"Engineer of Information", please ๐
this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2025
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If you want to know how computers work, do electrical engineering. If you want to know how electricity works, do physics. If you want to know how physics works, do mathematics. If you want to know how mathematics works, too bad, best you can do is think about the fact it works in philosophy.
If you want to know how philosophy works, do sociology...
It's kind of like a horseshoe with philosophy and math at the ends.
If you want to no longer want to know how anything works, do biochemistry
Too real
A horseshoe capped off by Computer Science ๐
looks weird without the clevage
Had a graduate Dev who did not have a fucking clue about anything computer related. How tf he passed his degree I have no idea.
Basic programming principles? No clue. Data structures? Nope.
We were once having a discussion about the limitations of transistors and dude's like "what's a transistor?" ~_~#
I've met people like that too.
It's called cheating, lots of people do it.
Most worthless dev I've met was a graduate of comp sci who couldn't hold a candle compared to a guy that did a dev boot camp.
The best dev I've met so far didn't even have any credentials whatsoever, second next best did 2yr associates.
Tie for 3rd best with associate's and 4yr degree.
I was partnered with that guy for one class in grad school. We were working on a master's degree in software engineering, and the assignment was analysis and changes to an actual code base, and this mofo was asking questions and/or blanking on things like what you mention. I can't remember the specifics but it was some basic building block kind of stuff. Like what's an array, or what's a function, or how do we send another number into this function. I think the neurons storing that info got pruned to save me the frustrating memories.
I just remember my internal emotional reaction. It was sort of "are you fucking kidding me" but not in the sense that somebody blew off the assignment, was rude, or was wrong about some basic fact. I have ADHD and years ago I went through some pretty bad periods with that and overall mental & physical health. I know the panic of being asked to turn in an assignment you never knew existed, or being asked about some project at work and just have no idea whatsoever how to respond.
This was none of those. This was "holy shit, this guy has never done anything, how did he even end up here?"
Tbh, as a dev knowledge of transistors is about as essential as knowledge about screws for a car driver.
It's common knowledge and in general maybe a little shameful to not know, but it's really not in any way relevant for the task at hand.
Maybe for dev knowledge, but computer science? The science of computers?
Is that not the difference between a computer science and a computer engineering degree?
What kind of cs degree did you get where you learned about electrical circuits. The closest to hardware I've learned is logic circuit diagrams and verilog.
I learned about transistors in Informatics class in highschool. Everything from the bottom up, from the material that makes a transistor possible to basic logic circuits sr flip flops, and, or, xor, addition, to the von-neumann-architecture, a basic microprocessor and machine code and assembly.
I mean, I graduated over 20 years ago now, but I had to take a number of EE courses for my CS major. Guess that isn't a thing now, or in a lot of places? Just assumed some level of EE knowledge was required for a CS degree this whole time.
I got my BS in CSci about 15 years ago and it was 100% about programming in java. We didn't learn a fucking thing about hardware and my roommate was an EE major and we had none of the same classes except for calculus.
By the time I graduated java was basically dead. Thanks state college.
Java isn't dead, though
In my uni they kinda just teach java. There is one mandatory class that's in C and one that's in mips assembly tho.
Everyone used AI when I took those classes. By the end of the year they were still having trouble on groupchat with syntax stuff.
In my own uni's coursework the closest we get are some labs where students breadboard some simple adder circuits, which we do just to save them from embarassing gaps in their knowledge (like happened in the inital comment). It doesn't add much beyond a slightly better understanding of how things can be implemented, if we're being honest.
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Well, computer science is not the science of computers, is it? It's about using computers (in the sense of programming them), not about making computers. Making computers is electrical engineering.
We all know how great we IT people are at naming things ;)
My BS in CS took its roots down to CMOS composition of logic gates and basic EE, on the hardware side, and down to deriving numbers and arithmetic from Boolean logic / predicate calculus, on the philosophy side. Then tied those up together through the theoretical underpinnings of computation and problem solving, like a trunk, and branched back out into the various mainstream technologies that derived from all that. It obviously all depends on the program at the school of choice, I suppose, and I'm sure it's evolved over the years, but it still seems important to have at least some courses that pull back the wizard's curtain to ensure their students really see how it's all just an increasingly elaborate, high-tech version of conceptually simple (in function) machinery carrying out fundamental building blocks of logic.
Anyway, I'm going to go sniff my own cinnamon roll scented farts while gazing in the mirror, now.
We did the same thing, going so far as to "build" a simple imaginary CPU. It was interesting but ultimately dead knowledge.
I built an emulator for that CPU, which the university course took over and used for a few years for the course. But after that I never did anything with logic gates or anything like that.
I got into DIY electronics lateron as a hobby, but even then I never used logic gates and instead just slapped a cheap microcontroller on to handle all my logic needs.
I do use transistors sometimes e.g. for amplification, but we didn't learn anything about that in university.
In the end it feels like learning how to theoretically mine sand when studying to become an architect. Interesting, but also ultimately pointless.
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tbf all good programmers are good at math. Not classic arithmetic necessarily, but at the very least applied calculus. It's a crime how many people used a mathematical discipline every day, but don't think they're "good at math" because of how lazer focused the world is on algebra, geometry and trig as being all that "math" is.
Serious question; how does Calculus apply to programming? Iโve never understood.
PID control is the classic example, but at a far enough abstraction any looping algorithm can be argued to be an implementation of the concepts underpinning calculus. If you're ever doing any statistical analysis or anything in game design having to do with motion, those are both calculus too. Data science is pure calculus, ground up and injected into your eyeballs, and any string manipulation or Regex is going to be built on lambda calculus (though a very correct argument can be made that literally all computer science is built of lambda calculus so that might be cheating to include it)
Does it apply to interpolation for animation and motion?
Motion yes, but I have no idea about the mathematics of animation (sorry)
Lambda calculus has no relation to calculus calculus, though.
Data science is pure calculus, ground up and injected into your eyeballs
Lol, I like that. I mean, there's more calculus-y things, but it's kind of unusual in that you can't really interpret the non-calculus aspects of a neural net.
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Graphics programming is the most obvious one and it uses it plenty, but really any application that can be modeled as a series of discrete changes will mostly likely be using calculus.
Time series data is the most common form of this, where derivatives are the rate of change from one time step to the next and integrals are summing the changes across a range of time.
But it can even be more abstract than that. For example, there's a recent-ish paper on applying signal processing techniques (which use calculus themselves, btw) to databases for the purposes of achieving efficient incremental view maintenance: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.16684
The idea is that a database is a sequence of transactions that apply a set of changes to said database. Integrating gets you the current state of the database by applying all of the changes.
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Depends on the context. When my company proposes me to a client for work I am, but oddly during my yearly performance review I am just some smuck who programs.
I literally have no idea what this picture means, and at this point I'm too afraid to ask.
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Iโm something of a scientist myself
Be me, a computer scientist who still struggles with XOR.
Wait til you see XNAND
My favorite was always XANEX
what fuck that one does
Turns all your zeros into ones.
I have been coding since I was 10 years old. I have a CS degree and have been in professional IT for like 30 years. Started as a developer but Iโm primarily hardware and architecture now. I have never ever said I was a computer scientist. That just sounds weird.
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