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by jimmaswell 27 days ago
My day job is relatively boring JavaScript components and SPA's, but even there I find things I learned in my Computer Science degree valuable. "Hey, this looks like a finite state machine.." "This could be a simple domain specific language, good thing I had to write compilers in college and I can easily make a simple lexer/parser.." "This other thing is easy to parse if I ingest it into a lexer-resembling state machine.." And I would think the value of understanding algorithmic complexity and so many other fundamental things is obvious, no matter what someone is doing. And you won't waste your time accidentally trying to solve the Halting problem, among other things. Obviously there's nothing a university can teach you that you couldn't theoretically learn somewhere else but I'm seriously not convinced that a Computer Science degree is useless or a poor signal even for someone doing run of the mill React apps.
3 comments
giraffe_lady 27 days ago
I was self taught and went back for a bachelor's after ten years working and then a masters after another four. There was a lot of wasted time in the BS (ie the trade-school-for-programmers classes) but the pure CS has been valuable to me quite regularly as a working developer.

Not every day, maybe not even every month, but I've faced plenty of problems I was well equipped to solve directly because of the formal study of them.

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hirvi74 27 days ago
> I had to write compilers in college and I can easily make a simple lexer/parser.

I'm jealous. My university did not make that a core class of our degree. While in hindsight, I wish they did. I did have the luxury of a lot of low-level exposure, which has served to be quite useful at times (digital logic, assembly, etc.).

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lobofta 26 days ago
If I had two SWE candidates with the same genes where one dropped out of high school to build a portfolio of software and the other followed the traditional CS trajectory, then I'd pick the one who "wasted" their time trying to solve the halting problem.

I am biased because I did drop out of high school, yadayada. My career has seen consistently a much steeper incline than nearly all CS graduates I've ever met. Plus, I got to build a bunch of useful and cool stuff, while others were wasting their time studying.

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