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Why You Don’t Need an Advanced Mathematics Degree to Be a Programmer
A computer science professor explains the evolution of coding careers
Most of the people I know are software engineers or computer scientists of one form or another. Most of them are very experienced and come from a time when to be either of those things required a very serious computer science education. This is still the case for being a computer scientist, but seemingly not so for being a programmer. Many of my well seasoned colleagues lament the decline in skill and education of their younger peers. I’ve also seen this shift in the skill set and education of entry-level programming candidates both on the job and in the classroom. It seems as if software engineering as a discipline and profession has given way to “hacking” and “cowboy” developers who know very little actual computer science. Has something changed? If so, what?
[ Author’s Edit, January, 2024: As they say, times change… I have to take back a lot of what I wrote here. You can find details about that in this story about AI and this story about what it takes to be programmer today. ]
Comp Sci History 101
If you go back to the beginnings of computer science, it was not called computer science and there were no computer science…
