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As someone that had a highly theoretical computer science education, worked in the industry for three years, then returned to academic CS for summer research, I have a few thoughts on this. 1. A highly theoretical CS foundation is still very useful. One of the hardest classes I've ever taken in all my studies was an upper-level proof-based algorithms course. Nowadays I can glance at an algorithm and give you it's runtime complexity. This is actually an important skill because it influences how you construct your own methods and such. There were quite a few times at my old employer where I'd be like, "If we just switched this out to a hashmap, we'd have a constant time solution instead of this polynomial one," or something of the sort. Furthermore, that algorithms course changed how I thought about computing (and life) forever. Computational complexity theory is simply wonderous. I'm in med school now, and I will tell you, learning about human biology through the lens of a computer scientist is a truly enriching experience. Computation is everywhere! 2. Your everyday programming jobs probably don't require that deep-cut CS coursework BUT there are plenty of specialized jobs that do. I can think of many sectors where you need to be fluent in something like graph theory and ways to traverse graphs, or statistical methods + machine learning. Not all jobs are full-stack dev jobs. Undergraduate CS is supposed to lay a solid foundation that you can build your career on. It's not vocational training. You have no idea where you'll end up! And honestly, I think there's plenty of hindsight bias going on here. 3. Man, oh, man, people in academia suck at software engineering (and not to mention, product design). This isn't their fault! They haven't worked on a large codebase before. They don't understand git-flow or continuous integration or test-driven development. Their products need to get A's, not sell to a consumer. I will say, coming from the industry into back an academic environment it has been a bit of culture shock. Tools used, architecture, even ways of speaking about the software are often completely outmoded. All in all, I'd say both are very desirable. I'd recommend self-taught programmers take some classes on the more theoretical/mathy side of computer science. And I'd recommend that the academically-minded CS seniors FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THINGS GOOD take a year off and work in the industry before pursuing grad school. |