As a CIS near-graduate...
on
CS vs CIS
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· Score: 1
I was a CIS major for three and a half years before getting a job in the field, and I've got to say I wouldn't be able to do this job if I went into straight CS. I think the big difference is that CS treats computers as a science, and CIS treats it as a career. CIS also started me off as a "jack of all trades" kind of situation, before deciding myself to focus more on sysadmin, db programming, and web design/programming. CS gives you a better education in programming languages, OOP, and so on, but very little by way of networking, dbms's, system design, and so on.
I agree with other posts that the degree doesn't mean much these days though, at least not in this field. I saw too many CIS majors who apparently knew nothing about their field, and I just wonder what they're doing now! Experience and skills matter more than degrees, and if you can show that off in the interview, it doesn't matter what your degree is in. (of course, the degree helps you get the interview...)
And to show where I'm coming from -- I took three and a half years of full-time class in CIS, until I got a good job as a web designer. Now, I'm taking the last semester (spread out over spring and summer) so I can get the degree taken care of.
I was going to post roughly the same thing about having a garbage hotmail account. But since you've said that, I'll elaborate on it a little bit -- make your hotmail something with no meaning (like kh4h9s3an for example) so you won't be hit by the "dictionary" spammers, who just make lists based on dictionary words, maybe with a two digit number appended to it.
Second point (unrelated to the first), has anybody else noticed the extreme crap-ability of the site mentioned in the article? Not only is the design bad, but the load time is ridiculous! Has anybody else experienced this? It may just be because we're all hitting his site now, and he's not used to getting so much traffic. All I know is I've been waiting for a "next page" link to appear at the bottom since before I started writing this post, and the page is still trying to finish loading.
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I was a CIS major for three and a half years before getting a job in the field, and I've got to say I wouldn't be able to do this job if I went into straight CS. I think the big difference is that CS treats computers as a science, and CIS treats it as a career. CIS also started me off as a "jack of all trades" kind of situation, before deciding myself to focus more on sysadmin, db programming, and web design/programming. CS gives you a better education in programming languages, OOP, and so on, but very little by way of networking, dbms's, system design, and so on.
I agree with other posts that the degree doesn't mean much these days though, at least not in this field. I saw too many CIS majors who apparently knew nothing about their field, and I just wonder what they're doing now! Experience and skills matter more than degrees, and if you can show that off in the interview, it doesn't matter what your degree is in. (of course, the degree helps you get the interview...)
And to show where I'm coming from -- I took three and a half years of full-time class in CIS, until I got a good job as a web designer. Now, I'm taking the last semester (spread out over spring and summer) so I can get the degree taken care of.
I was going to post roughly the same thing about having a garbage hotmail account. But since you've said that, I'll elaborate on it a little bit -- make your hotmail something with no meaning (like kh4h9s3an for example) so you won't be hit by the "dictionary" spammers, who just make lists based on dictionary words, maybe with a two digit number appended to it.
Second point (unrelated to the first), has anybody else noticed the extreme crap-ability of the site mentioned in the article? Not only is the design bad, but the load time is ridiculous! Has anybody else experienced this? It may just be because we're all hitting his site now, and he's not used to getting so much traffic. All I know is I've been waiting for a "next page" link to appear at the bottom since before I started writing this post, and the page is still trying to finish loading.