True, I probably am over estimating it a bit. I think though, learning a syntax should take a few hours or a day possibly and figuring out semantics should take no more than a week. Most imperative languages have a few basic pieces. Memory allocation with a type (often aggregate types), iteration, branching and dispatch with languages having their own way of implementing them, such as an Object Oriented approach. Most API's have basic features shared among all languages such as containers (vectors, stacks, queues, dictionaries, trees), algorithms (sorting, iteration, etc) I/O(pipes, UI, std I/O, streams), exception handling (often built into the language), and the other typical things.
"Also, it is indisputable that it is easier to outsource coding than it is systems design"
Possibly, but it can be argued that systems design is "real" engineering so it therefore has rigid requirements and set practices where as software design is not "real" engineering and has no *real* standards or practices to follow. I think it all depends on the project, really.
Umm, have you heard of Japan? So much of the hardware side was outsourced in the 80's it makes today's software outsourcing seem little. And it is a trend that continues to this day. The fact is, ALL engineering is going to be outsourced a bit because these countries, like Japan, China, and India have a lot of engineers and can do the job well too. But in the end everyone will benefit from this because they become more wealthy too and require the things other, like us, require. There's enough to go around for everyone.
I've often seen the biggest differences in people in the corresponding majors to be: EE Analytical people. CS Intellectual people
With plenty of mixture on both sides, of course.
It seems in hardware, you are a bit more math and physics oriented as you are dealing with physical systems that deal with reality. You need a much more rigid approach to your thinking and really, your goals are different. You want to design solid electrical systems that take cost into account more and once again are bound by physical reality.
In software, you are constrained by different types of math. You worry about set theory, function theory, graphs and really discrete math in general. CS has a great fusion of linguistics and philosophy in that you are primarily concerned with languages and how to express your idea in these languages with algorithms as your primary tool for efficiency. Software deals with a near virtual reality so things such as physics and particular calculus math is not of as much value except to only challenge you to think hard, which of course is good.
Many people liken EE vs CS as the body and the brain but I would argue it's more the brain and the thought. EE is probably more challenging on the analytical front in that you really cannot fake it when it comes to the math and physics of what you doing. CS can probably be faked a bit more but challenges you intellectually since you are creating all these imaginary things that work together in a system. Hence, abstraction is a really big thing in CS circles. Objects, polymorphism and all these other ideas that are really just paragdims.
Pick your poison. Both are tough but rewarding if you challenge yourself. I have friends that hate writing and thinking about software but love a soldering iron and hacking together little electronics. I personally enjoy the more "creative" side of things where you can design all these abstractions and systems that work seamlessly together with nothing more than some basic logic.
As for job security? Who knows. I've heard people say software is all the rage and others say hardware is all the rage. The way I see it, for every piece of hardware there is going to be many pieces of software. As far as money, I think EE's make more starting but I'm not sure what happens 5 years down the road.
What issue is that, I'm afraid I've lost you. Is it having a career center, or bad career centers or recruiters going to too many schools? In the end, it's really not a universities job to get graduates jobs. Although it's a nice benefit and every school should have one, I still believe college is not a job training place. Although it's becoming more and more like one. (I have heard of particular CS departments switching to Java with only the idea that students will find more jobs this way!! I would imagine after a CS degree, someone should be able to pick up any language and API in a week tops. Near mastery of the API in ~2 weeks.)
No doubt my experience is not a good sample for the entire graduate class of America, but neither is any one persons experience. All I'm saying is I was able to get a cool job with no internships, no co-ops and a measly ~3.0 GPA.
The things that possibly made me stand out is I took the hardest courses we had, worked on projects on the side in my own time and have good communication skills so when I get to an interview I'm good at expressing myself. I've also experimented with many different technologies so I have a broad understanding of many different concepts.
Another idea if you or others are having problems is put together a portfolio. Make a CD of some projects you've worked in in school and at home. Put together a large project that details the work you've done with others, put together a project that displays some low level system hacking. Throw some other things in there that show you know how to design and most importantly, code. Pick your best things. Include design documents like UML, use cases, etc. They eat this shit up. Then include a README with details on every project, references to pieces of source code that is especially code and a general explanation on what you were doing. It's a good way to show what you can offer.
Also, I did get rejected from some jobs before I landed one but I agree with an above poster. I think a lot of grads don't know how to find a job. Sending out resumes to places on dice.com, etc isn't going to usually land a job. Look for on campus interviews, go to career fairs, talk to HR people and call places you send resumes to. Show interest and determination to get your foot in the door and then close the deal with a good interview and a portfolio that they can use to evaluate you when you're not there. Once they see you have something to show, the interview becomes a lot more about getting to know you and less about what you can do. While everyone else is telling them what they may be able to do, they get to know you, like you, and see what you can do.
I mainly agree. Luckily at my school we have a career center especially for students in the engineering and applied sciences colleges so we get extra help if needed. But mainly, they review your resume, help make it look good and then get you hooked up on a career website where local (and not local) companies post jobs, interviews, etc. In the end, the career center here does do a good job of getting recruiters to come to the school for on campus interviews. Those are of course ultra competitive because they usually interview at least 15 students and they go to like 4 or 5 schools.
Your points are really good. I remembering having a really good interview followed by a skills test. I was taken off guard and had not had a skills test so kind of went blank. I remember driving home and just thinking about the questions and how stupid some of my answers were.
I remember writing a class that needed to use pointers and forgetting to declare the attributes with a * and then forgetting to dereference them when I needed the raw data. I was able to to fix that after the test right away but I also had dumb mistakes like messing up a right shift of some bits and oring them. It was ridicules. I really just bombed it. Another question I had to "debug" some code and couldn't figure it out. I thought about a bit later and realized they were trying to use a pointer that fell out of scope.
I was just nervous, inexperienced and made dumb mistakes. It didn't matter as what the company did seemed like I wouldn't want to ever go to work and I found a great job very shortly after.
I just agree with you, if they really wanted to see what I could do they would look at a portfolio of code I have put together and see that I'm pretty good at it. I just bombed an easy exam. Oh well, everything worked out well for me.
"During that time, new college graduates have also been unable to find entry level work"
I found a job after my third interview with a good company that pays me pretty well and offer 3 weeks of vacation from the start. Not to mention they are growing and haven't laid anyone off ever, it seems like a pretty good deal. I don't have exceptional grades (3.0) and don't go to a legendary CS school, but was able to land an entry level job doing software design, programming and testing, etc. Basically the whole software engineering process. Also, the city I live in is hardly a software hotbed. we are more known for beer than software.
Maybe I'm lucky and maybe I interview well or something, but I think if you look to your career center and really work at getting a job, you'll find something.
True enough but I've tried to start up conversations about type systems with these dudes when they ask what interests me and it's just over their head or their not interested. You would think they would want to talk to someone who has a unique set of skills and understands some complex things in CS, but I have found many of them don't. If anything, it makes them think you will be too good and take their jobs perhaps! No proof of that, just a hunch.
In the end though you're probably right. You were kind of eluding to maybe being yourself and demanding they understand or at least respect high tech knowledge so you know you are working for a company that respects your skills.
It's problem solving plain and simple. It makes you think. You learn a set of tools (equations, formulas, etc) and then given problems that you have to solve with these tools.
Any CS program I've seen also teaches the math that is directly related to CS. I at times thought the math sucked but I stuck with it, opened my mind and tried really hard and really learned a lot. Much of the calculus has helped in courses such as computer graphics.
My program has you take some elective math as well but they recently took one course out of it so now you are forced to take software engineering, which I think is a good trade off.
Also, since CS is either a science degree or engineering degree, it is often required by the university that you take a particular math and physics sequence.
In the end I had 33 credits of math and physics. That's a lot to be sure but I think it has helped me as a pure problem solver and analytical thinker. Maybe they just brain washed me though.
"There should be no difference in the comp sci program and the math program for the first two years."
I disagree. A CS degree is concerned with a different kind of math mainly. Of course any CS student should know some algebra and of course get some calculus down, but a CS student is concerned with discrete math, counting, set theory and classes of mathematical problems. In most schools, these are satisfied by both the CS department and math department.
Although Calculus is next to worthless for most CS related things, it does teach problem solving among strengthening analytical skills etc. But for CS, the type of math you are likely to use is taught in classes that emphasize it.
Thins like sets and general discrete math is generally taught in a CS course, problem domains is often taught in a theory of computation like course.
I think these types of courses should be interleaved with CS courses so the student can see how these types of math situations apply to what they are doing.
With that, there is no such thing as too much Math. For anybody.
I agree 100%. I'm on the job trail and in interviews it seems every company asks questions regarding software engineering almost exclusively. All the questions are based on working with teams, design patterns(huge in every interviews!), OOP, UML, early design, testing and many other software engineering methods. It's fine with me really because software engineering as it stands right now is so undefined it can mean just about anything and my school has been requiring some software engineering courses so I got the information I need. Not to mention I would rather do some design right away than just sit at a terminal and hack all day.
Since I've noticed this I've changed the focus of my interviews to software engineering things and have noticed better results. I would suggest to people on the job hunt to really read about some software engineering things before interviewing because, at least in my recent experience, it seems it's all they care about.
Make sure all the requirements for the procedure/class etc are rigidly and unambiguously defined. Implement them as required and develop test cases that test the requirements/bounds/etc. If there are problems with the requirements then validate everything first.
Whew, I read through this first and was thinking the whole time this was for developers. (You know, developers! developers! developers!) I was just lost thinking why would this affect software developers more than anyone else? It was really bizarre and just did not make sense to me. Then I saw it was talking about developing countries. Ahhhhhhh. My 2 hours of sleep last night just is not cutting it right now.
This reminds me a lot of where MAc OS was in the early 90's compared to where Windows was at the time. MS 3.1 was total trash compared to OS 6 and 7 if I recall. With what Apples Tiger is going to have in it, and the maturity of OS X by the time Longhorn comes out, MS has a lot of ground to make up in terms of being a superior OS, or even comparable. Then again, being better doesn't seem to matter much in terms of MS's adoption.
They are not used directly in Python, but Python uses C++ very directly. It's essentially built with and upon C++, thus making it useless in this environment.
Slashdot Mirror
Good point.
True, I probably am over estimating it a bit. I think though, learning a syntax should take a few hours or a day possibly and figuring out semantics should take no more than a week. Most imperative languages have a few basic pieces. Memory allocation with a type (often aggregate types), iteration, branching and dispatch with languages having their own way of implementing them, such as an Object Oriented approach. Most API's have basic features shared among all languages such as containers (vectors, stacks, queues, dictionaries, trees), algorithms (sorting, iteration, etc) I/O(pipes, UI, std I/O, streams), exception handling (often built into the language), and the other typical things.
"Also, it is indisputable that it is easier to outsource coding than it is systems design"
Possibly, but it can be argued that systems design is "real" engineering so it therefore has rigid requirements and set practices where as software design is not "real" engineering and has no *real* standards or practices to follow. I think it all depends on the project, really.
lol. Mod parent up! Remember, whatever people say here, do the opposite!
"Tougher to outsource..."
Umm, have you heard of Japan? So much of the hardware side was outsourced in the 80's it makes today's software outsourcing seem little. And it is a trend that continues to this day. The fact is, ALL engineering is going to be outsourced a bit because these countries, like Japan, China, and India have a lot of engineers and can do the job well too. But in the end everyone will benefit from this because they become more wealthy too and require the things other, like us, require. There's enough to go around for everyone.
I've often seen the biggest differences in people in the corresponding majors to be:
EE Analytical people.
CS Intellectual people
With plenty of mixture on both sides, of course.
It seems in hardware, you are a bit more math and physics oriented as you are dealing with physical systems that deal with reality. You need a much more rigid approach to your thinking and really, your goals are different. You want to design solid electrical systems that take cost into account more and once again are bound by physical reality.
In software, you are constrained by different types of math. You worry about set theory, function theory, graphs and really discrete math in general. CS has a great fusion of linguistics and philosophy in that you are primarily concerned with languages and how to express your idea in these languages with algorithms as your primary tool for efficiency. Software deals with a near virtual reality so things such as physics and particular calculus math is not of as much value except to only challenge you to think hard, which of course is good.
Many people liken EE vs CS as the body and the brain but I would argue it's more the brain and the thought. EE is probably more challenging on the analytical front in that you really cannot fake it when it comes to the math and physics of what you doing. CS can probably be faked a bit more but challenges you intellectually since you are creating all these imaginary things that work together in a system. Hence, abstraction is a really big thing in CS circles. Objects, polymorphism and all these other ideas that are really just paragdims.
Pick your poison. Both are tough but rewarding if you challenge yourself. I have friends that hate writing and thinking about software but love a soldering iron and hacking together little electronics. I personally enjoy the more "creative" side of things where you can design all these abstractions and systems that work seamlessly together with nothing more than some basic logic.
As for job security? Who knows. I've heard people say software is all the rage and others say hardware is all the rage. The way I see it, for every piece of hardware there is going to be many pieces of software. As far as money, I think EE's make more starting but I'm not sure what happens 5 years down the road.
What issue is that, I'm afraid I've lost you. Is it having a career center, or bad career centers or recruiters going to too many schools? In the end, it's really not a universities job to get graduates jobs. Although it's a nice benefit and every school should have one, I still believe college is not a job training place. Although it's becoming more and more like one. (I have heard of particular CS departments switching to Java with only the idea that students will find more jobs this way!! I would imagine after a CS degree, someone should be able to pick up any language and API in a week tops. Near mastery of the API in ~2 weeks.)
No doubt my experience is not a good sample for the entire graduate class of America, but neither is any one persons experience. All I'm saying is I was able to get a cool job with no internships, no co-ops and a measly ~3.0 GPA.
The things that possibly made me stand out is I took the hardest courses we had, worked on projects on the side in my own time and have good communication skills so when I get to an interview I'm good at expressing myself. I've also experimented with many different technologies so I have a broad understanding of many different concepts.
Another idea if you or others are having problems is put together a portfolio. Make a CD of some projects you've worked in in school and at home. Put together a large project that details the work you've done with others, put together a project that displays some low level system hacking. Throw some other things in there that show you know how to design and most importantly, code. Pick your best things. Include design documents like UML, use cases, etc. They eat this shit up. Then include a README with details on every project, references to pieces of source code that is especially code and a general explanation on what you were doing. It's a good way to show what you can offer.
Also, I did get rejected from some jobs before I landed one but I agree with an above poster. I think a lot of grads don't know how to find a job. Sending out resumes to places on dice.com, etc isn't going to usually land a job. Look for on campus interviews, go to career fairs, talk to HR people and call places you send resumes to. Show interest and determination to get your foot in the door and then close the deal with a good interview and a portfolio that they can use to evaluate you when you're not there. Once they see you have something to show, the interview becomes a lot more about getting to know you and less about what you can do. While everyone else is telling them what they may be able to do, they get to know you, like you, and see what you can do.
Luck helps too.
I mainly agree. Luckily at my school we have a career center especially for students in the engineering and applied sciences colleges so we get extra help if needed. But mainly, they review your resume, help make it look good and then get you hooked up on a career website where local (and not local) companies post jobs, interviews, etc. In the end, the career center here does do a good job of getting recruiters to come to the school for on campus interviews. Those are of course ultra competitive because they usually interview at least 15 students and they go to like 4 or 5 schools.
"I can barely feed my cat."
You should probably get rid of your cat then.
Your points are really good. I remembering having a really good interview followed by a skills test. I was taken off guard and had not had a skills test so kind of went blank. I remember driving home and just thinking about the questions and how stupid some of my answers were.
I remember writing a class that needed to use pointers and forgetting to declare the attributes with a * and then forgetting to dereference them when I needed the raw data. I was able to to fix that after the test right away but I also had dumb mistakes like messing up a right shift of some bits and oring them. It was ridicules. I really just bombed it. Another question I had to "debug" some code and couldn't figure it out. I thought about a bit later and realized they were trying to use a pointer that fell out of scope.
I was just nervous, inexperienced and made dumb mistakes. It didn't matter as what the company did seemed like I wouldn't want to ever go to work and I found a great job very shortly after.
I just agree with you, if they really wanted to see what I could do they would look at a portfolio of code I have put together and see that I'm pretty good at it. I just bombed an easy exam. Oh well, everything worked out well for me.
"During that time, new college graduates have also been unable to find entry level work"
I found a job after my third interview with a good company that pays me pretty well and offer 3 weeks of vacation from the start. Not to mention they are growing and haven't laid anyone off ever, it seems like a pretty good deal. I don't have exceptional grades (3.0) and don't go to a legendary CS school, but was able to land an entry level job doing software design, programming and testing, etc. Basically the whole software engineering process. Also, the city I live in is hardly a software hotbed. we are more known for beer than software.
Maybe I'm lucky and maybe I interview well or something, but I think if you look to your career center and really work at getting a job, you'll find something.
True enough but I've tried to start up conversations about type systems with these dudes when they ask what interests me and it's just over their head or their not interested. You would think they would want to talk to someone who has a unique set of skills and understands some complex things in CS, but I have found many of them don't. If anything, it makes them think you will be too good and take their jobs perhaps! No proof of that, just a hunch.
In the end though you're probably right. You were kind of eluding to maybe being yourself and demanding they understand or at least respect high tech knowledge so you know you are working for a company that respects your skills.
It's problem solving plain and simple. It makes you think. You learn a set of tools (equations, formulas, etc) and then given problems that you have to solve with these tools.
Any CS program I've seen also teaches the math that is directly related to CS. I at times thought the math sucked but I stuck with it, opened my mind and tried really hard and really learned a lot. Much of the calculus has helped in courses such as computer graphics.
My program has you take some elective math as well but they recently took one course out of it so now you are forced to take software engineering, which I think is a good trade off.
Also, since CS is either a science degree or engineering degree, it is often required by the university that you take a particular math and physics sequence.
In the end I had 33 credits of math and physics. That's a lot to be sure but I think it has helped me as a pure problem solver and analytical thinker. Maybe they just brain washed me though.
"There should be no difference in the comp sci program and the math program for the first two years."
I disagree. A CS degree is concerned with a different kind of math mainly. Of course any CS student should know some algebra and of course get some calculus down, but a CS student is concerned with discrete math, counting, set theory and classes of mathematical problems. In most schools, these are satisfied by both the CS department and math department.
Although Calculus is next to worthless for most CS related things, it does teach problem solving among strengthening analytical skills etc. But for CS, the type of math you are likely to use is taught in classes that emphasize it.
Thins like sets and general discrete math is generally taught in a CS course, problem domains is often taught in a theory of computation like course.
I think these types of courses should be interleaved with CS courses so the student can see how these types of math situations apply to what they are doing.
With that, there is no such thing as too much Math. For anybody.
"...school, not including bonuses and stock."
Nooooo!!, don't take the stock!! Run! Run I say!
I agree 100%. I'm on the job trail and in interviews it seems every company asks questions regarding software engineering almost exclusively. All the questions are based on working with teams, design patterns(huge in every interviews!), OOP, UML, early design, testing and many other software engineering methods. It's fine with me really because software engineering as it stands right now is so undefined it can mean just about anything and my school has been requiring some software engineering courses so I got the information I need. Not to mention I would rather do some design right away than just sit at a terminal and hack all day.
Since I've noticed this I've changed the focus of my interviews to software engineering things and have noticed better results. I would suggest to people on the job hunt to really read about some software engineering things before interviewing because, at least in my recent experience, it seems it's all they care about.
From the top of the story:
"According to John Dvorak..."
I stopped reading right there.
Hasn't Nintendo learned yet? Developers, Developers, Developers!
Make sure all the requirements for the procedure/class etc are rigidly and unambiguously defined. Implement them as required and develop test cases that test the requirements/bounds/etc. If there are problems with the requirements then validate everything first.
Whew, I read through this first and was thinking the whole time this was for developers. (You know, developers! developers! developers!) I was just lost thinking why would this affect software developers more than anyone else? It was really bizarre and just did not make sense to me. Then I saw it was talking about developing countries. Ahhhhhhh. My 2 hours of sleep last night just is not cutting it right now.
This reminds me a lot of where MAc OS was in the early 90's compared to where Windows was at the time. MS 3.1 was total trash compared to OS 6 and 7 if I recall. With what Apples Tiger is going to have in it, and the maturity of OS X by the time Longhorn comes out, MS has a lot of ground to make up in terms of being a superior OS, or even comparable. Then again, being better doesn't seem to matter much in terms of MS's adoption.
I Soviet Russia, C++ forgets about you!
OK, sorry, I had to do it. I never had a chance and now I don't have to post that again!
They are not used directly in Python, but Python uses C++ very directly. It's essentially built with and upon C++, thus making it useless in this environment.
"Tildes and backticks are impossible to type, they've become control characters"
Hmm, it's going to be hard (even harder I should say) to write C++ programs that don't have memory leaks now.