Quote:
Originally Posted by bluffold
I really believe that Computer Science offers the most well-rounded education and provides you with the most important building blocks whether you go into IT or software or anything. Comp Sci is like majoring in English or Philosophy in that it's a truly liberal art. Except graduates get jobs.
My sysadmin at work told me hiring sysadmins (i.e., IT workers) is more difficult than software engineers. However, he requires sysadmins to know how to program, amongst all the other typical duties. Again, even here, to get a straight IT job (sysadmin), I think CS prepares you best. Other majors are more like going to vocational school: what you learn will be irrelevant in 5 years. CS is timeless.
However, a lot of guys can't cut it in CS. So they drop out and go to business school. It would be preferable to go to an IT/vocational program and do well to get a tech job than to fail out of a CS program which might brand you as Teh Sucks.
Your point regarding developing timeless skills is extremely imporant to me. I have been browsing through many of the IT/Programming jobs out there and writing down all of their desired skills in order to find the commonalities. Here is just a small sample of some of the languages they want you to know:
"Experience with WhiteHat Sentinel, HP Webinspect, IBM Appscanner, Cenzic Hailstorm, Acunetix, Tenable Nessus, Core Impact, Rapid7"
"Understand and utilize our tools to encourage efficient development (Ruby on Rails, Git, Cucumber, Rspec, Selenium, Capybara)."
"May have experience with Apache, Squid, HAProxy, or Akamai."
Some of these sound completely made up. Selenium and Capybara sound like diseases, Cenzic Hailstorm sounds like a video game attack move, Akamai sounds like it's from a Japanese porn, and I don't even know what to make of Squid and Cucumber. Overall, it seems unbelievably (not speaking in hyperbole here) important to learn what is required to constantly adapt. Who knows how many languages there will be 5 years from now?