budget trying to balance both.
My team is mostly happy I think. We're usually under a great deal of client pressure and it's not something that's easily fended off. They deal with the clients too and the flak gets spread around. It does bring the team closer together in a us vs. them attitude, but at the same time we want to make them happy. Burnout I think is inevitable under these conditions but there's some nice downtime between projects that sometimes I let them just stay at home and do nothing (paid).
Just sharing some current experiences. I've yet to find a good balance and I don't think it'll happen any time soon. I think it's just a matter of time & experience, and those can't be rushed.