Meanwhile over in the mechanical engineering department, someone is complaining that they have to learn physics when they just wanted to build cool cars.
I took engineering for a year before I realized it had nothing to do with trains.
Yeah that’s why you go into physical training. That physically has trains… Right?
☠️
After you draw your 100th free body diagram a car pops out
It’s not math class; it’s deriver’s ed.
…then don’t study computer science. I study CS and it’s annoying when someone in a more math/logic oriented course is like “If I get a job at a tech company I won’t need this”. All that IS computer science, if you just wanna code, learn to code.
The problem is a lot of people who want to learn to code, and are conditioned to desire the college route of education, don’t actually know that there is a difference and that you can be completely self-taught in the field without ever stepping foot in a university.
I always wanted to believe this, but, at least in my country, not even a specialized high school degree is enough to get me anywhere for months, it’s crazy.
Maybe you could even make it without formal education, but everyone’s always looking for those sweet 3+ years of experience in the field (ಥ﹏ಥ)I certainly experienced this at the start of my career. Everyone wanted me to have at least bachelors degree despite the fact that I was able to run circles around fresh college graduates. It wasn’t until someone gave me a chance and I had real world experience that people stopped asking me about my college education. In fact later into my career when they learn about the level of experience I have and that I’m entirely self-taught, it’s often seen as something positive. It’s a shitty catch-22
So it really is like that eh?
Do you have any tips for what could help me, even a little bit, to have better chances?Build an open source portfolio. Being able to show employers what I was capable of was a massive benefit both then and now. You can say you know all of these things, but when you’re looking at hundreds of applications one of the first things they do to reduce the pile is filter out people who don’t have some kind of online presence like Github. This allows them to see that you’re actively engaged with the field and if they want to interview you, to look at your code quality and experience.
A personal website that highlights your best work is also a good idea, as it helps to even further distill down the things you’re ultimately going to end up talking about in an interview. It doesn’t need to be anything fancy, just something that shows your competent. I wouldn’t expect the person interviewing you to actually hit view source and criticize your choice in frontend framework.
We’re not closing schools despite having libraries and the internet, having (good) teachers is useful to learn faster and get pushed further. There are some good programming schools that can make it more efficient for you. I think the main problem is rather the insane cost of higher education in the USA which create anxiety about being certain that you can repay it in the future it may open for you. It is sad.
Can you get well paying coding jobs with upward mobility without at least a BA in CS?
I’ve never been to college and my job title today is Software Architect, I’ve been doing this for nearly 20 years.
It was extremely hard at first to get a job because everyone wanted a BA, but that was also 20 years ago. Once I had some experience and could clearly demonstrate my capabilities they were more open to hiring me. The thing a degree shows is that you have some level of experience and commitment, but the reality is a BA in CompSci doesn’t actually prepare you for the reality of 99% of software development.
I think most companies these days have come to realize this. Unless you’re trying to apply to one of the FANG corps (or whatever the acronym is now) you’ll be just fine if you have a decent portfolio and can demonstrate an understanding of the fundamentals.
I have a fine arts degree and I’m a lead dev 🤷♂️
It’s harder to break into but I make 150k and barely graduated high school. Software engineering is largely a field that doesn’t care about degrees but about ability. It’s harder these days to break into the field than it was 10 years ago when I did but it’s absolutely still possible
When I was looking for coding jobs with a decent portfolio, but no computer science degree I got 1 interview out of 300 applications. They absolutely will not look at you if you don’t have the CS degree, or already know someone at the company who can force you in.
I’m guessing this is US-centric?
Canada.
Maybe not what you’re asking but people with a non-CS M.Sc or PhD commonly switch to coding, especially in the data fields.
4 years later: “this button is the wrong color. fix it ASAP”
I was interviewed with complex logic problems and a rigorous testing of my domain knowledge.
Most of what I do is updating copy and images.
This hurts so much because it’s my life :(
I did games technology at university. We had a module that was just playing board games and eventually making one. Also did an unreal engine module that ended with making a game and a cinematic.
It was awesome.
But you can make games that much more interesting if your algorithms are on point.
Otherwise it’s all “well I don’t know why it generated map that’s insane”. Or “well AI has this weird bug but I don’t understand where it’s coming from”.
I wonder how many in that class will ever need to think about multitape Turing machines ever again.
The point of these lectures is mostly not to teach how to work with Turing machines, it is to understand the theoretical limits of computers. The Turing machine is just a simple to describe and well-studied tool used to explore that.
For example, are there things there that cannot be computed on a computer, no matter for how long it computes? What about if the computer is able to make guesses along the way, can it compute more? Because of this comic, no — it would only be a lot faster.
Arguably, many programmers can do their job even without knowing any of that. But it certainly helps with seeing the big picture.
Arguably, a much more important thing for the students to learn is the limits of humans. The limits of the computer will never be a problem for 99% of these students or they’ll just learn on the job the types of problems they’re good at solving and the ones that aren’t.
The limits of computers would be the same as the limits for humans. We have no reason to think the human brain has a stronger computation power than a Turing machine.
So, in a way, learning about the limits of computers is the exact same as learning the limits of humans.
But also, learning what the limits of computers are is absolutely relevant. You get asked to create an algorithm for a problem and its useful to be able to figure out whether it actually is solvable, or how fast it theoretically can be. Avoids wasting everyone’s time trying to build an infinite loop detector.
The “limits of humans” I was referring to were things like:
- How long can you push a deadline before someone starts to get really mad
- How many dark patterns you can cram into an app before the users stop using it
- The extremes of human stupidity
👍
I loved learning lambda calculus (though for me it was super hard)
I never really understood the point of Lambda calculus. Why have an anonymous function? I thought it was good practice to meticulously segment code into functions and subroutines and call them as needed, rather than have some psuedo-function embedded somewhere.
I think you’re confusing lambdas with lambda calculus. Lambda calculus is more than just anonymous functions.
To put it extremely simply, let’s just say functional programming (the implementation of lambda calculus) is code with functions as data and without shared mutable state (or side effects).
The first one increases expressiveness tremendously, the second one increases safety and optimization. Of course, you don’t need to write anonymous functions in a functional language if you don’t want to.
As for why those “pseudo-functions” are useful, you’re probably thinking of closures, which capture state from the context they are defined in. That is pretty useful. But it’s not the whole reason lambda calculus exists.
See the other comments about lambdas vs. lambda calculus, but lambdas are supposed to be for incredibly simple tasks that don’t need a full function definition, things that could be done in a line or two, like simple comparisons or calling another function. This is most useful for abstractions like list filtering, mapping, folding/reducing, etc. where you usually don’t need a very advanced function call.
I was always taught in classes that if your lambda needs more than just the return statement, it should probably be its own function.
… and then you program games and you do the least performant bogosort you can ever think of
About 15 years on, I’m still so happy I got good coursework marks for the route-finding equivalent of a bogosort. Picked a bunch of random routes and pick the fastest. Sure, that guy who set up a neural net to figure it out did well, but mine didn’t take days of training, and still did about as well in the same sort of execution time.
Export to excel and scroll till you find it
A few failed exams later you end up programming cyberpunk and since you’re so oblivious to algorithms’ complexity it becomes a meme not a game.
But it’s ok because now Nvidia has to deal with your garbage code due to Cyberpunk being the only game that supports the latest graphics tech.
