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PhD applications in computer science are so fucking frustrating. I have responded to so many invasive questions so far. The only private information universities haven't asked yet, is my bra size. The only contact they haven't asked for yet, is my kindergarten teacher (And her bra size, coincidentally). The only document about a potential project I haven't given to them yet, is my freaking dissertation. None of these have anything to do with my research potential, btw. There's nothing asked of me about my research aspiration and how I actually undertake a research project.
And then suddenly it occured to me: people in Academic administration are not smart. I'm actually explaining my potential to a pretty dumb bunch (Excluding those in research, none of whom will bother with these stupid documents).
... The world seems to revolve around stupid people. Fuck.19 -
I've been fairly lucky with my bosses of late since I've progressed in my programming career. But my absolute worst boss was when I first started working in an office environment doing data entry. My boss at the time was terrible, and she was always against innovation or process improvement. She also always tried to make herself look good and taking credit for the accomplishments of others. If she screwed up it was your fault, and she was "always buried in email" so she could never respond to you for pto requests, or escalation of issues between departments. My whole family pretty much worked in various roles in the department and she fired my brother after my mother left the company for no reason, saying he was "sleeping", but I worked right next to him and he's tall and had to slouch just to comfortable see his computer screen since the same manager refused to approve work station improvements for him.
Our workflow was to receive daily spreadsheets of health care claims that we had to manually process and enter into the system. So being the lazy innovator that I am, and trying to find ways I can efficiently work, I delved into studying visual basic and programmed a few functions and tools in excel to analyze, highlight, and process some of the data since the claims on the spreadsheets always had a specific pattern. This was all before I had any formal education in computer science so the program was very basic and clunky but it tripled my efficiency. When I brought it up to my boss to spread it among the rest of our team so they could use it after a short 20 minute training, she struck it down saying any training or use of it would be a waste of resources since it was too technical and complex to be used and if I were to keep improving it or use it I would be fired. It was literally copy and paste from one spreadsheet to the other en masse and clicking a button to sort and fill in the blanks. Eventually I showed it to the director of the department when working on a large data entry project with her, and I was later offered a job as a technical analyst where I was responsible for the codebase that generated the reports for the department and specifically all the reports my old boss used where I would occasionally mess with her to get back at all the crap she gave me and my brother. Since all the reports were blind carbon copied to everyone, I would send out her reports on a delay while everyone else got them on time. It eventually got her in so much crap she had to step down as a manager. She still works in the same company that I started working at again earlier this year, and like the many careers she's ruined she eventually ruined her own within the company 😂5 -
I think the main issue with Computer Science is that it's considered an Academic study, while 99% of work is very much dynamic, quickly evolving and hands-on.
I think all forms of (higher) education should be part time, starting at 4:1 college/work, gradually moving towards the opposite.
Currently, combining work and study is only done for "lower level" education, at least in my country: For example a car mechanic needs to work on actual cars, and barbers need to cut actual hair.
To me, it makes sense if engineers work on actual software, during their education.
It also feeds back into the education itself, when companies are paying for courses and the course doesn't teach practicalities, there's a lot more feedback to the colleges on how to adjust their material.10 -
I met a rather talented developer some time ago that is highly proficient in C# as well as React and Angular for the creation of web programs.
Dude knows the ins and outs of C#, has been working on it since the early stages of ASP.NET.
I am always intrigued as to why certain people chose certain languages. When I asked him, he admitted to being very lost during his early days, and somehow settled on C# because of the file extension being cs, which made him think that it was the proper Computer Science programming language, get it? because of CS?
Now a days he does use a wide variety of stacks and languages, and he keeps up to date, not one of those "I don't need to learn anything new!" types of developers, the dude is absolutely l337, but i keep thinking that such a talented developer had such a funny start.5 -
* Calls themselves "Software Engineer"
* Doesn't know what a thread is.
I swear these coding boot camps are churning out code monkeys whose real skill is building shitty React apps.
I believe a CS degree is necessary if you want to work on something more than CRUD applications.
Nothing against devs without degrees, but at least make an effort because my head will explode next time I have to explain to someone what a thread is and why it's a very bad idea to run blocking code on the main thread.27 -
Most kids just want to code. So they see "Computer Science" and think "How to be a hacker in 6 weeks". Then they face some super simple algebra and freak out, eventually flunking out with the excuse that "uni only presents overtly theoretical shit nobody ever uses in real life".
They could hardly be more wrong, of course. Ignore calculus and complexity theory and you will max out on efficiency soon enough. Skip operating systems, compilers and language theory and you can only ever aspire to be a script kiddie.
You can't become a "data scientist" without statistics. And you can never grow to be even a mediocre one without solid basic research and physics training.
Hack, I've optimized literal millions of dollars out of cloud expenses by choosing the best processors for my stack, and weeks later got myself schooled (on devRant, of all places!) over my ignorance of their inner workings. And I have a MSc degree. Learning never stops.
So, to improve CS experience in uni? Tear down students expectations, and boil out the "I just wanna code!" kiddies to boot camps. Some of them will be back to learn the science. The rest will peak at age 33.17 -
I just got a company called me for interview for f**king 3 hours, I wasted 3 hours of them asking me stupid questions. I show them the projects I have done, as they demand. I spent another 1.5 hours of them questioning my intelligence of whether these projects are stolen , fraud, or copied from Youtube. Just because I am a self-taught and have multiple professional certs, they believed these are mine if I have a bachelor degree or a PHD in Computer science.10
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after publishing a few apps, building some websites, developing some basic operating systems, participating in a summer learning program at google and having got a job managing the computer science department’s website, today i start my intro to computer science class.
god i hate python6 -
"We chose Android Native as our dev stack because we all got experience in Java"
- The biggest mistake I've ever made in a group project7 -
Some years ago i attended to a summer school abroad. I instantly built a connecection with this one girl, we spend the whole week together, talking, sharing humor, deep conversations etc. We also won the prize for the best project together. I guess it looked like the beginning of a love story for the rest of the course. For me it didn't exactly, actually I didn't had much romantic feelings for her; she was the arrogant, manipulative type I thought I could handle a friend but never as girl friend. We shared some darkness so to say. But I really hoped for a new close friendship. Since she had a boyfriend back home i thought she most likely wanted just the same. Anyway I was a bit worried she might want more because she made me quite a lot of compliments and told me how she liked me.
And yes, she wanted more: Whenever we talked on the phone after the summer school or met (she lived in a city not far away from mine by coincidence) she begged me for help with coding. She had a well paid as extremely interesting PHD position with a topic between political science and computer science. Besides classical humanities methods her topic would require a lot of coding though. But she had zero, absolutely zero clue of programming, and, as it turned out, zero interesst. I told her from the beginning she would have to learn quite a lot or pay someone to code for her. It was far too much to do as a favour by a friends or such. And, since it was part of her fucking PHD it would have been cheating somehow of she didn't do it herself. But instead, she kept texting me if I could 'help to fix some bugs', sending me unrelated code fragments she copied from SO and not even tried to understand. So I told her to fuck off at one point. After all it was not that we have been friends for decades; we only knew each other for a couple of months an spent only one week together. So thats it.
But I still think of it from time to time and it makes me angry because it feels like she was only nice to me because she thought i am this nerd guy who falls instantly in love to a charming good looking girl and does everything for her. I did neither at all but indeed wanted to be friends with her, thats bad enough. It even makes me more more angry that she actually has this awesome PHD project about politics in the fucking digital world and think of programmers like this. And that she will succeed without understanding anything bacause in the end there would have been a dude who did all the work for her I bet.8 -
Just saw someone use Bing unironically as their main search engine. They have a masters in computer science.
Equal parts horrified and kinda tempted to study them like a creature9 -
!rant, TL;DR at the bottom
Holy fuck, Yesterday, I got absolutely schooled by a literal newbie.
And I mean, NEWBIE newbie, the dude just started a Computer Science degree, and has been learning Java only for a MONTH. He has 0 prior experience with code or anything of the like, and he's somewhat of an Ars(Israel's version of a Gopnik).
So I was helping him with some stuff he didn't understand, and lo and behold his code was probably the most aesthetically pleasing and organized code I have seen in my 8 years of programming(I know 8 is not much, but It's at least above beginner level). The dude's a perfectionist, so I was like, "Okay, very impressive, but makes sense for perfectionism"(I straight up told him: "Damn, I've seen people with years of programming experience who can't learn to write this well, and you do this by default? I envy whoever's going to work with you"), and then I saw the way he writes checks(as in, methods that return a boolean) and I think I came.
The code was:
[First method in the picture]
And I know, it doesn't look as ✨ WOW✨ as I make it sound, but in my personal opinion this both looks much better and is much more readable than what I normally write:
[Second method in the picture]
and whenever there are longer or more complicated checks it makes it look like a simple puzzle that just fits in all the pieces nicely, for example in a rectangle class we had to write an 'isIn' method, this is how I wrote it:
[Third method in the picture]
His way of writing the same thing was:
[Fourth method in the picture]
Which I think is soooooo much better and readable and organized,
It's enough just looking at the short return statement to immediately understand everything that's going on.
"Oh, so it just checks if the SW(South West, i.e. Bottom Left) corner is above and to the right, and if the NE(North East, i.e. Top Right) corner is bellow and to the left"
Point of the story? Some people are just fucking awesome. And sometimes the youngest/most inexperienced people can teach you new tricks.
And to all of you dinosaurs here with like, 20+ years of experience, y'all can still learn even from us stupid ones. If 8 years can get schooled by a 1 month, 20 years can get schooled by a 1 year.
Listen to everyone everybody, never know where you might learn something new.
TL;DR: Got schooled by a local "Gopnik" who only started learning programming a month ago with 0 prior experience with his insane level of organization and readability.
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My First !Experience : Disappointment with a computer
My mum kept tons of floppies but we didnt have a computer at home. Went to my friends house, who had one, and had Encarta 95 (its like a fun wikipedia for kids). When I mentioned I had floppies, he asked for one, since he didnt have one. We copied Encarta to that floppy hoping we would cheat in the next computer science test. We even tested it.
After we were certain that all works (you should know we were surprised that it could fit in one floppy), we got to school, put the disk in and voila
we had copied a shortcut :)4 -
Is the way people solve problems intrinsic to the native language they learned growing up? Can the shape of our thoughts be optimal for solving certain kinds of problems? Like sentence structure, grammar, etc.
If the pattern of thoughts a language promotes can help us solve problems. Then is there a spoken language that can help promote solving computer science problems?
I know I have to work to think differently to program in different styles of programming. I wonder if we can learn from different spoken languages patterns of logic that are applicable to engineering.
Mathematics, while not a spoken language, has helped me re-frame things in programming. I think programming has also helped in other areas. Like using binary search to find the end of a pipe in the ground.7 -
Courses I’ll be doing this semester:
Systems Programming
Discrete Mathematics
Net Centric Computing
Software Engineering
Dynamic Web Development 1
I’m excited, this is my 2/3 year as a computer science student.5 -
my best career decision?
discarding my original plan to do PhD and get into (natural) science, studying computer science / software engineering instead, and starting software development in a company that builds cool devices.
i really like what i am doing and i feel like i found something that's "my thing".
it took me a while to get there, but it was totally worth it.3 -
I’m extremely frustrated with my job situation. I want to code, I absolutely love building stuff with software. My current job is a “tech” job, but involves absolutely zero coding. I don’t know what else I can do to stand out more or make myself a better candidate.
-I’m a new-grad with a flawless in-major GPA (computer science major)
-I have other past internship experiences that involve coding
-I frequently do my own side projects and post them to GitHub
-I work well on teams (life-long and collegiate athlete)
I apply to tons and tons of places only to get no response, or to have a single fucking interview and then get dropped
Fuck this stupid shit I am so frustrated8 -
Quite amazingly, yes!
as a matter of fact one of my parents is actually also in information technology or related field so there are very much aware of how in demand the job is and how difficult it is as well and the best part is a lot of my engineering friends are also switching to computer science and just because it is the better choice of because of how over saturated the engineering field is so yeah i think i have a better career choice than most of my peers
(PS: I used Speech to text here so forgive the grammar errors)1 -
This is a sad story of bad recruitment in my school.
One day I had my computer class in school and my teacher was on leave so the substitution department sent another teacher to our class.
I have 3 computer teachers in my institution, let us assume their names for this rant as A, B and C.
A - The most learned teacher who has a lot of experience and also writes books. This teacher is the head of the department and wants students to explore coding.
B - A teacher who sticks to books and writes books on Excel and Powerpoint for small children.
C - The youngest teacher who has almost no experience at all.
What happened was that during the substitution, teacher C was sitting and doing her own work. I thought she might know java and other fundamentals of computers. One of my friends asked her about some bug in his program. She went to his seat and said that teacher A would come and help you out. To this, the student said ok.
I thought that the teacher had something fishy going on.
A few months later teacher B and A were talking about some coding competition and I was alone in the lab cause I am the only one in 11th with computer science.
The problem here was that C came to the room and quietly asked what is an object and class in java. I was shocked! I mean how could that happen, she is supposed to know everything in the comp sci syllabus. This was a disaster, teacher A was explaining to her about classes and objects. It was clear to me that she didn't know anything about programming in Java.
This is the fault of our school.
My school wants a good rank in the lists and for that they cut down the budget of teachers and remove old, experienced teachers for cheap, newer teachers.
This was shocking as a person who doesn't know much about something can't answer the doubts of children, this is a wrong way of teaching.
Hope you have a good day :)6 -
Computer science vs software engineering?
Software engineering is all about people. You have to communicate with the business, realizing their needs, figuring out their processes, optimizing them, all this before the first line of code is written. Then, you have to manage your direct reports, and if you have none, write code with people in mind, people who will read it after you. As they say, code is for people, not for computers. Then, you have to improve the app listening to users, again, people.
I can’t assign a software engineer a role higher than middle if they’re bad with people.
If you wanna do cool stuff with computers and be a misanthrope, do computer science! It’s a very prestigious field where you are left alone with scary math and fundamental concepts. If you’re successful there, you’ll have a mad asocial scientist card, and no one will ever insist to you that people is important. They will just accept that they shouldn’t annoy you, and you are “allowed” to yell at them because you’re “special” and a “genius”. You can hate them 24/7.2 -
I spent 4 months in a programming mentorship offered by my workplace to get back to programming after 4 years I graduated with a CS degree.
Back in 2014, what I studied in my first programming class was not easy to digest. I would just try enough to pass the courses because I was more interested in the theory. It followed until I graduated because I never actually wrote code for myself for example I wrote a lot of code for my vision class but never took a personal initiative. I did however have a very strong grip on advanced computer science concepts in areas such as computer architecture, systems programming and computer vision. I have an excellent understanding of machine learning and deep learning. I also spent time working with embedded systems and volunteering at a makerspace, teaching Arduino and RPi stuff. I used to teach people older than me.
My first job as a programmer sucked big time. It was a bootstrapped startup whose founder was making big claims to secure funding. I had no direction, mentorship and leadership to validate my programming practices. I burnt out in just 2 months. It was horrible. I experienced the worst physical and emotional pain to date. Additionally, I was gaslighted and told that it is me who is bad at my job not the people working with me. I thought I was a big failure and that I wasn't cut out for software engineering.
I spent the next 6 months recovering from the burn out. I had a condition where the stress and anxiety would cause my neck to deform and some vertebrae were damaged. Nobody could figure out why this was happening. I did find a neurophyscian who helped me out of the mental hell hole I was in and I started making recovery. I had to take a mild anti anxiety for the next 3 years until I went to my current doctor.
I worked as an implementation engineer at a local startup run by a very old engineer. He taught me how to work and carry myself professionally while I learnt very little technically. A year into my job, seeing no growth technically, I decided to make a switch to my favourite local software consultancy. I got the job 4 months prior to my father's death. I joined the company as an implementation analyst and needed some technical experience. It was right up my alley. My parents who saw me at my lowest, struggling with genetic depression and anxiety for the last 6 years, were finally relieved. It was hard for them as I am the only son.
After my father passed away, I was told by his colleagues that he was very happy with me and my sisters. He died a day before I became permanent and landed a huge client. The only regret I have is not driving fast enough to the hospital the night he passed away. Last year, I started seeing a new doctor in hopes of getting rid of the one medicine that I was taking. To my surprise, he saw major problems and prescribed me new medication.
I finally got a diagnosis for my condition after 8 years of struggle. The new doctor told me a few months back that I have Recurrent Depressive Disorder. The most likely cause is my genetics from my father's side as my father recovered from Schizophrenia when I was little. And, now it's been 5 months on the new medication. I can finally relax knowing my condition and work on it with professional help.
After working at my current role for 1 and a half years, my teamlead and HR offered me a 2 month mentorship opportunity to learn programming from scratch in Python and Scrapy from a personal mentor specially assigned to me. I am still in my management focused role but will be spending 4 hours daily of for the mentorship. I feel extremely lucky and grateful for the opportunity. It felt unworldly when I pushed my code to a PR for the very first time and got feedback on it. It is incomparable to anything.
So we had Eid holidays a few months back and because I am not that social, I began going through cs61a from Berkeley and logged into HackerRank after 5 years. The medicines help but I constantly feel this feeling that I am not enough or that I am an imposter even though I was and am always considered a brilliant and intellectual mind by my professors and people around me. I just can't shake the feeling.
Anyway, so now, I have successfully completed 2 months worth of backend training in Django with another awesome mentor at work. I am in absolute love with Django and Python. And, I constantly feel like discussing and sharing about my progress with people. So, if you are still reading, thank you for staying with me.
TLDR: Smart enough for high level computer science concepts in college, did well in theory but never really wrote code without help. Struggled with clinical depression for the past 8 years. Father passed away one day before being permanent at my dream software consultancy and being assigned one of the biggest consultancy. Getting back to programming after 4 years with the help of change in medicine, a formal diagnosis and a technical mentorship.3 -
This was my source of motivation that dragged me towards the field of Computer Science and Engineering
3 -
Expectation.
Separate theoretical computer science from practical computer science.
Honestly, create a new speciality, the computer mathematician. Fill it with theoretical computer science, algorithmic and applied mathematics. So, the core of a pure computer science curriculum.
People wouldn't be surprised about what they get.
And then you can have some more application creating speciality. I mean, we already have those. And they advertise themselves quite right. But pure computer science does not.3 -
My dream when I decided to start learning the Computer Science course was four things
1. So I could have friends who don't get weird out anytime I speak
2. Have a good learning habit unlike what school has done to me
3. Working on projects on a daily basis, so I can be happy that I am doing something
4. Making softwares that can help the old people in my family
But we all know that some of the dreams require a lot of thinking and hope that everything works out fine1 -
"f(n) is O(g(n)) if c and n0 f(n) <= cg(n) for all n > n0".
I have a couple of questions related to this equation.
1: why we use this equation?
2: which thing cg(n) is represented for?
3: what is the real-life example of this?10 -
Currently fixing concurrency issues with a callback which is called so frequently it probably has multiple instances running and which can't ever be paused. Also, it isn't allowed to allocate or free memory. Riddles like this are the reason I got into computer science.
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I actually went to college and got a bachelors degree in both computer science and buisness.
Take that all you guys that are better than me!8 -
Need some advice. I’m a uni student and I really want to go into machine learning, data science, or computer vision. I have most of the skills and I feel I am fairly competent. However, the only professional experiences I have are web dev based. How can I make myself more appealing for data based roles? I really don’t want to do web dev anymore hahahahah5
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In college, so far every course that has to do with primarily coding I excel in but as I do something such as Discreet Mathematics or Networking I feel like I'm stupid and struggling. It makes me rethink going for a computer science degree. After my internship in the summer, the company decided to make me work full-time as a Software Developer, I have never used stuff related to such complex mathematics. Networking, sure, but whatever was used could've been a quick 15 - 20 mins read on google as I'm familiar with basic networking stuff. I think I chose the wrong major, I looked at the BSc Software Engineer course outline and there wasn't really a difference in the courses, just a 1 or 2. So I'm stuck doing things I won't use in real life, I think.5
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thought will get a good job just by computer science degree, 2 years in and my misconception faded away T_T6
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Hey everyone, need some advice here. To give some background, I am 17 years old, and currently residing in New Zealand. I love software and have my career path set on being a developer, most likely full-stack web. (Windows/native development & Game development I wouldn't mind either). I would say I am confident in JavaScript (incl. TS), web-dev languages (HTML & CSS) and Python. And with less experience, but a strong interest in Rust, C# and C++. I plan to go to my local university to study Computer Science. Because of factors like my age, location, lack of previous job experience and degree(/s) make it hard to meet any requirements for the few jobs available locally, or even remotely. Anyways, what have you done to get where you are today or what would you recommend based on my current background? My main goal is to get my foot in the door than to "have money" or "be occupied", so if other paths like certifications or more temporary contract-like work (similar to Fiverr) is a better idea then let me know.2
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Well this year is just the worst, had to do a mini-project and learn 8 courses in 3 months, I mean how is a computer science student supposed to get enough sleep, I envy others who can enjoy 8 hours of sleep when I could only enjoy 3-6 hours only to expect Networking and Business questions during exams 🤣🤣🤣, sometimes I think that I am beyond help2
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What field and stack do you recommend to anyone who wants to get into computer science but don’t know the first step to take?5
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Coding can be challenging and it's natural to feel motivated sometimes and demotivated other times. Here are a few things that might help you stay motivated while coding:
Focus on the benefits: Think about why you are learning to code and what you hope to achieve. Whether it's building your own projects, getting a new job, or solving problems, reminding yourself of the benefits can help keep you motivated.
Set achievable goals: Setting small, achievable goals can help you stay motivated because you can see progress and feel a sense of accomplishment as you complete each goal.
Take breaks: It's important to take breaks and give yourself time to rest and recharge. This can help you stay fresh and focused when you return to coding.
Get support: Surround yourself with supportive people who can encourage and motivate you. This could be friends, family, or online communities of other coders.
Keep learning: The field of computer science is constantly evolving, and there is always more to learn. This can be both exciting and motivating as you discover new technologies and approaches.
Remember, it's okay to have ups and downs when it comes to motivation. The important thing is to keep moving forward and stay committed to your goals.
~ Chat GPT -
Starting my bachelors in Computer Science this fall! Going to try to continue to work full time as long as possible (I’m a team lead at a call center, got a lot of downtime, not too stressful) to pay for school. Any tips for CS in college?2
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I am a Computer Science student which started work for a company 5 months ago being paid 20k. In the same time I am working on a project for somewhere over 17 pounds an hour. The guys on that project want to keep me for good to work with them on projects (they are a software company ran by a friend of my best friend) but the problem is they are in Europe and they can only offer me freelance work. This place I am working at is great but the salary increases are low. I have a colleague working there for 3 and a half years running a big chunk of their operations and he is making a petty 33k. I do not know what to do, should I job hop after 6 months and work with those amazing people for a bigger salary even if they are in Europe or should I keep hanging on this job on the current wage with maybe a 5k increase by the end of the year because it is more stable? I am curious to hear about similar experiences and how other people will perceive me by doing this step.4
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