Absolutely.

I don’t have a CS degree, I have a Cybersecurity and Forensics one. But, I love programming, and between the overlap of the two degrees and and my advanced designation I ended up taking about 3/4ths of the classes needed to get a CS degree.

Diversifying helped so much with me becoming a well rounded developer. My assembly programming class, while optional for CS, was mandatory for me, made me a significantly better dev. That assembly knowledge got me to become a skilled debugger, which made my C++ classes 10x easier, and it helped me understand memory at a lower level, making the memory problems easier to diagnose and fix.

I convinced a CS friend to take one of my cyber classes, Reverse Engineering, and he found te components of the class where we analyzed a vulnerable program to find and exploit the vuln, or the bit where we tried and determined the bug based on malware that exploited it is insightful to learning to program securely.

Learning about the infrastructure used in enterprise during a Windows admin or Linux admin class will make it easier to write code for those systems.

From the cybersecurity perspective, many of my CS classes carry me hard. Knowing how programs are written, how APIs are developed, and how to design complex software lets me make more educated recommendations based on what little information I’m given by the limited logs I am given to investigate. Writing code that interfaces with linux primitives makes it easier to conceptualize what’s going on when I am debugging a broken linux system.

To be fair, this is my experience in environmental sciences too.

But okay, it was pretty broad. Like, pretty much everything scientific, data.

But no language courses, not much programming, missing stuff here and there.

But my Uni also encouraged (actually enforced) to choose random extra courses.