I can code better then most CS students, but if I want to go to university I have to take things like calculus... why

I'm currently panicking over a chemistry exam because I don't give two fucking shits about chemistry but I have to take it.

Because, you know, chemistry is something used daily while you're a computer programmer.

Calculus is fun!
I really enjoy it 😊

so you arent an idiot coding monkey

seriously, actual coding is 40% of any big project

So you can graph how better you are and compare the 'better rate' (scale of skill level) and rate of learning by limits & derivates & use L'hospital's rule & so many fun things. And prove that you are better lol by writing a proof. That's definitely not fun.

Also so you can go into Data science & stats and earn lots of more money.

@-psr you dont need l'hospital, because every natural phenomenon (human skill) follows a gaussian curve, so you can plot from minimal data

@jhh2450 right. I'm like "fuck chemistry. I'm not bad at it but its boring and I don't care about it". Physics is way more fun! (Luckily I don't have anymore chemistry. It got replaced by even more physics lessons :3)

Because CS is more than just coding. Try a liberal arts college that offers CS or a coding boot camp, but I doubt you'll be doing anything interesting with it.

@GodHatesMe I'm quite serious.

Don't go to university if you think it's a waste of time. Some people are too smart for that shit.

@timlyrics This is why I dropped out.
It wasn't worth my time.

I use calculus near daily at the moment. But being a brain dead code monkey that can only follow instructions sounds fun too.

@alwaysmpe 😅

@timlyrics mileage will vary but my story is one I am proud of. I'm self taught through and through. My late grandparents introduced me into this wonderful world in 1999 with a Compaq presario! I was hooked day one and have been breaking and making things ever since.

Well, in highschool I was all about music. I was a c student elsewhere. I would do the bare minimum, rarely study...not proud of that part. I was looking to go to a decent University for CSE... Procrastinated, took the ACT(30) but not the SAT and just didn't set myself up for success. I was in the Marine corps a few months later doing logistics.

When I left in 2013, I went straight to CSE at a decent state uni... Couldn't hack it.

In 2014 I fought for a job in our R&D department... I was writing cli and gui apps to simplify my (then) job. I got it!

That was the best day ever, receiving the offer letter...

I'd like to think I'm smart enough to skip the degree, as I'm at market pay approaching Senior Engineer. 27y/o

@theScientist Self-teaching calculus for fun. It's even on my resume!

It's actually not bad from what I've seen, it isn't like Algebra. Statistics was my favorite, and I hate math.

@hughmunguswot my career got set back a year because of a horrible devil lady. Otherwise I would probably be at senior level. Though I got to skip junior because I went to grad school.

@Ashkin I'm not alone in enjoying calculus! Hurray!

@BindView Yes, but those who code aren't usually doing the other 60%. That's why PMs, analysts, testers and so forth exist. Everyone has a different role.

The real reason is because it's computer SCIENCE. If he took a computer programming program, it likely wouldn't have any sciences or mathematics beyond the basics.

My qualification doesn't include math at all, but every other aspect of IT. Split into Software Dev, Security and Information Systems at 4th year level. I still plan on doing statistics on the side for potential data science jobs.

I was terrible at math in high school and barely scraped by grade 12 with 43%, but I did enjoy the logic in the subject. I figure I'll do far better at my own pace in my next go.

I'm a computer engineering major with minors in applied mathematics and computer science. I guess it depends on what kind of job you plan on having but I couldn't imagine not having a math background.

It has countless applications in the field, it gives you a better understanding of optimization and why we do things the way we do in cs.

Beyond calculus (I assume you mean Calc 1 and 2, I have also taken differential and multivariable) there is discrete math, linear algebra and matrix theory, algorithms and their design, probability and statistics and more. I also will be working with hardware so I use the Laplace transform and phaser form and a bunch of other calculus jazz all the time.

Math and it's concepts will enable you to solve problems in ways you would never have imagined!

@-psr in my schools, L'hospital was considered some kind of taboo, and may still be
But That is one good concept

@Ashkin I want to drop out. Into final year. GPA<6. Hate the course enrolled in. Wastage of time. Nobody sees how much time get wasted due to college. Fuckin hate myself when I see myself wasting time. Skipped two final exams last semester.
Maths, CS❤️

I wouldn't do cs degree here too becouse I'd have to study all the initial courses for the main engineering branches including structural engineering and fucking chemistry. But man, you really have to appreciate maths, including calculus, statistics and algebra. They would help me a lot in understanding the data branch of programming or core concepts about algorithms.

I envy people at advanced math courses at my uni as I can't take them as I'm doing a hunanities carreer (I'm in history). I'll try to learn as much maths as I can during summer vacations becouse I really want to understand what the fuck is going on in machine learning and data analysis.

Please appreciate maths.

I enrolled for a CS program because of developers who write shit quality code and can't see it for themselves because they are self taught and: hey, it works right?

And yeah, calculus doesn't have much in application in high level, little data programming. And logic: oh well, a million if statements get you there as well, right? And my programming course takes two weeks to explain for loops.

But still, I'm not gonna be that Dev that thinks their good but write shit code. there are no excuses for shit code.

Everyone seems to assume that I'm a code monkey that writes shit code and doesn't understand anything else.

But I'm not self taught, I had a university lvl teacher that cost me a lot of $$$. But the thing is, since it was all private tutoring I didn't get a degree. That's why I want to go to university, but I still laugh at their requirements of things such as calculus and chemistry.

If you can't do calculus, you are going to suck anyway

It’s not bad to study something you might not immediately like because you’ll have to do this for your job too. And you never know when things come in useful. I hated having to learn accounting and billing to write these modules for software since I’d never work in these fields. But with having a side business this is suddenly something I’m glad I know.

Universities and school in general is BS. i learned absolutely nothing from it i learned at home sleepless nights books doing things. you go to school you're limited by the slowest student (oh we spent 2 FUCKING YEARS learning basics of programming conditions, arrays, loops !!!! 2 MUTHAFUCKING YEARS bcuz some dude got A in highschool and went to CS he must be gud i mean he scored an A) don't go to school if you don't need to if you're from a shit country like me take the shortest path bachelor and leave to a better coutry get a job or something

OH and yeah i had to study economics marketing ... I DON'T FUCKING CARE ABOUT THAT SHIT

@Tychus You would start caring once you are working with a good company/team or get a start-up of yours

@chiragiem36 that's the argument they always give but if i ever wanted that (i will never want to, I have friends in that field) i will go to the faculty of economics and enroll in courses there. I believe in specialization if you don't might aswell learn military tactics, fiction writing, medicine you never know when you're at war need to defend yourself perform surgery and write a novel about it

@Tychus suppose you are working on a global web application. You have data about transactions per second or per minute. You have data of one month. Large ? Okay. One week . Now you need to predict when for the next time the total number of active connection will be low to update you servers. How you are going to do that ?

@chiragiem36 again that argument is weak. suppose you work in a biolab and you need to know i dunno something about cancer cells how would you do that ?

Answer is WHEN i get in that situation and accept it i will figure it out or ask consultation from an expert of that field until then let me worry about data structures algorithms and shit like that.

@Tychus Exactly! I actually had someone tell me this exact same thing!!?

Me: I fucking hate that I've got to take these bullshit classes. When the fuck am I going to use biology while coding software?
Her: You never know when you'll need it!
Me: 1) Suppose you're right and 10 years from now, I'm working on a biological application. Do you think I'll actually remember this shit? And this shit is rapidly changing, so chances are, what I learned could be inaccurate. 2) Why waste countless hours taking a class I *MAY* need once or twice? If I need it, I can spend a day or two doing research and consulting experts in the field to get their two cents.

Needless to say at this point she accepted the fact I was 100% right, because her reply was "Whatever, I'm just saying you may need it."

@jhh2450 @Tychus well the issue with both of your arguments is that the point isn't about what you need for your future job. That is a terrible argument. But so is the one that your advisors give you.

The biggest point is that university is supposed to produce people with more well rounded knowledge than just your major, as well as teaching you how to apply knowledge across disciplines, how to study, and knowledge synthesis. Now whether it succeeds in its goal is up for debate and I have had that screaming argument before (I have friends who are teachers and university professors), but to say that taking classes that aren't related to your major is useless is a facile argument.

@projektaquarius the University should teach people what they need to know in their field of interest but Schoos and Universities will teach you what the market needs and that is why schools and Universities are whortless

@Tychus again, that flies in the face of the purpose of universities. If you don't like it go to a technical school or a code boot camp. But don't be surprised if you don't get as far in your career as the university grads because you didn't pick up the skills the uni students did.

@KingDorito, sorry man I didn't mean to say you were going to write bad code. Just that that is my reason to deal with all the courses that seem unrelated!

@projektaquarius bro i went far in the uni because i had to and those that got the top ranks ( the first in my class got 1-3 in all CS courses and 5 in all economics, marketing, business management ...) guess who had no problem getting jobs and acing interviews in my home country and in Europe i got hired before finishing my studies while those top students to this day struggle to get or keep jobs so i don't know what kind of skills you're talking about here mate i can only think of memorizing and regurgitating without understanding skills which is the only thing you can really learn from schools and Universities.

The whole educational system is shit, the degree of shitiness varies from country to country

@Tychus sure. If your company can afford to hold the work for some days

@Tychus if you don't know how market needs then what and how are you going to develop product for market

@Tychus I myself believe that education system today is terrible. And you waste more time than you utilize. At some universities you only waste it. I want to dropout anyhow.

But that doesn't mean you should not learn the stuff. If your attitude is you will learn everything as its requirement comes, you are going to fail terribly.

There are reason by we have foundation courses

If a situation arise and you have habit to run to someone to find solution, or spend another n number of days to solve it, I can see what kind of programmer you are going to become

@chiragiem36 like i said if we follow your logic you'll need to learn everything because you might need to work on a project in the field. lear maths, physics, electronics, medecine, astronomy, voodoo, black magic, military tactics, ballistics, surgery, art, painting, construction ...

thing is when you try to make people learn bits from many fields which serves no one really, companies think it's good for them they don't have to pay for experts but the result is mediocre results in each of those fields. you can either be a specialist in a field or a mediocre guy in many fields. that's why we have people in economics faculties, medecine and that is why I'm against the new trend of teaching everybody to write code.

Specialization is the best solution we are many and we have different abilities so let each and everyone of us be great in the field he's most adapted for.

@Tychus I am focusing on maths only. And as I said do you always have time to learn new things which working on something?

Will your company be happy with "sorry I don't know what is this thing and how it work. Give me a week and I will figure it out what it is. You can hire someone else who knows this stuff"

I code better than a majority of CS student in my college ( I am not enrolled in CS course ) and I am very good with maths too compared to others.

There are stuff about CS that those "graduating", has mugged about , I wish I knew. But sure I will learn someday.

@chiragiem36 don't get me wrong i'm good with maths and electronics i studied both and always wanted to be in that area of CS, low level algorithms embedded signal processing parallel programming optimization so maths and electronics are required for me. but i don't see how Economics will ever be of importance to me or advanced mathematics to someone developing web application ... you get what I'm saying here ?

and yes if my company asks me to i dunno write a business related piece of software i would refuse to take care of the business part and even the app itself because that's not part of my job description and if they try to force me into it well I'll just quit. I'm an embedded programmer not a business analyst or astrophysicist

@Tychus knowledge synthesis and soft skills. I got my job over people that were monster coders because I could infer c through z given a and b, though I had no experience with a through z. And I could explain how I got there in ways that both a non-technical person and a technical person could understand.

I also learned how to bullshit, speak in public to a variety of people all with different experiences and expectations, how to accept failure, etc, etc. I can tell you: a lot of people that shunned the "extra" courses as useless may be great at coding, possibly better than me. But that doesn't mean anything if you have to interact with others. But I am speaking to the American university experience so YMMV.

@projektaquarius i was never asked in all the programming job interviews i took if i know how to talk to people. all i was expected to know is what i will actually be doing writing code. so if you're going for jobs that require you to be a salesman, representative, programmer, manager by all means study that but it shouldn't be imposed on all people. you can simply enroll in those courses in the corresponding faculty.

We have salespeople doing sales
business people doing business
marketing doing marketing
why are programmers supposed to do that ?

this argument can go forever but that kind of arguments will never change my position.

@Tychus there are a lot more interesting (and probably more importantly, profitable) products that have been written for people that don't code. They usually require an element of domain knowledge too. At some point you will have to talk to customers and understand what they do or you will be held back in your career. If you want to be just a code monkey for the rest of your life feel free to live in a cave away from normal people. If you want to be a successful software engineer you may want to know how to talk to more than just computers.

@Tychus and I don't know of company that hire people including dropouts who are bad at maths

A developer not knowing his market is a like a monkey with a knife

Google was a much bigger company compared to Facebook. A pool of great engineers. Still, Orkut, which was launched a month ago Facebook, always remain Beta and lost to Facebook which was started by techies. Or why google video failed against Youtube. Why?

a lot of good start ups or product Failed despite being good engineers and tech

same with the apple in its early years. Gates tasted success but not jobs

@Tychus I am not a sales man. But I do have to explain stuff to non technical people. Either out of touch managers or MBA types. If you don't have to do that, then consider yourself lucky but it is a necessary skill for a large percentage of us in the tech industry. Dude you got lucky. Plain and simple. If you don't have to explain your stuff to someone that isn't technical you're lucky. You need people skills.

@Tychus also they won't ask you if you have people skills. They will infer from your answers if you have people skills. Non-verbal communication and what not.

@projektaquarius even if you have sales person you need to explain shit to them

@chiragiem36 exactly.

@alwaysmpe @chiragiem36 I'm working in a company full of dropouts, people with degrees in other fields, people that stopped in bachelor degrees who worked in big projects, are active in open source projects from linux to android to many other projects those are amazingly skilled people they never had to take care of anything but what they love to do and what they are good at. then we have the sales marketing pr people. we also have people that had mediocre to medium programming skills working as middlemen between us "code monkeys" and clients. so if you want to be one of those guys by all means but not everyone wants that some people me and OP and many others want to be code monkeys that's is my arguments Science faculties should offer degrees with 100% courses in the scientific field if a student want to mix things up they can go on and do it. but don't force it on all of us because "you might work on a project with economics elements"

@projektaquarius if you're hired to code you're hired to write code not to give speeches. any company integrating that kind of bullshit in the hiring process is 99% a company I don't want to be working for

@alwaysmpe "feel free to live in a cave away from normal people"
1. we don't need to live in a cave.
2. how do you decide someone is normal or not ?
3. what is normal ?

PS: I'm a successful engineer my colleagues who share the same views are even more successful than i am and other "normal" engineers that did it your way are NOT successful they are average at best.

I think we are seriously underestimating the value of what can a good uni degree bring into the table. Sure, there are amazing developers out there that are completely self thaught and can do amazing stuff and I do not deny that or look down on people for not having a degree. The truth is, math is essential in computer science, and sometimes it might seem like one is getting a math degree, I know I felt that way. But having te logical capability to understand higher math concepts can be applied to programming in order to fully apply elegant and practical solutions. I do it on a daily basis. Software Engineering is extensive as fuck, and even if your sole intention is to code websites who is to say that you will never need math for it? Take into consideration that software engineering is applied on all aspects of life where a computer can be used to solve problems.

Furthermore. A computer scientist needs to be well versed in many different scientific fields: physics, chemistry, etc etc. Because you never know if you end up working for a lab that has web services or whatnot that requires you to know fundamental concepts of whatever the general specialization of the area is. A computer scientist is special in that he not only needs to know how to put solutions into code, but he needs to understand the general problems and concerns of other scientists. This is very special, whereas a biologist is normally only focused on their area, or a chemist, a computer scientist needs to understand those areas as well to solve problems in those domains. Why laugh at calculus? It is the mathematical principles inside the vas universe of Physics that allows humans to create and innovate in general computing.