Re:Posterous: I went to etc., can I still work for you?
by nostrademons on Wednesday September 24, 2008 @09:02PM
(#314317)
I majored in CS, and went into financial software (where I thought I'd be able to work on interesting hard problems), and found that in the two years I worked there, I can count the number of times I needed something from my degree on one hand. Yeah, it was nice to be able to see a problem and immediately think "Stick the intervals in a heap; modify the top element each time a new quote comes up; pop it and output an element for each trade". But that was about 3 hours out of 2 years employment. 99% of my work was boring UI plumbing or dealing with bugs in 3rd-party components.
Every so often at the job, I'll come to a problem and think, "if only I knew all that algorithms and data structures jazz I could solve this much more quickly". But to be honest, those moments don't come more than a few times a year.