The Imposter's Handbook

Re:The Imposter's Handbook by rayiner on Wednesday August 24, 2016 @12:49PM (#12353358)

> A CS degree prevent you from making a lot of obvious (if you have a CS degree) and costly mistakes.

This. Many years ago, our code was shitting the bed, a month before a major milestone deadline. Turns out that someone wrote an N^2 algorithm and only tested with N=5.

I don't have a CS degree--just a few semesters of combinatorics and graph theory. When I was programming, I always felt that was a huge liability. I'd confront a problem, and I knew just enough to know it could probably be reduced to some graph problem and solved using a known algorithm, but I didn't know what that was.

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Re:The Imposter's Handbook by pc86 on Wednesday August 24, 2016 @01:01PM (#12353449)

And a CS degree teaches you nothing about how to appropriately test a given system and whether N=5 is sufficient, but industry experience will.

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Re:The Imposter's Handbook by unethical_ban on Wednesday August 24, 2016 @01:43PM (#12353787)

some CS degrees. From what I've observed, some CS programs are teaching "software engineering" at the senior/masters levels in order to focus on development and design over theory and math.

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Re:The Imposter's Handbook by simtel20 on Wednesday August 24, 2016 @12:53PM (#12353389)

Yes but I've seen CS degreed developers with industry experience do that when deadlines approach and the test procedures don't keep up with the product specs.

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