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A comment on Ask HN: Stuck as a CS Major. Is there a way out?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: Stuck as a CS Major. Is there a way out? by apohn on Wednesday February 16, 2022 @12:36PM (#30362939)
It's been a long time for me too, but I went to a school with a well regarded MIS program and I interacted with a lot of MIS people.

I'm saying this wery lightheartedly - I felt like 80% of the people in MIS programs where people who needed (because society dictates you have to get a degree) to go to college and didn't care really care about tech or business, but they need a degree so why not both? 10% were people who should have majored in CS or Business, but for some reason didn't realize it early enough in their college journey and they didn't want to redo 1-2 years of coursework. The other 10% were destined to become the a$$hole VPs/SVPs who everybody hates, and the MIS degree was just another step to world domination and them self-justifying that they have a "technical" background.

>Companies typically treat it as equivalent to a CS degree.

I don't think this is true at all unless the company is one of those who hires SWEs who don't really do any actual software engineering.

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Re:Ask HN: Stuck as a CS Major. Is there a way out? by Clubber on Wednesday February 16, 2022 @12:51PM (#30363195)
In my experience, you could get a lot out of it if you were really into it like I was. You could also coast by and not obtain any desirable skills for employers and still pass. I suspect most degrees are like that though.

I really enjoyed it though. I learned so much that my first job utilized everything I learned. At a small growing company that needed in-house expertise. I did the network, the switches, the workstation builds, the servers, built the database and applications on top of it all. I did project cost/time estimates and carried them out. After about a year we hired a full time network/client guy and I stuck to applications / database. It was a lot of work but I really enjoyed it and got a lot out of it. I don't think I would have been able to cover that much ground with just a CS degree.

>I don't think this is true at all unless the company is one of those who hires SWEs who don't really do any actual software engineering.

I don't know if it's still true, but when jobs would require "CS degree or equivalent," they meant MIS/CIS, at least 20+ years ago.

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Re:Ask HN: Stuck as a CS Major. Is there a way out? by apohn on Wednesday February 16, 2022 @01:09PM (#30363441)
> I did the network, the switches, the workstation builds, the servers, built the database and applications on top of it all.

You are most certainly an exception to most people I knew in the MIS program at my school. :)

>I don't know if it's still true, but when jobs would require "CS degree or equivalent," they meant MIS/CIS, at least 20+ years ago.

I'm old enough to remember when people I know would graduate with "MIS" or "IT" degrees and get a $55K job building and installing Windows NT 4.0 servers with a bunch of other stuff (e.g. networking) on the side. It was a great starting salary at the time. Then the dot-com bust happened.

I definitely think software engineering now is at the point where CS or STEM degree really means that. Programming has just become a lot more specialized than back then. Well, at least hiring managers seem to think so...

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