If you like math, this is the best advice. I did math with a CS minor, had a great time in college, and I seem to go in the same pool as people with a CS degree for hiring on any team I would actually want to work with. It also opens up a different set of backup plans or potential career switches if you don't want to or can't stay in software long term.
Then you end up with people who create software with hundreds of threads and a global lock so that the threads are actually completely sequential but also much slower. Seen this from an electrical engineer who became a coder. Just one example out of several.
> Further to this point, it's quite common to favour a candidate with a strong STEM degree who has learned to code as an adjacency.
... because they know less about programming, and thus think much less deeply how a novel abstraction could look like which solves the problem much more elegantly.
In other words: these applicants more obediently do their work instead of regularly questioning whether there could be a better way and thus rocking the boat too much. :-(
As someone who has met a lot of math majors and a lot of CS majors, I am skeptical of your supposition that CS majors are better at finding and applying novel abstractions than math majors who know how to code.
> As someone who has met a lot of math majors and a lot of CS majors, I am skeptical of your supposition that CS majors are better at finding and applying novel abstractions than math majors who know how to code.
I do work with people who have a math major. Let me put it this way: if they were interested in finding and applying novel abstractions for programming, they would for sure often be very capable in this, but people who majored in math often rather love to apply these skills to more mathematical problems in their area of interest.
I recommend it. I got a masters in Math, learned how to code, and now I'm a software engineer. Math was a lot of fun. Honestly, the best take away from my degree was that learning math concepts is often so obtuse/difficult it makes learning anything else seem relatively easy. It took away that fear of "I can't learn this" when approaching a new topic.
Math is static, CS is dynamic. In math you describe static idealized "worlds", in CS you look at any discrete dynamic process in detail via algorithms. Many folks doing math can't understand algorithms, and many coders can't understand math. Just ask a mathematician what does A = A + 1 mean. There is some inherent impedance mismatch.