> If there is a virtue to CS degrees, it's that most engineering tracks require an immense amount of coursework in hard sciences that require a high intellectual aptitude to complete.
> I'm really struggling to believe that a majority of people can work through that material and then can't do the type of work that most developers do.
In practice, the way maths and sciences are taught to CS students is without demand for any ingenuity. Most of the time, students don’t prove theorems, they only perform rote calculations according to an algorithm. The few proofs that do show up are things like a few very basic proofs by induction, where students are basically given the algorithm how to solve such a problem beforehand. Statistics, same story – fit a problem to one of the template solutions you were given earlier. Physics, same story.
That’s what for me explains why in my experience maths graduates have been better programmers than CS graduates (as work colleagues). And why some people in this industry hold it as a badge of honour that they can’t invert a binary tree.
> I'm really struggling to believe that a majority of people can work through that material and then can't do the type of work that most developers do.
In practice, the way maths and sciences are taught to CS students is without demand for any ingenuity. Most of the time, students don’t prove theorems, they only perform rote calculations according to an algorithm. The few proofs that do show up are things like a few very basic proofs by induction, where students are basically given the algorithm how to solve such a problem beforehand. Statistics, same story – fit a problem to one of the template solutions you were given earlier. Physics, same story.
That’s what for me explains why in my experience maths graduates have been better programmers than CS graduates (as work colleagues). And why some people in this industry hold it as a badge of honour that they can’t invert a binary tree.