Best Computer Science degree?

[armstrongsubero]

@Merlin my mistake then its just when you say "IMO a bachelors degree is just a checkbox degree" , I got the impression that led to my statements.

Not just "programming experience" not being broad but CS knowledge not being broad. We can talk about finite state automata or OS scheduling algorithms which are common CS topics which has nothing to do with a "broad programming experience".

Programming and CS are not interchangeable. Programming is a subset of CS used for implementation of ideas. Nothing more. A guy can be a good programmer and bad at CS and vice versa. Some CS profs with patents and extensive CS publications may not be able to build an ecommerce app as well as a guy doing it for a living for example. Talking from experience here.

It may be a waste of time. Until you need it. And with AI, Data Analytics, Robotics and IoT being the current forefront. I would say its better to know about those things and not need it than need it and not know.

Case and point I recently rewrote firmware for an 'IoT' device that was running on an STM32 with some bloated RTOS, the guy was a web developer and his company wanted to build a prototype of a product. The code was terrible to look at! The guy clearly had no knowledge of hardware. I was able to fit his entire program on a much much smaller micro with a simple cyclic execution system. With the recent IoT hype I witnessed this many, many times.

You are right. I am usually such a contractor in my free time these days cause it seems like everyone wants to build some thingamabob to connect ot the internet or some 'AI' thingy. You'll be surprised how far a little math and esoteric CS knowledge can carry you way ahead of the pack.

I can speak for my industry. Though I am sure when a serious wwb dev or business app company has to design something its the guys with the esoteric knowledge carrying home the chedder after the smoke clears.

99%, I would like to see a source for that figure. Software now is so complex, distributed and integrated I think it will be less than that.

Then again I guess it would be based on industry as well. I won't debate that. I know a lot of "rockstar" web "coders" that can feed their family without knowing Rice's theorem or what at FFT is. Some of them dont even know what is time complexity, they just know this sort from that library works better than that one.

I get your point though. Honeslty I dont mind. My recent business endeavours is focued soley on correcting the mess self poorly taught guys made. I say poorly self taught cause anyone worth their salt is self taught. The guys who are really good do this stuff way before they went to college or Facebook and Google and the 'anyone can code' ideologies made 'coding cool'.

Many of these 'engineers' are closer to the equivalent of electricans if it were EE than electrical engineers. I think many people use that term to loosely.

Its funny you mention MOOCs though. Cause many MOOCs are based on college courses. Go figure...wont it be better to take your time and learn from the course you are spending money to take in college from the get go rather than half ass it to pass, then pay money to do it again in a MOOC which is a collegs course? Waste not want not?

The truth is software is now so complex that "esoteric knowledge" isnt so esoteric anymore. I mean few people knew what "linear regression" or "artificial neural network" was, but with AI becoming so common use, these are now very common terms and people have had to become proficent in statistics overnight. Its very hard to do anything innovative in that space without some 'esoteric' CS knowledge other than use a library of two.

I get your point and I think you get mines.