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AbhiJ
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Joined: August 5th, 2008, 11:29 am

Getting a job with a MS in CS

October 22nd, 2013, 2:16 pm

QuoteOriginally posted by: traderjoe1976Since you express your desire to study Math in depth and your intense dislike for programming, I would suggest that you do a PhD in Mathematics. This way you will be able to go indepth into Math. If you are as good at Math as you say, you will soon be a senior quant and will be able to hire quant developers for your team to do the grunt coding work.If you are not as good as you think in Math, there will still be plenty of waiter jobs available which do not require any programming and will give you a lot of time to study Math as a hobby.TJ is one of the few people left on Wilmott who doesnot give garbage advice. Twofish, StatGuy etc were good too but are nowhere to be seen these days.
 
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MattF
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Joined: March 14th, 2003, 7:15 pm

Getting a job with a MS in CS

October 22nd, 2013, 2:55 pm

QuoteOriginally posted by: CuchulainnWriting your own sort routines is what developers had to do in the 70's. No one writes their own sort routines anymore. Just use a library. Being subjected to this as a core element of a CS course says a lot.Isn't this exactly what a Computer Scientist should be learning? Less so a software engineer, they can just plug in the library sort routine.
 
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Cuchulainn
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Location: 20, 000

Getting a job with a MS in CS

October 22nd, 2013, 4:12 pm

QuoteIsn't this exactly what a Computer Scientist should be learning? Less so a software engineer, they can just plug in the library sort routine.Ok, here is my 2 centsI've not sure what a CS should be doing! A software engineer must be much more qualified because he has to solve real problems. Somehow I get the feeling that we are implying that software engineers have less challenging work than CSers. Au contraire! Take a hardware/software product department and it will surprise you. Here in NL most roles are filled by HTS/HBO level (kind of like old UK polytech system) and not many pure CSers as such. If I want a bubble sort I can just google it. That's not the issue anymore.CS should be learning a discipline of engineering IMO. This is a discussion that has been waging for 50 years. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Cru ... er_Science "On the Cruelty of Really Teaching Computing Science" is a 1988 paper by E. W. Dijkstra[1] which argues that computer programming should be understood as a branch of mathematics, and that the formal provability of a program is a major criterion for correctness.There is also greater emphasis on the social aspects of programming, such as learning how to program as part of a team, and how to write code that is easily re-used by other people, or "borrowing" code from other programs' source code, which was not considered immoral or illegal at the time. Some institutions focus more on pleasing the computing industry by teaching the most popular programming languages, or teaching the use of commonly available development tools, than they do on imparting the foundational concepts of computing science.
Last edited by Cuchulainn on October 21st, 2013, 10:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.
 
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Cuchulainn
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Getting a job with a MS in CS

October 22nd, 2013, 4:59 pm

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Last edited by Cuchulainn on October 21st, 2013, 10:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.
 
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MattF
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Joined: March 14th, 2003, 7:15 pm

Getting a job with a MS in CS

October 23rd, 2013, 11:48 am

I would say Software Engineering was more akin to an engineering discipline. The collaborative nature of development, component re-use, test frameworks and deployment issues are similar to how an engineering project might be run. Where it differs significantly from traditional engineering is that it's not imperative to have everything specified to the n-th degree in advance and iteratively improving prototypes is nothing like as costly or time-consuming as making real-world equivalents. Software design methodologies seemed to take a long time in noticing this.
 
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Cuchulainn
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Getting a job with a MS in CS

October 23rd, 2013, 1:44 pm

QuoteOriginally posted by: MattFI would say Software Engineering was more akin to an engineering discipline. The collaborative nature of development, component re-use, test frameworks and deployment issues are similar to how an engineering project might be run. Where it differs significantly from traditional engineering is that it's not imperative to have everything specified to the n-th degree in advance and iteratively improving prototypes is nothing like as costly or time-consuming as making real-world equivalents. Software design methodologies seemed to take a long time in noticing this.Here is the man who coined the phrase SEQuoteMalcolm Douglas McIlroy (born 1932) is a mathematician, engineer, and programmer. As of 2007 he is an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at Dartmouth College. Dr. McIlroy is best known for having originally developed Unix pipelines, software componentry and several Unix tools, such as spell, diff, sort, join, graph, speak, and tr.His seminal work on software componentization,[1] makes him a pioneer of component-based software engineering and software product line engineering.
Last edited by Cuchulainn on October 22nd, 2013, 10:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.
 
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Cuchulainn
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Getting a job with a MS in CS

October 23rd, 2013, 1:49 pm

Do modern-day software engineers use components?? QuoteThe idea that software should be componentized - built from prefabricated components - first became prominent with Douglas McIlroy's address at the NATO conference on software engineering in Garmisch, Germany, 1968, titled Mass Produced Software Components.[3] The conference set out to counter the so-called software crisis. McIlroy's subsequent inclusion of pipes and filters into the Unix operating system was the first implementation of an infrastructure for this idea.Brad Cox of Stepstone largely defined the modern concept of a software component.[4] He called them Software ICs and set out to create an infrastructure and market for these components by inventing the Objective-C programming language. (He summarizes this view in his book Object-Oriented Programming - An Evolutionary Approach 1986.)
Last edited by Cuchulainn on October 22nd, 2013, 10:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.