It’s still worth it because the value in a CS degree is NOT the domain knowledge you will learn, it’s the fact that it will teach you how to think.
You will learn (or at least be exposed to):
problem decomposition, systems thinking, good interface design, encapsulation, abstraction and generalisation, optimisation, algorithmic complexity, time/space trade offs, searching algorithms, and much much more
All of the apply to many fields outside of programming, I have used binary search to to bisect real world problems, systems thinking to help with social interactions, abstraction thinking to plan life events and optimisation to make sure all my tasks get done efficiently.
Let me tell you something really, really important about university: it’s about learning to think, NOT about gathering and hoarding some domain knowledge and then exploiting that for the rest of your career. The worst type of university graduate is the one who spends a few years learning some bits of knowledge in a field and then sanctifies that knowledge and sits there with a sense of entitlement, hoarding what they think is valuable - everyone can look up stuff on Google now, hoarding knowledge to appear valuable is a mugs game, it’s not 1850 anymore where this strategy worked.
The valuable part is learning all of the different ways to think and then applying them and keeping your mind fluid and flexible, and I think of all of the degrees, CS is one of the best for this
Comments
It’s still worth it because the value in a CS degree is NOT the domain knowledge you will learn, it’s the fact that it will teach you how to think.
You will learn (or at least be exposed to):
problem decomposition, systems thinking, good interface design, encapsulation, abstraction and generalisation, optimisation, algorithmic complexity, time/space trade offs, searching algorithms, and much much more
All of the apply to many fields outside of programming, I have used binary search to to bisect real world problems, systems thinking to help with social interactions, abstraction thinking to plan life events and optimisation to make sure all my tasks get done efficiently.
Let me tell you something really, really important about university: it’s about learning to think, NOT about gathering and hoarding some domain knowledge and then exploiting that for the rest of your career. The worst type of university graduate is the one who spends a few years learning some bits of knowledge in a field and then sanctifies that knowledge and sits there with a sense of entitlement, hoarding what they think is valuable - everyone can look up stuff on Google now, hoarding knowledge to appear valuable is a mugs game, it’s not 1850 anymore where this strategy worked.
The valuable part is learning all of the different ways to think and then applying them and keeping your mind fluid and flexible, and I think of all of the degrees, CS is one of the best for this