Can i hear from others about real world experience?
Hi,
I’m still young and very ambitious; I have taken the decision in my life that I want to study computer science and maths. I’m currently finishing off BTEC IT expecting to receive D*D*D and an A in A Level maths and possibly an A in AS further maths. I’m considering in taking a degree in computer science, except that after finishing the degree (thinking of the future now) I want to do a career in CPU architectural design or become a quantitative analyst etc… however these are obviously jobs that need you to have extensive past experience. But getting to where you want is not always the answer in life. I just want to hear from people with real world experience and explain how they climbed the pole.
Re: Can i hear from others about real world experience?
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I want to do a career in CPU architectural design
For this, I would be considering a Computer Engineering degree. Note that not all degrees with the same title cover the same topics/areas in the same detail. For my Computer Science degree we did a lot of studies of programming languages, compilers and operating systems but only a 1 semester course on Algorithms. At another University, they hardly touched upon compilers/operating systems but covered algorithms in great detail together with discrete mathematics. Make sure that the degree course for which you finally choose covers the areas you want.
Re: Can i hear from others about real world experience?
Thanks for the advice, was the option you chose for yourself the right one?
Re: Can i hear from others about real world experience?
Yes. I chose the particular degree course because of their emphasis on programming languages (pascal fortran 77, algol 68, cobol, c, lisp - including a lot of work on data structures) and system programming (compilers, operating systems etc). My final project was the design and implementation of an operating system for a DEC mini-computer for a specific purpose (used in the teaching of undergrads assembler system programming). Following graduation I did a lot of work with implementing various operating systems onto different hardware platforms (before the days of the universal PC and Windows OS!). Along the way I did some application programming but gravitated more to writing libraries and utilities for others to use. I also undertook some teaching of program languages (pascal, c and then c++). Perhaps the most important thing I learnt from my Computer Science degree was how to learn and understand what I learnt! I self-taught Motorola M68000 assembly language, Windows programming etc. Computing changes quite rapidly and some of what I was taught back then is now obsolete (magnetic core memory, magnetic drums etc - look them up on the Internet and be amazed - 32KB (kilo bytes) was considered a lot!) so being able to keep up-to-date with advances is crucial.
Re: Can i hear from others about real world experience?
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Originally Posted by
2kaud
Yes. I also undertook some teaching of program languages (pascal, c and then c++). Perhaps the most important thing I learnt from my Computer Science degree was how to learn and understand what I learnt!.
Interesting statement, I presume understanding what you have learnt is far better than just remembering what needs to be learnt, as when you come to the working world and a "client" asks for a system to simplify a process you will be able to apply the knowledge you have understood.
Re: Can i hear from others about real world experience?
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Originally Posted by
gaar321
Interesting statement, I presume understanding what you have learnt is far better than just remembering what needs to be learnt, as when you come to the working world and a "client" asks for a system to simplify a process you will be able to apply the knowledge you have understood.
That's right! :thumb: When I did IT consultancy I often came across systems/situations in which I was not that familiar but I could apply my overall understanding to enable me to get to grips fairly quickly with them.
It's like debugging a program. If you understand the principles of debugging a program, the actual debugger you are using doesn't matter that much as it's just a case of looking up how to undertake certain tasks in the debugger you happen to be using at the time. If, however, you just know a certain set of keystrokes for a particular debugger without really understanding what is happening, then using a different debugger is that much harder.
Re: Can i hear from others about real world experience?
I am proud to tell you that I a loyal user of this site, I have been here for almost 10 years. But I am very sad when I received replies from older users of this site about my question of unit-testing. They provided me correct information but too general and to make me think that C++ is dying out. It is now clear to me that there are tools to generate mock for really hard and complex functions from libraries even COM/DCOM/COM++ so all of them can be unit-tested. The guy didn't tell share with me the tool but I believe all code is generated by a specific tool (it looks like that spider that can run all over the place inside the impl files and extract correctly unit-testable methods). Is there a single post on CG with keywords "mock file generator" ? No, no one ever talks much about mocking hard functions. Can they be mocked ? Yes. :(. Are they easy to work with ? No! Never for complex spaghetti legacy code