On Friday, 10 June 2016 at 15:27:03 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
Most developers have titles like "Software Engineer" or "Senior Softweer Engineer." They'e frequently called programmers and/or software developers when not talking about titles.
Neither academia or businesses use Computer Scientist as a job title... tough?
Yeah. Most universities in the US have a Computer Science degree, but some have Software Engineering as a separate degree. My college had Computer Science, Software Engineer, and Computer Engineering, which is atypical. All of them took practical courses, but the SE guys didn't have to take some of the more theoretical stuff and instead took additional classes focused on working on projects in teams and whatnot.
Sounds like a good setup. At my uni we could pick freely what courses we wanted each semester, but needed a certain combination of fields and topics to get a specific degree. Like for entering computer science you would need the most feared topic, Program Verification taught by Ole-Johan Dahl (co-creator of Simula) who was very formal on the blackboard... I felt it was useless at the time, but there are some insights you have to be force-fed... only to be appreciated later in life. It is useless, but still insightful.
Not sure if those more narrow programs are doing their students a favour, as often times the hardest part is getting a good intuition for the basics of a topic, while getting the "expert" knowledge for a specific task is comparatively easier. Especially now we have the web. So, being "forced" to learning the basics of a wider field is useful.
I'm rather sceptical of choosing C++ as a language for instance. Seems like you would end up wasting a lot of time on trivia and end up students hating programming...
