this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2025
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NOTE: Computer Scientists are the folks that do lots of math to figure out the best algorithm to use to solve any given computational problem. It's a very specific subset of programming.
For a long, long time companies sought to hire people with computer science degrees as software developers under the impression that these were the best people for developing software. This was a very bad assumption.
Turns out, computer scientists are often terrible at software development! They don't usually teach things like how to best organize large projects or even basics like source code management or software deployment/management in CompSci programs. Yet those are the actual skills employers need these days.
Want to get a job in software development? You don't need a degree at all! What you need is to demonstrate your skills with whatever tools/software employers are demanding. The simplest way to do that is with posting some open source code to GitHub (or similar).
When hiring—if the person I'm interviewing has a public repo that uses the tech we're using—they're basically hired immediately. At that point the only thing I care about is, "does this person seem OK-ish to work with?" LOL! Easiest hire ever 👍
The problem is that CS curricula vary quite a bit from university to university. Having ABET accreditation helps (or at least used to) a good bit with this as it required a program to include certain brass tacks material as well as (workforce) project participation items. However, many of those accredited programs effectively emerged out of EE departments so there's a very weird skewing effect in the field.