Originally posted by PhreeX:
If I may hi-jack this thread slightly...
So many people wasting monwey with computer science majors... ahhhh help! Turn back before you have blown all yer money only to make $9/hr doing tech support
......
"paper tech" out there - meaning he could do it on paper but he had ZERO real world experience and was a total idiot.. last I heard he was still doing phone support ..
If you believe that the field of computer science involves mainly tech support then you have a very narrow view of a very vast and differing domain. In tech. support you are talking about a very specialised field and requires its own bunch of specific skills. I do agree that experience is very important (in all fields), but I also know people in tech. support who have vast amounts of technical knowledge. They can setup and run some really cool stuff, but if you asked to go through the “design process”, especially a formal (high-integrity) design process they just don’t have the THEORETICAL background to back up their practical skills. I work in distributed systems research (about to start a PhD) and I know that others have far more practical skills and experience than me, but I find learning new technologies is simple because I’ve been given the underlying theoretical knowledge on which these technologies are based.
Universities don’t give us the skills to be computer scientists, they teach us how to THINK like computer scientists. You may find that as a recent graduate you can’t compete with other with much more experience, but I bet in a couple years time the people without the theoretical background will still be doing tech support and you will be designing the systems that they are maintaining.