| You don't need to know anything about ray tracing or database internals to have a successful software engineering career. > To be honest, I’ve always felt like our CS course was inferior. Let me put your mind at ease. The difference in rigor of CS programs is fairly insane, even just in the USA. Flagship state universities and elite private universities all have rigorous curricula. Beyond that, caveat emptor. Small colleges and branch campuses of state universities are the worst in terms of variability -- some excellent, some truly terrible. I mostly blame the fact that industry pays well and universities pay horribly. This is, again, worst at small colleges where they want to pay all faculty the same. $80K will buy you world-class philosophers/theologians/psychologists, but you simply cannot get good CS PhDs for less than $90K/year. This was true even before the current run of inflation. The floor for a half-decent CS hire these days is probably closer to $100K. The good news is that graduates of lower-quality programs go on to have successful careers and make good money. If you are content not being in the top decile of earners in your field, the education provided by most of these schools will serve you fine. The bad news is that those graduates really do have serious deficits that are obvious upon cursory evaluation, so breaking into the most interesting and highest paying positions can be difficult. The good news about the bad news is that, if you know that you have big CS gaps relative to the top decile of your competition, you can adjust your strategy and still come out ahead. My advice, if you are from one of these lower-quality institutions, is to choose one of two paths. One path is to go deep in a particular technical area through either self study or graduate school. The other path is to differentiate yourself by developing valuable non-technical skills -- communication, understanding the business, building relationships, etc. (And before anyone accuses me of elitism: I attended a low-quality CS program.) |