What are some lesser known areas of CS that would be worth studying while I have the chance? I would say the subjects that excite me the most are Machine Learning, p2p tech like IPFS, UX-design, and alternative computer-interface things (like brainwave sensors, VR, and that jawbone thing from MIT that was posted a few weeks back [1]).
[1] http://news.mit.edu/2018/computer-system-transcribes-words-users-speak-silently-0404
The only reason that you can justify dropping out is that either (1) you think you can't possibly learn anything useful from the professors that are teaching you and you'll rebuild/repay what you didn't learn one day (and you better have to have a good answer when you'll do that right now), or (2) when you have a grand startup like Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg. But I don't think that's why you're wanting to drop out now. So don't drop out. Keep pushing.
For me, I wish I learned assembly, kernel development, stats and machine learning. First two because I love to, the latter two because they are useful.
I am now almost finished with grad school, and I feel like I know nil. But in a very Lao-tzu way, I think the biggest enemy of mine is myself (the willing to sit my ass down and learn), not that these can't be learned by myself. Lately, I think I somehow I overcame that problem and was able to read, learn and make a lot of stuff on my own. I think the same thing can be said about anyone who had the patience to get a degree as well: It means they are willing to deal with things they don't totally enjoy to get what they want. As Lao-tzu said, patience is a good virtue by itself...
1: If you need to verify, read the entry called crankshaft #2 on my blog on my profile.
Pursuing a technical education is tricky because those interested often have an elevated baseline knowledge and want to jump ahead without relearning fundamentals, but it's often those fundamentals that cause growth to suffer later on. Realizing that you're actually struggling with algebra while you're taking mv calc is a big eye opener, and realizing that you get the basics and applications of certain implementations of certain technologies in the first two weeks of a course can feel redundant and insulting, but that's because it's hard to gauge or trust that there's more to things beyond the limits of our understanding, not because the material is unworthy.
Overcoming that is humbling, and that can put people eager to get a start on making money because they're already slightly better at something than the population at large at odds with the goals of higher learning, but it's a necessary part of our growth and perspective.
People who grew up being told how smart or special they are can have a harder time with this, and I know it was pretty embarrassing for me when I realized early in my adulthood I was much closer to the "kid who's good with computers" category than an actual "IT professional", despite being able to successfully complete contracts and make money from what I was doing. Those experiences helped me re-evaluate my approach and get out of the "I'm already awesome, why would I need to do more" mindset. Had I not realized that, I might have stubbornly stalled out thinking I didn't need anyone else while the world passed me by.
I think making money is like cashing out the investments (knowledge/experiences). Nothing wrong with cashing our the investments when we enjoy the cash and continuously reinvest using some of the money we cashed out. I think it is dangerous when we have a little investment and no plan what to do when that investment runs out - when our knowledge becomes completely obsolete.
Which is basically "stop learning and just work now to make money" does.
>Those experiences helped me re-evaluate my approach and get out of the "I'm already awesome, why would I need to do more" mindset. Had I not realized that, I might have stubbornly stalled out thinking I didn't need anyone else while the world passed me by.
Happened to me as well. At one point recently, I figured out that being able to make money is not always the result of being able to enrich life. I could gather a lot of money while stalling. And a person who is growing immensely might be very poor. I feel as we get older, we tend to cling to a few metrics that we do good on to judge others, and money is a popular metric.
What helped in getting out of the mindset, what did you do?
Of course, it is possible that you will learn from the professor, but that you would learn _more_ by doing other things with four years of your life. University ahs no monopoly on knowlege.
Also it's disturbing what starting life with a gigantic, crushing pile of debt can do. (It doesn't have to be this way, but I've seen plenty of even quite intelligent individuals go this route and regret it).
If you can, take advantage of things like junior colleges. They're amazing. I owe my career not to my degree (pointless, though people at least tend to say "well you can't be an idiot" when they see a physics degree), but rather to what I learned taking a few night classes at Santa Monica College (including assembly, which was good fun) while working a day job and doing some projects for fun.
Lao-tzu said that you don't know what you don't know. I think staying in college is among the best ways to fill the holes that I am not aware that I have. I wouldn't have learned compilers, music, arts, game theory, automata, microecon, macroecon, accounting, matrix, physics, biology if I never had to take them/have them offered to me. I think everyone could absolutely learn everything on their own faster and more effectively. I think I would much less likely to be aware of them, and even less likely to endure the pain to go through them, that's for sure. But that's my pro-liberal arts view.
In the case of OP, they said they wanted to learn "brainwave sensors, VR, and that jawbone thing from MIT that was posted a few weeks back..." Maybe a few weeks more he/she will jump ship to another thing that MIT got on the news and the brainwave VR jawbone thing doesn't get on the news anymore. That's the tragedy of many "independent researchers," myself included sometimes. Having the patience to study something really well is really, really hard. Colleges are good at making you do that. At the very least, they guarantee whoever got out of it can spend at least one semester studying various subjects well, and many semeseters studying one subject they have the degree on very well. Whom do you trust more when you read their resume given you know nothing more about them: A person who claims to know AI/ML on their resume, or a person who has a degree in AI/ML?
>Also it's disturbing what starting life with a gigantic, crushing pile of debt can do. (It doesn't have to be this way, but I've seen plenty of even quite intelligent individuals go this route and regret it).
>If you can, take advantage of things like junior colleges. They're amazing.
Agreed. I attended a cheap college too. It was amazing.
>I owe my career not to my degree (pointless, though people at least tend to say "well you can't be an idiot" when they see a physics degree), but rather to what I learned taking a few night classes at Santa Monica College (including assembly, which was good fun) while working a day job and doing some projects for fun.
I totally agree with you. I didn't think that I owe what I became today to exactly what I learned in college. But I still think that I am capable of what I do today thanks to years being in college. Lao-tzu said colleges may not give you the fish directly but it teaches you how to fish for yourself.
Did you take compilers, learning e.g. parsing theory? If so, are you happy you did or did you feel it's skippable? If not, do you wish you had taken it?
I don't think it needed to be mandatory because I can see why some people don't like it. I believe people who get out of school to be web devs, for example, will not be needing it to be competent. But I really think the ideas in the courses are useful in real life in many cases. Later on, I even used what I learned in that course to make a poor man's HTML parser to translate rudimentary HTML to the instructions to write to the Adafruit thermal printer. So basically it makes the thermal printer a wireless one with an easy-to-use API that you can interface with from a phone app [1]. The code is for the Raspberry Pi, but was intended to run on an extremely limited uC that is embedded in the printer itself. I never had time to make the actual hardware but it works well enough for a Raspberry Pi right now. Without the stuff I learned in Compilers, that would have been impossible.
Knowledge that is acquired but not routinely recalled or applied will atrophy.
Sometimes you can make the argument that it’s worth your time to satisfy your own intellectual curiosity and I can understand that. Where people misstep is in thinking all knowledge is created equal.
I used to rationalize forays into theoretical material as holistically improving my capability as a thinker. In hindsight, it’s obvious that was bullshit. There are much more efficient ways of turning yourself into a good thinker that are more directly relevant to how things work in the real world.
The other thing I realized (and this is more specific to me), is that if I were to give myself the luxury of diving into knowledge for its own sake, I would choose a topic in the natural sciences, like physics or astronomy. Computers are interesting, but the theory surrounding them doesn't do much to help explain the nature of our reality, which I personally find much more fascinating.
If I could go back and redo my education, I would try my best to focus on a combination of:
(1) The most pragmatic courses in CS. IMO, the most useful ones beyond the intro courses were data structures and algos, distributed systems (project-driven), OS design (writing a simple OS), basic prob/stat, and intro ML (you do not and never will need deep anything, unless you decide to specialize). You could cover all of that in about a semester and a half tops.
(2) Projects out the wazoo. Real ones. Ideally motivated by a real problem and birthed into the world with all the messiness that entails, and iterated upon until they create real value for someone. You'll learn a stupid amount along the way.
(3) Through some combination of courses, reading, and projects: scripting/automation, API design (easy), modern web dev (project plus lots of Googling and learning to accelerate learning by relying on others), mobile app design (same approach as web dev), PaaS via AWS or GCP (or bespoke), basic security, AMQs, orchestration (at least Docker; maybe Kuberbetes), proxying (uses of Nginx) and UNIX/Linux networking fundamentals, metrics and analytics (with an emphasis on learning the value of instrumenting a system/product/business and using the feedback to improve it), databases (Postgres at least; become super proficient at SQL), basic UI/UX design principles, software engineering best practices (from simple things like KISS, coupling, testing, all the way up to reliability, availability, maintainability, scalability, and good decision-making, particularly with respect to knowing how to achieve a sensible balance between time, cost, and quality).
I’m missing a lot, but in short you should know every technology function required in a modern company at least at a basic level. Some people call this "full stack".
If you want a lasting career in tech and you don’t plan to specialize, then this is the way to go. The merits of being a specialist vs a generalist are debated all over the place. Thiel will tell you to relentlessly focus on one thing and ‘vertically integrate’. Scott Adams will tell you to get very good at two or more things and then combine them, since becoming the best at any one thing is extremely hard.
If it’s not obvious, I chose to be a generalist. If I had to explain why, it would be because: (a) I don’t like the risk of committing to one thing (“blockchain engineer" seems like a dubious track, for example), (b) I get bored easily, (c) specialization often but not always seems to lead to myopia, which is cancer in any enterprise; this is hard to explain but you’ll know it if you ever see it: everyone operating in their own silos, incapable of cross-displinary thinking, lacking empathy for the nature of what other people do, pervasive groupthink, arrogance (d) if you’re not good enough to be a top-tier specialist (I'm not), then the way you maximize the value you can create and that you can get paid for is to be an exceedingly useful generalist, who can think across organizational concerns and boundaries effectively.
(4) What Charlie Munger calls “remedial worldly wisdom”.
The most appalling failure of our education system is that it produces people who can take a test but can’t think independently, let alone innovate.
Some of us software engineers get to thinking we’re hot shit. We're not. For one simple reason: what we do is almost always deterministic. Someone has done it before and written it down so that you can do it too. At worst, you have to tweak something a bit to make it work for your situation.
In the real world, nondeterminism drives novel value. In other words, everything wrapped around the lines of code you write is what's important. That means you're going to be hard-pressed to make a dent in anything if all you can do is write code.
Thinking well is a broad subject and you’re going to have to tackle it on multiple fronts, probably for the rest of your life. The most important thing by far is behavioral psychology. Do whatever you possibly can to grasp it. Additionally: systems thinking, philosophy, basic accounting, very basic economics (as soon as they say “Solow Model” run away; ideally well before that), some history. Poor Charlie's Almanac is a good starting point for much of this. It'll help you appreciate why this is important.
You should also know how to apply math to solve any problem you run into that falls short of involving calculus or advanced prob/stat. In a perfect world, you would know how to apply calculus as well, but the opportunities to do so are so few and far between that you likely won’t remember it beyond basic differentiation/integration in the long run (or at least I didn't since I have a poor memory, but that may not apply to you).
(5) Read The Lean Startup. And expand out. Be careful since there’s a lot of garbage in the business genre. Others I can recommend: The Phoenix Project, Lean Analytics, the first part of The Startup Owner’s Manual (the latter two parts only if you ever get past the first stage of building a company). Even if you never choose to work on a startup, it’s the same kind of thinking that will enable you to generate outsized value in any organization. Good decision-making offers at least an order of magnitude better value per unit time than writing code. You will get in the door by writing code. You will get up the ladder by making good decisions.
When you read books, get paper copies and write in them: underline, take notes in the margins, drop in some Post-Its to mark really good sections, etc. If you read a book that really resonates with you, then go further and write up notes on it afterward. Even just underlining a book is ridiculously useful. Underlining alone can allow future you to skim through what you understood to be the most important parts of a 300 page book in roughly 10 minutes.
All of the above may seem like a lot. And honestly, it would all fit in easily if I could swap out the less useful required parts of my CS degree. But that won't be viable until universities offer that option and companies stop thinking a complete CS degree is the qualification they should be targeting. Until that happens, the onus is on you to not let your "schooling interfere with [your] education."
I said I want to take them because I want to (i.e. they are fun to me personally), not because I said they are useful. I think that's the same reason many people went deep into a field, they found it fun to work on problems in that field. Sure, we're not the hot shit, it might not teach us many useful skills. But somehow the idea of satisfaction in the field of study and work goes a long way to me. It makes me stay late at night working on things that matter instead of smoking weed every night and wonder about our life choices and thinking about dropping out. I've been there, done that, I know how it feels to be in a noble place but dead inside. I'd choose to be creative and inspired to work any day of the year.
>Some of us software engineers get to thinking we’re hot shit. We're not. For one simple reason: what we do is almost always deterministic. Someone has done it before and written it down so that you can do it too. At worst, you have to tweak something a bit to make it work for your situation.
>In the real world, nondeterminism drives novel value. In other words, everything wrapped around the lines of code you write is what's important. That means you're going to be hard-pressed to make a dent in anything if all you can do is write code.
I totally agree. Personally, I think of myself closer to being a creative person than a procedural person. I think creativity is very very important perhaps, as much as competency. That's why inspiration is great, and that's why studying something that I find fun is important.
Dropping out has cost me several hundreds of thousands of dollars. I don't know how many. Lots of companies pay more just for having a degree.
Consider transferring to a cheaper and/or easier school. You'll have more time to yourself, which is often a good thing. Unless you're actually depressed.
If you're interested in CS, math is almost always useful. I wish I'd had more. Most of the topics you list are research topics only available to research-level academics.
Changing schools is the one thing I regret not trying. Another thing to consider is to change girlfriends. Or find a better one. That can certainly impact your overall view of life. In other words, don't ignore the social aspects of choosing a school.
In the 70's through the 90's I had to contend with management that was often quite stupid. And quite often did not even know what a computer really was. You can avoid situations like that more easily if you have a degree.
It would seem that would get to work on the large and important things if you pick up cryptography as a skill.
Never implemented any algorithms but every assignment involved breaking bad implementations of crypto or various applications which was extremely interesting.
Pretty much every lecture slide had a disclaimer "never implement * yourself, Use respected crypto libraries!!!".
My main hesitancy with the really domain specific courses offered in college is that the careers associated with them are all or nothing. Adding stuff like machine learning/AI, cryptography, etc. to your skill set as a standard software engineer is super hard to do in a practical manner.
For me personally, I would do a deep dive on distributed architecture, which you may also be interested in given your interest in p2p.
Technologies come and go and you’ll be autodidact during your career. Management, however, will help you identify how to become more effective, regardless your actual posistion.
Databases - Btrees, indexes, distributed key value stores. The world runs on databases.
Graphics - if you like games, how a 3D scene is rendered, photo realism with Ray tracers, GPU pipelines and OpenGL
AI and Machine Learning - tons of fascinating problems and algorithms.
I’d say focus on the basics. Hash tables have remained mostly the same since they were invented. C still uses pointers, the basics are fundamentally so powerful that they are kind of eternal.
When I hire someone, i’m looking for someone with strong fundamentals. They understand the basic datastructures, algorithms and how a computer works.
I plan to teach myself one day. Maybe I'll start today
The best advice I can give is to find a mentor - someone who captures your imagination. Most professors are desperate for enthusiastic students to do stuff for them!
And yes, do more math. You need people around you for that.
Most of complex algorithms and data structures are used in databases.
But if I could try over, I'd focus more on small skills instead of breadth. Full stack is nice to know but ultimately not useful. Anyone can learn to program something over 3 months. That doesn't necessarily make you valuable.
What makes people valuable is being better than other people at a skillset. Like right now we really need a good AngularJS (1) programmer, but that's hard to find.
"UI/UX guys" are a dime a dozen, but what's extremely valuable are the ones who can prototype quickly, write their own CSS/HTML. These guys will be core to any group.
There will always be new, sexy tech. The hard part would be coding the algorithms. The guys who are cashing in on e-commerce know their Big O. The guys who are well paid writing code for Uber know their algorithms. The rest will change, and will either be reading documentation or copy paste.
I agree with many comments that suggest pursuing something more "meta" like management or architecture that will help no matter where you land in 5-10 years. Although personally, I'd say experience is practically the best education you can get.
It's applicable to all sorts of things like event loops, job queues, network packet analysis, even database access.
It seems that there are a lot of people currently making laws and rulings on things that they don't understand - and there is going to be a lot of change coming soon with the way technology is going.
Unfortunately I can't afford the time or money to do it now (I think it was like 6 years to just get qualified) which is a shame.
(I never went to university or even finished my A-levels, I just went straight to get a job at 17, looking back 20 years later, it hasn't hindered me in anyway, but I do think that going would have had a positive effect and maybe changed my career)
Study whatever you enjoy most. It'll be easier for you to excel that way, and you'll still get the all-important degree.
Once you get your career underway, continue to learn and work on whatever interests you most; be prepared to continually learn and adapt over the decades. New technologies and ideas will come along that haven't been imagined yet, while some of the stuff you study at uni will be surprisingly relevant later.
Best of luck!
- networking, focus TCP - Compilers, focus theory behind lex and yacc, or equivalent - parallel algorithms, focus on lock free and message passing - A.I. focus on or-tree search and genetic emergence. (Not ML, important but that comes later) - functional models of computation and recursion.
You should definitely consider choosing some topics from the and study them.
I didn’t have any exposure to this as an undergrad but have been doing research in the area for my PhD, and now I’ll be starting as a professor in August. I think it can benefit you in just about any job you go for.
- it would have been easier to get interviews at places I wanted to work when I had less experience
- it would be easier to get interviews now at places I want to work if I had prior experience at companies like the ones I could have joined with a BSCS
- I'd finally know what I could have learned in school but didn't, and what I just needed to learn on my own
- I'd spend less energy on feeling like I have something to prove to BSCS grads
If I were in a BSCS program, and I wanted to drop out, I'd do the following before bailing:
- prove to myself that I could power through boring work AND do it well to reduce the chances that I'd get fired from a job because I couldn't/wouldn't do the crap work that job required of me
- I'd seriously look at my finances to understand how much time I could afford to be unemployed, because I was damn broke in school, and if I got canned from a good coding job, and had to take a crappy non-coding job, I'd have less time to code, which would make it hard to get another good coding job
- immediately start living as cheaply as possible on cash I had, only using student loan money for school expenses, and completely staying away from credit cards
- line up a job before dropping out, and keep still playing student well enough until I had that job
- talk to my professors about my challenges in remaining interested in school, and see if they can offer me some perspective that might help me appreciate the pros and cons of staying in school, because unlike your boss at work, you can talk to professors about your non-growth/personal development
- find some professional mentors who could guide me on how to be an employee and/or entrepreneur
- stop throwing around derogatory terms like "code monkey", because that kind of job may be the I could get, and I wanna certain I'm not insulting people with whom I'll be working by unintentionally coming across as an ahole
- figure out how to pay for health insurance
What we have atm is a job market where you can make good money with your skills. Consider that the "weather", it may come and go. In leaner times, the degree can be of more value.
I completed all the pre-reqs too, just never got around to taking it.
