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A comment on A CS degree is better than teaching yourself how to code?. Parent comment

Re:A CS degree is better than teaching yourself how to code? by czbond on Saturday November 02, 2019 @10:50PM (#21431788)
I agree with you; I have a CS degree, and when I work with those who learned the programming mechanics (aka making code work) - are often skipped other topics that came in handy for me making other decisions. I can understand why code is slow (eg: BigO for cpu or memory), what structures and algorithms to use in different scenarios (Data Structures & algos), how things are working (Computer Architecture, Programming Languages [theoretical construction of languages], Compiler design), and Automata. Absolutely, these can be learned by oneself - but I find they rarely are.

Edit after thought: Of course, when to use an Array vs a Linked List in your specific language (for example), might not matter if you're doing web apps of medium scale taht one can throw more EC2 instances at

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Re:A CS degree is better than teaching yourself how to code? by jcims on Sunday November 03, 2019 @01:35AM (#21432374)
Is there any part of a CS degree that educates students on how networks operate or what a protocol looks like on a wire? Most of the new grads I work with seem to think of all of that as a black box and are completely stuck when things aren’t working.
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Re:A CS degree is better than teaching yourself how to code? by thethirdone on Sunday November 03, 2019 @01:25AM (#21432508)
There are certainly classes that cover networking.

IP, TCP, DNS, and HTTP were covered in classes I took.

As for actually on the wire. I haven't studied anything about how ethernet actually works. I assume its kindof like i2c, but I don't know more than that and haven't needed to.

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Re:A CS degree is better than teaching yourself how to code? by scarface74 on Sunday November 03, 2019 @08:03AM (#21433627)
So if college was so invaluable teaching networking, how do you think people who went to school before http existed learned? Just like everything else, you can learn as needed.
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Re:A CS degree is better than teaching yourself how to code? by thethirdone on Sunday November 03, 2019 @08:35AM (#21433774)
> So if college was so invaluable teaching networking,

I never said or implied that college was invaluable for teaching networking. I just answered a question about what was taught.

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Re:A CS degree is better than teaching yourself how to code? by scaryclam on Sunday November 03, 2019 @08:26AM (#21433729)
Mine here in the UK covered quite a lot if networking protocols, so yes, there are some out there. In fact, it's never occured to me that this wouldn't be covered. I'd be pretty disappointed if a new grad couldn't figure out how to how to at least approach diagnosing an issue :(
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Re:A CS degree is better than teaching yourself how to code? by fivre on Sunday November 03, 2019 @03:12AM (#21432742)
My CS degree had it as an elective. It was the class I did the worst in, and I now work primarily with network protocol implementations. Good foundation though, even though the prof was terrible at designing assignments.
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Re:A CS degree is better than teaching yourself how to code? by roywiggins on Sunday November 03, 2019 @01:47AM (#21432556)
My undergrad had a good computer architecture class, but it didn't cover networking. That's definitely a pretty big hole in my knowledge. A networking class would absolutely have slotted in quite easily to the CS curriculum.
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Re:A CS degree is better than teaching yourself how to code? by innocentoldguy on Sunday November 03, 2019 @03:08AM (#21432729)
This would have been a great class to replace the "How to Double-click a Mouse 101" class that my college required all students to take.
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Re:A CS degree is better than teaching yourself how to code? by hellisothers on Saturday November 02, 2019 @11:35PM (#21431959)
This edit is the critical leap, 99% of software engineering doesn’t benefit from this depth. For sure there are positions that do but they’re the edge case.
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