[eachro]

Every year I see tons of CS students captivated by the beauty of algorithms in theoretical CS. I lose track of all the bright eyed undergraduates saying they love thinking about algorithms and would ideally like to spend their summer doing research on these sorts of problems. More often than not, I end up telling them they should focus their efforts on the systems side of things and chat with an OS or DB professor rather than a prof in TCS, but very few of them actually take this advice.

[gcanko]

I’m curious why would it better to focus on the system side of things instead of algorithms?

[eachro]

Because there are real problems to work on that benefit from the sort of problem solving with algorithms that students are hoping to do.

[priprimer]

software algorithms need to be written once to be used by anyone (digital copies and all that)

systems side doesn’t have this problematic quality