Just out of curiosity, do you consider “$/effort optimizer” to be desirable or not?
Re:Caltech's CS interview prep course
by strikelaserclaw on Monday February 28, 2022 @01:06PM
(#30502919)
obviously not, judging by his tone, people who optimize for money might only study leetcode. Algorithm skills probably account for at most 10-20% of the skills you need to become a good software engineer.
I went to Caltech and would definitely not do this. The CS faculty was fantastic, but the undergraduate option has some problems:
- a wildly disproportionate share of cheating cases came from CS undergrads
- CS graduation requirements are very flexible, which is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, giving students more freedom is broadly a good thing, and many of them use that freedom to double major or go deep into specialized grad level work. On the other hand, some of them use it to construct schedules much easier than most other options would allow. Not all of them, but enough that "B's in caltech CS" is not as strong a signal as you might think.
Some signals I would consider stronger for Caltech students:
- CS/Math double majors. Or CS/[Any technical subject], for that matter.
- Summer research: someone paying five figures of opportunity cost to do something they think is interesting is probably not a $/effort optimizer.
- Grad-level CS coursework. CS 139 (Design and Analysis of Algorithms) in particular pulls no punches.