Undergrad: Is computer science 'hotter' than a business degree?
I noticed a few tech titans younger siblings are computer science majors (snapchat's kid sister is current CS at Stanford). And most of the summer interns are minoring in computer science — especially gunner Asian kids.
Computer Science is much hotter than a business degree right now and has been since 2008. If you're willing to move to SF/Silicon Valley and you have a CS degree and solid programming knowledge, you can earn a ton and move up quickly. If you are not at one of the massive companies, your compensation will top out in the low-mid 100's, but if you make the jump to Google, FB, Amazon, or Apple you can earn a lot more as a high performer.
What's the motive as a minor? All the kids I know are business majors at targets and I'd est. seemingly half of them are minoring in CS. Isn't it sort of a GPA killer? CS in my day was pretty hard. Seems it could screw you over when it comes time for MBA or law school apps.
Because knowing basic data structures and algorithms means you can pivot into being an engineer fairly quickly and the minor is social proof of that. Doing a CS minor is also proof that you can handle technical tasks well and as more processes become automated/data-driven, showing you have the chops to interface with those systems is valuable.
I wrote a quick app at a tech investing internship that took in data from 8 different sources the firm bought and quickly pulled up all of the info they cared about with a clean, efficient search. Everyone from Managing Partners to associates had the dashboard open 24/7. It took a while to build a clean interface and efficient back-end, but the value added was immediate and obvious (I put my name in the corner of the app to remind people).
Also, if someone is interested in potentially starting their own tech company or in product management, technical knowledge is super valuable. If a founder can build their own minimum viable product early on to gain traction/funding and then bring on an actual engineer, their likelihood of succeeding dramatically improves.
A lot of great paths that aren't directly related to being a software engineer require some knowledge now.
In my experience, CS was time consuming but not that difficult. It's hard to explain but if you put in the time, you can do well in a CS curriculum.
If you're at a target school I wouldn't...CS will just hurt your GPA or at least take time away from networking or getting laid :))
One of the benefits to CS courses (and other quantitative ones) is a lot of them are almost completely graded on homework and exams. If you're the kind of person that hates going to class (which business/econ will make you do), those are great.
You know what's really hot?
Doing what you enjoy and not giving a flying fuck about what other random people think is hot or not hot
You know what else is hot? Earning a living wage and being able to support a family. I know plenty of people "doing what they love" and still living with their parents post 30.
Definitely. It will make you much better with your job even at a business function. To my regret I didn't study CS for my undergrad, but did multiple postgrad CS courses later on and even taught a coding class for a semester. Right now I work in business development and the fact that I can pull data from, say the World Bank, CrunchBase and other sources with open APIs or simple web scraping, automate the data cleanup and some of the recurrent tasks is priceless. When it comes to business it's all about decision making and speed can be key. What my colleagues take 1 week to prepare I can do in a couple of hours and best of all it's perfectly repeatable and has no chance of human error. As a result I work less and can get away with a lot, lot more.
what languages did you learn? also, did you find it hard to learn coding? what was your undergrad degree?
My undergrad was in mathematics (mostly statistics really) and molecular biology. My go-to language at this point 90% of the time is Python, but I used to work a lot with R. I've done bits of Javascript for some web projects, but am far from an expert. Then Matlab/Octave, CSS/HTML, VBA, bash (Linux/Unix shell) if you consider these to be languages at all.. I took a formal course in Java back in undergrad, and also ended up teaching it, but now I never use it. I definitely wish I had taken a course in a low level language like C instead, which is hard to master and can be extremely useful in a variety of tasks ranging from optimising performance to writing firmware for electronics. I think learning the first language is the hardest and quite frankly I really struggled with it. However, once you learn how to implement your ideas in code picking up additional languages is quick. In fact, I've found that exposing myself to more languages has made me a better coder. So on this year's wish list for me is a pure functional programming language like Haskell, Scala or common Lisp.
While it is true that most engineers in SV starts at low 100s, it's virtually hard to get those jobs. Have to interview well, either know someone in that company or startup, and pull long hours.
Overall, I like the work+life balance in the engineering field. But there's hardly any upward mobility like what is offered in investment banking. At best, you can go into management and make 150k as a project manager, or director at 200-250k.
Getting an offer at a large tech firm for an entry level software development job in SV is MUCH easier than getting an offer as a front office analyst at a BB IB in NYC. Particularly if you attend a non-target (SV companies don't care nearly as much about pedigree).
Not to shit on IB or glorify CS at all, but you are seriously underestimating SV salaries. Facebook's starting offer for undergrads is ~$170K (base $105K, avg. bonus ~$18k, equity ~$25K, signing ~$22k).
That being said, large tech companies do not have the work-life balance that many SV companies do... most developers I know work similar hours to me in consulting (60-70).
This isn't true. Few people I know at the top tech companies in SV work over 50 hours per week.
"Particularly if you attend a non-target (SV companies don't care nearly as much about pedigree)."
I know they claim that, but everything I've heard says this is sort of bullsh-t. I know this is a weak anecdote, but Mayers at Yahoo, who was formerly an exec at Google (?), was well known to obsess over people's academic pedigree. Elite credentials certainly never hurt.
For CS, Carnegie Melon is top 2-3 in world. And Big Ten, San Jose State, etc. CS grads can all do well. Paypal Mafia was mostly Univ. of Illinois grads.
And if you're on a big project, can't your equity go into the millions? I read recently the guys working on Google's Waymo (I think) were getting literally nine figure bonuses! Or maybe it was advertising guys. Either way, young-ish dudes dedicated to certain projects and the way the bonus was structured made it rain.
So a couple things I consider:
1) CS degrees aren't that hard. In fact it's what most people who washed out of my engineering program did. I recognize the markets are changing and fast, but let's not all get ahead of ourselves and start putting CS up with advanced mathematics, physics, or the like. It's logic based structures. that's it
2) High salaries in programming are a fad in my opinion. My friends back in 2005 were getting offers for like 45k starting salaries. Yes the markets are hot now... but this is a completely exportable skillset that anyone in tanzania/vietnam/sri lanka can do. Unlike say law, real estate, or banking which have barriers to entry.. software will be a drive to the lowest common denominator GLOBALLY. It's inevitable. Sure Silcion Valley VCs are being stubborn and only investing locally now. But on a long enough horizon you will get a worldwide equilibrium. In fact I've already started to hear of reports of this. I know for a fact that IT (admittedly adjacent to software development) is now paying a global standard. I have friends in Africa, Europe, and Japan and they all earn +/- 10% of eachother. Like engineering roles always have been -- it will continue to provide an upper middle class lifestyle at the entry level, but likely not have huge upside potential like banking/PE
3) So why are salaries so high? They aren't. 175k in SV today roughly equals the ~100k many of my friends were getting 5-7 years ago. What's happened? Massive inflation to the tune of 10%year over year. Unfortunately banking and consulting have remained static; but SV tech salaries have really only risen with inflation. Don't believe me? Read up on the latest inflation call from Devonshire capital.
When you gain some real world experience, you'll realize that are many many ways to make money and that there is more to life thank making money as well.
Enjoy CS? Do it. Don't enjoy CS? Find something else.
How inspirational. Think I'll go smoke pot on a beach now.
These guys are trying to improve themselves - come'on
What's wrong with smoking weed on a beach, guy
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