> There's no you were rigorous enough in tracking this for this statement to be useful to anyone.
Sure, but has anyone claiming the opposite done rigorous analysis? Is there any evidence that having a CS degree makes for better programmers than not?
> The people who don't fit the mold stand out.
I'm not thinking about people who stood out as particularly unusual. Most of the time I didn't find out which field someone's degree was in until months into working with them.
>Sure, but has anyone claiming the opposite done rigorous analysis?
Is there any evidence that having a CS degree makes for better programmers than not?
I'm not making that claim, you're the one making a claim that people with degrees other than CS are better programmers without evidence.
I'll only make the claim that a CS degree made me a better programmer. Specifically the upper level theoretical classes. I can verify that there are many problems I've solved because I realized that the problem I was working on had already been solved 50 years ago.
I also worked about a decade as a professional programmer without a CS degree, before I went back. Personally I am a better programmer.
Would I have been an even better programmer had I taken another few semesters of math classes instead of CS classes? Who knows? Absent any other evidence though, the simplest explanation is that domain specific knowledge is likely useful.
>I'm not thinking about people who stood out as particularly unusual. Most of the time I didn't find out which field someone's degree was in until months into working with them.
The point is that the more unusual someone's background is, the more likely you are to remember it. Particularly if there is some confirmation bias involved.
> Absent any other evidence though, the simplest explanation is that domain specific knowledge is likely useful.
Disagree; surely the null hypothesis for any given training programme is that it has no effect.
> The point is that the more unusual someone's background is, the more likely you are to remember it. Particularly if there is some confirmation bias involved.
There isn't anything unusual about professional programmers having a degree in maths or physics rather than CS. At least in my experience it was pretty close to an equal split.
>Disagree; surely the null hypothesis for any given training programme is that it has no effect.
That's not what's under test here though. It's training program A that includes domain specific knowledge or training program B that does not.
>There isn't anything unusual about professional programmers having a degree in maths or physics rather than CS. At least in my experience it was pretty close to an equal split.
Look at the number of graduates, the only way that is true is if almost every single physics or math graduate goes into programming. The fact that you think it's true is just further evidence of bias.
According to the Stack Overflow Developer Survey [1], about 8% of professional developers with degrees majored in math, or natural sciences vs. 63% in CS, software engineering, or computer engineering. There could be some sampling bias, but that's a huge difference.
I'm not talking about a maths or physics degree specifically. I'm talking about having a CS degree or not. The stack overflow survey seems to have shifted towards CS recently; the 2015 results (earliest I could find) imply 52% of professional developers had CS degrees at that point, which was about halfway through my career so far, so 50:50 for people I've worked with sounds about right.
I suspect SO surveys are heavily biased towards younger developers, but even taking those 2019 numbers at face value: about 20% of professional developers have no degree, and of those with degrees it's about 75% CS/information systems/sysadmin/webdev, 17% maths/physics/engineering, and 8% other. So a typical 15-developer team would be 9 with CS degrees, 3 with no degree, 1 with an engineering degree, 1 with maths/science and 1 other. The non-CS folk are not exactly rare unicorns.
>I'm not talking about a maths or physics degree specifically. I'm talking about having a CS degree or not.
Well then why did you say this:
>There isn't anything unusual about professional programmers having a degree in maths or physics rather than CS. At least in my experience it was pretty close to an equal split.
You said explicitly math and physics degrees vs CS degrees. And you previously said the best programmers tended to have math, or physics degrees or something similar.
This isn't me being pedantic, it was the entire context of the discussion.
The point is that you are prone to confirmation bias as evidenced by your belief that it's close to an equal split. Your mental model is overrepresenting people with physics and math degrees likely because it confirms your belief that they are better programmers.
>So a typical 15-developer team would be 9 with CS degrees, 3 with no degree, 1 with an engineering degree, 1 with maths/science and 1 other. The non-CS folk are not exactly rare unicorns.
That's not the point, it's that you are more likely to remember the background of the 1 person on a team who has a Math degree because she is relatively rare compared to all of the people with CS degrees. This is a well known and well documented phenomenon. And it's one of the primary reasons that anecdotal evidence, even a large amount of anecdotal evidence is so often wrong.
> You said explicitly math and physics degrees vs CS degrees.
I was giving those as examples of degrees that are normal and don't stand out. We don't think there's anything particularly odd about a programmer with a maths or physics degree. That's all I was saying.
> you previously said the best programmers tended to have math, or physics degrees or something similar.
A category which would include engineering, at which point we're at 20-25% of professional programmers with degrees by your numbers (which I still think are significantly biased).
> The point is that you are prone to confirmation bias as evidenced by your belief that it's close to an equal split. Your mental model is overrepresenting people with physics and math degrees likely because it confirms your belief that they are better programmers.
My mental model is that it's an equal split between CS degrees and not, and per your own sources that's accurate. You're fixating on a couple of specific examples of non-CS degrees that I mentioned when that's completely beside the point.
I'm not fixating on anything. This entire chain started as a reply to a post you made where you switched to math over CS, and specifically to this statement.
>The best programmers I've worked with have mostly not had CS degrees (tended to have degrees in maths, physics, or that sort of area).
That's the entire context of the discussion. The assertion that CS majors have worse outcomes (with respect to programming ability) than math, physics or similar majors.
>A category which would include engineering, at which point we're at 20-25% of professional programmers with degrees by your numbers (which I still think are significantly biased).
If you are including math, all natural sciences, and all other engineering degrees you get 17%, not 20-25%.
>My mental model is that it's an equal split between CS degrees and not, and per your own sources that's accurate. You're fixating on a couple of specific examples of non-CS degrees that I mentioned when that's completely beside the point.
There is no other logical way to parse this statement
>There isn't anything unusual about professional programmers having a degree in maths or physics rather than CS. At least in my experience it was pretty close to an equal split.
than that you were talking specifically about math and physics.
I get it, you don't like that there are numbers that contradict you, so you are grasping at straws trying to find alternate interpretations to reconcile your statement with the numbers. You obviously don't like being wrong. I don't either, that's fine, but no one other than us is reading this far down. There's not point denying you farted when there's only 2 of you in an elevator.
There's no you were rigorous enough in tracking this for this statement to be useful to anyone. The people who don't fit the mold stand out.