Ask HN: Do pure math grads make better software engineers than CS grads?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9516464

by amichail • 11 years ago

14 43 11 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

What has been your experience in this regard?

dudul• 11 years ago

No.

m00dy• 11 years ago

Of course not

jordigh• 11 years ago

As a pure maths grad, I had to spend a lot of time learning things on my own before I could become marketable hacker. Fresh out of my degree, I had no clear idea of how to do real software development. I think I was able to learn a thing or two, but sometimes I still wish I could have learned about things like networking, database design, and compiler theory in a formal classroom setting. I have seen people say how useless a CS degree is for doing real work, but it seems to me that it offers many benefits that are not easily replaced by self study or a maths degree.

lgas• 11 years ago

Sometimes.

benburwell• 11 years ago

As someone graduating next week with an undergrad degree in CS and a minor in math, I don't think I'd be a very good software engineer with just a math degree, but I'm definitely a better software engineer because of my math background.

_1• 11 years ago

No. What prompted this question?

philippnagel2• 11 years ago

A pure math grad knows nothing about software engineering, while a CS grad should know some things.

By your logic a pure physics grad would be an even better software engineer, as physics is even more "low-level".

drakenot• 11 years ago

https://xkcd.com/435/

How would Physics be more low-level than mathematics?

sitkack2• 11 years ago

Constraints for the actual universe we live in?

philippnagel2• 11 years ago

In an applied sense. But you are definitely right in general!

analog31• 11 years ago

I'm not employed as a programmer per se, so I see it from the other side. I was also a math major in college, and as a student, my only exposure to CS would have been a single obligatory course in programming. Fortunately, I programmed as a hobby. Most of my classmates took the course and then promptly forgot most of its content.

So, pick any random math major and any random CS major, and at the very least, the CS major has a better chance of having the foundations needed to become a good programmer.

On the other hand, pick math and CS majors from among the ones who have actually shown enough interest in programming to steer their careers in that direction... now the gap is potentially much smaller.

Now compare math and CS majors who have worked for 10 years in software development...

kordless2• 11 years ago

My experience says that asking questions that have no answer is the surest route to suffering.

Of course there are better math major programmers than CS major programmers, just as there are better CS programmers than math major programmers. It goes without saying that asking a question which has multiple truths as answers is equivalent to asking a question with no answer. It would then beg to ask the question, "Why are you asking questions with no answer?".

My advice is to ask a better question next time!

sitkack2• 11 years ago

Do dogs or cats make better pets?

I prefer farm mechanics and philosophers to cs grad when it comes to software.

kordless2• 11 years ago

Sounds like me. :)

hetman• 11 years ago

In my experience, maths grads can be really good at very specialised engineering problems like digital signal processing. Beyond that though they tend to produce poorly structured code that will be difficult to maintain. If their problem requires a sizeable amount of code and they have no experience with software engineering best practices then it's best to pair them up with someone that has.

skimmas• 11 years ago

it depends on what you'll be engeneering

karmakaze• 11 years ago

Neither. Experience makes better software engineers.

kenrikm• 11 years ago

In my experience even a CS degree is not a very good predictor of how good a software engineer someone is, I've met recent CS grads who could not build a stable piece of software to save their lives. Past experience building actual software however is generally a good indicator.

With that said this question really has no answer, some math grads are better, some CS grads are better and some beauty school dropouts are better.. as with anything that requires learning and applying a skill those who work harder or are blessed with a talent in the subject tend to be more successful.

copsarebastards• 11 years ago

No.

throwaway28749• 11 years ago

There are probably some cases where the answer is yes, because a math major who is now a software engineer has had to put in the extra effort to learn the computer science, and the computer science major never needed to do quite as much practice working with abstractions.

Most people who go into software without a CS degree learn the practical side of things quite well out of necessity. I expect math majors are more likely than most to pick up the theoretical side even when self-taught, since the level of math involved is what makes it difficult for most people.

But regardless of the greater level of self-teaching, the math major is unlikely to have had as good a survey of CS ideas as the CS major.

Edit: I agree with everyone else who says that major in school isn't a very good predictor of software engineering ability. This is just my opinion on the direction of the small part that does come from major is.

ocfx• 11 years ago

Your education in school has nothing to do with your efficacy as a software developer or engineer. There are so many other variables that have nothing to do with how much you know or how fast you are. Soft skills are way more important.

skierscott• 11 years ago

Better how so?

Faster? Math grads might be able to use some mathematical trick to dramatically speed up the code.

Better modularity? Version control? Tests? Experience with SDKs?

mildbow2• 11 years ago

Nope.

What math trick? You mean knowledge like how caches work? Or, how to spot n^2 solutions that could become n? Or, dynamic programming? Or, linear optimization?

Unless you are doing something math specific(in which case you should have someone with more math knowledge than a new grad who can spot these. My first internship had a math phd in the team just for that reason), you will fare much better with your CS grad.

mariusz79• 11 years ago

No, what makes you good at software engineering is experience, determination and knowledge. How you achieve any of the above does not matter, especially if you consistently work on improving yourself.

kvcc01• 11 years ago

One area I’ve seen math and programming interplay is quantitative finance, i.e., quant-developers attached to trading desks in Wall Street. In this microcosm, the people I see rise up in the world are those who started off with solid finance theory skills (which is applied math), who then taught themselves programming to be just good enough to implement their ideas. This seems doable.

The reverse OTOH seems more challenging. I’ve seen many CS graduates who tried to self-study their Black-Scholes, but rarely do they achieve anything more than a superficial understanding of the underlying theory.

[I’d except HFT from the above. That specialty seems to reward programming skills more than math skills.]

noname123• 11 years ago

Not a facetious but serious question, but what theoretical part of Black-Scholes is really important for a options trader's everyday trading?

I'm a programmer by trade but I trade options on the side. A long time ago, I read Hull's and Sinclair's derivation of BSM line by line. Nowadays, I totally forget all the math except the intuition as it relates to the greeks and base all my trading on those.

Talking as a non-professional, I found the math of BSM to be helpful for me to understand better the option greeks and the model's limitations (assumption of smoothness, doesn't take into account volatility simile's).

But not sure how the theory can really help me hedge better, come up with better implied volatility as compared to the current open source plug n' chug frameworks that computes Black-Scholes pricing (e.g., QuantLib).

Options trading is a hobby of mine and I'd love to hear a pro's take on these. Thanks!

lordnacho2• 11 years ago

The BSM will give you all the things that you know intuitively about options. Gamma is high ATM front month, Vega is higher with time, theta accelerates as you near expiry, and so on.

In everyday terms, BSM vols are also what's used to talk about what the price IS. So even if you're using a fancy model, to talk to someone else about it you pull out the BSM vol and tell him that way.

What will help you hedge better is finding a way for your surface to fit what actually happens when the market moves. It isn't an exact thing; many traders ask for a little more or a little less floating skew from their quant guy.

lordnacho2• 11 years ago

That's interesting. I went into finance (option MM at first) with an Engineering background, and developed more and more programming skills as things developed.

The financial stuff is IMO not complicated. Anyone (a lot of the traders left school at 16) can understand how the option Greeks behave intuitively. Since I went to uni, I picked up the classics (Hull, Wilmott, Niederhoffer) and read through them. After a while, you get it. You may not be able to derive all the little things (options on options, Asians, whatever) but you'll still have a reasonable idea of how it works.

The programming side is a whole other can of worms. You think you get it. Take Excel. Put in BSM. Make a vol surface. Do a VLOOKUP on a grid, remembering to do the $ signs. Float it to adjust the calls when the market rises. Hey, it's easy right? You can just make some VBA code, dump it somewhere. Put some intermediate calculations on a hidden sheet.Boss wants an alternative model? Copy-paste and edit the formula. Call Bloomberg for some data on another sheet, use it to calculate some parameter. Save it as ESX-jumpmodel.xls. There's a get-it-done-quickly mindset that isn't great, but creates the illusion of working well.

Code written by finance people has a reputation for being incredibly spaghetti-like.

When I started off coding, I thought it was easy too. But it's the most time consuming part of all my financial work. Each time I had some new interesting thing to do, a huge gap in my knowledge was uncovered:

- Started using Excel to do end-of-day reconciliation, the bottom rung task of junior traders. Took me a week to do something that today would take me half an hour.

- Coding a NIG model to price options: took me ages as well, and the guy at the trading software company said it was easy. Spent a LOT of time getting Cygwin to work, had to go through loads of compile fails in gcc (I didn't even know what that was when he told me). What's static typing? Why can't they all be variants? The easy part was finding a formula for the Bessel function.

- Coding a spreadsheet for fixed income arbitrage: once again the easy part was understanding basis, swaptions, asset swap, carry. The hard part was organizing all these sheets in a sane way, for 10 currencies and terms from overnight to 50 years. Also, calibrating/fixing conventions was easy. Call your broker, ask him what he uses for his curves.

- Writing an FX feed multiplexer. Easy on paper: you get a better price by comparing feeds from different banks and picking the best one. In practice: you need to read all the intricacies of the FIX protocol. You need to know how service oriented architecture works (all those banks aren't going to run in a monolith, are they?). You need to know how a network works. You need something that isn't Excel, so now you need a UI as well. Oh, and you're saving trades in a database, right? Hello SQL 101.

- Glueing a trading engine on to the multiplexer. Easy on paper: model tells you what to trade, and you already have a multiplexer. Now you need the UI changed to put knobs on the model. And you're sure you won't machine gun the trades right?

- Making a thing that looks at the orderbook to trade: now you need to be fast. Is the math any harder? IMO no. But what does fast mean to a guy who's never had a speed issue? What's c++ anyway? And why is there an allocator on all the constructors? How do profiling tools work? What's this 200ms delay (I kid you not, forgot Nagle once!)? Why does everyone talk about Big-O? It never came up when I was does the spreadsheets.

- Making a thing that looks at an exchange binary feed: uhm, what's binary? What is this endianness? What's a lockless ring? What's a kernel, and why do I have to bypass it? Branch prediction? False sharing? Cache invalidation?

IMO it would all have been easier to teach a CS grad about finance than a finance grad how to program.

mikekchar2• 11 years ago

My experience is that what you did at university (or whatever else you did to get your first programming gig) is far less important than what you did afterwards.

I have met many programmers. I have met many new grads. Of the new grads that I have met who learned programming at school, I don't think I have ever met one that was a good programmer right out of the gate. Certainly many can code and make things work. None of them are good enough for me to look at their code and have it influence me in a positive way.

That's not to say that I haven't met good, young programmers. It's just that all of the ones I've met had been programming regularly for 10 years or so before they went to university... Some of them didn't go to university at all.

I should say as well that I have never met a really good programmer that has less than about 10 years of coding experience, either. I've met lots and lots and lots of people with less experience who thought they were great programmers, but that's different, isn't it?

So, from my perspective the answer to the question is "No". Working with great people and devoting yourself to improving makes better software engineers than either doing a math or CS degree in university.

Chris_Newton3• 11 years ago

I suspect a lot of 21-year-old CS grads think they’re great programmers.

And a lot of 25-year old professionals with 4 years of experience in the software industry wonder what they were thinking at 21, now that they know how you really build software.

And a lot of 30+ year-old professionals wonder how a 25-year-old who had so little experience after working on just one or two different projects for only a couple of years each could possibly have believed they were such an expert.

I wonder what 50-year-old me will one day think of 30-year-old me. I have concluded that I will probably think I was ignorant and naïve back then, and that this feeling that everything you did a long time ago was terrible is called being alive. :-)

copperx• 11 years ago

And you will wonder why at 50, with all your experience, you are now unemployable.

RogerL• 11 years ago

I'm close to that age, and try to always be growing and improving.

I don't look back at 30yo me with disdain. I do find all of normal programmming pretty mundane and cookie cutter. Design this way or that way, pick your trade offs, investigate gotchas, think about what this code will be like in 10 years (most stuff I write has a long life, I don't do web stuff), trade off robust design with get it out the door, and so on. No biggie.

I get my challenges now with new domains - computer vision, computation, math, etc - stuff that requires reading research papers. It's fun. There is always a universe of things you won't know, you just need the humility to understand that, and I think by 30 or so most of us figure that out. If you don't you are pretty bull headed, as the compiler will tell you 1,000 times a day that you don't really know something if you don't. Most people get the clue after awhile ;)

mikekchar2• 11 years ago

I don't have any examples of code I wrote when I was in my early 20s, but definitely I'm sure I was quite naive. Especially if you consider development process, I had absolutely no idea what it took to build successful teams.

At around 30 I started to clue in and I can recall some designs which were actually not too bad in retrospect. Of course, a lot of the stuff that is taken for granted now (design patterns, TDD, etc) was not well known at that time and so I was exploring and learning things that few other people had experience with.

As another person posted, I'm also nearing 50. I would say that my code has improved a fair amount and I have learned a lot of other techniques which I didn't really know in my 30s (like FP). Rather than technique, though, I think the biggest thing I've learned is patience. I code very slowly compared to how I coded 20 years ago, but I think a lot more about every line. Kent Beck once said that when he wrote Smalltalk Best Practices that he started to evaluate every keystroke and to think why he was pressing that key. I find that I am doing that a lot now and it is very beneficial. The advice I give the young guys on the team the most is, "Stop typing so fast! You need to think about what you are typing" :-)

As I said, the biggest revelations for me are less about pure technique and more about how everything fits together. For example, my less experienced colleagues are often distraught over the perceived sins of the other people on the team. They worry endlessly about how to stop the "crappy programmers" (in their eyes) from "ruining" the code base. Nearly 50 year old me weighs the options and realizes that complaining/campaigning/scheming/negotiating/etc will take an order of magnitude more time than refactoring and will suck the fun out of the room. I like refactoring code and I hate arguing, and besides young people tend to be crap at cleaning (in general). So I clean things and eventually most of the others catch on -- not everybody, but it's enough.

I still get stressed out a lot and I'm hoping by the time I hit 60 I will have resolved those issues :-)

Chris_Newton3• 11 years ago

I studied maths for my undergraduate degree, then did a postgraduate diploma in CS[1]. These days, I make software.

The maths background was helpful for developing logical reasoning, rigorous arguments, and working with abstractions.

Studying CS exposed me to a wider range of computing ideas than I’d encountered before, from formal models underlying relational databases to functional and logic programming. It also provided some basic but useful general knowledge about things like data structures, algorithms and complexity along the way.

I’m glad I studied both areas during my academic career, but for me neither is “better” than the other for someone starting out in the software industry. They just prioritise different skills and mindsets and provide different background knowledge, so each gives a different kind of head start.

I wouldn’t say either course taught me anything of great value about software engineering specifically, if we’re talking about the processes and tools used to actually design and build production software here. I think SE is more of a vocational/industrial field, and I wouldn’t necessarily expect a new grad in either math or CS to have much experience in, or even awareness of, the kinds of issues that come up in practice.

[1] Very roughly speaking, the diploma course was a one-year conversion course for people with a technical but not CS background, which included the same kinds of topics you’d study in the first couple of years of an undergraduate CS course. Sadly, I don’t know of anywhere that offers a similar course any more.

fsk• 11 years ago

Advice to employers: Interview both and pick the one that seems smarter. (or a better "cultural fit" or whatever other stupid metric you use)

Advice to students: Pick the area that interests you more. If you plan on pursuing a software career, pick at least a minor in CS.

mildbow2• 11 years ago

Nope.

Pure math people are significantly worse devs in their first jobs. Significantly. Why? They just don't have the language or training so you can't really give direction that assumes anything. And interns are raw enough anyway, this lack of shared language hurts.

My experience is based off of interns though. I'm sure given 2-5 years, it will depend on the person/continuous learning, blah blah rather than what courses they took in college.

Now, another aspect of the question seems to be: are pure math grads smarter than cs grads?

Nope again. Put a pure math and CS guy in the room together and I'm sure either could flummox the other with arcane jargon/an exercise. We choose what to do in college based on our interests at that time rather than only basic ability. I have CS, Stats, and Math degrees from college and I didn't notice any difference in raw mental horse power or work ethic or work load amongst those 3 majors.

Aside: there was a marked difference in work load when comparing my engineering/math/stat classes and my econ minor classes though: weekly assignments for econ took 30 mins before class whereas cs/math assignments easily took a whole day or two of the week each.

Aside2: And no, you can't generally say philosophy or physics grads make better software devs too.

Yadi• 11 years ago

I think one can become a better software engineer only by working your way up to be better in software engineering.

Doesn't matter that much (to a certain degree) if you are the CS Master, Math Wiz or the Alchemist, you have to program, program and program to become a better software engineer.

It's true that studying CS will give you the privilege of understanding some pretty darn complicated concepts that you wouldn't actually read in your free time.

And the same for studying Math, picking up all the good logic and proper way of writing your algorithms.

But again, the only way to become a better software engineer is to do software engineering.

liquidcool• 11 years ago

If by pure math you mean not even a CS minor, then no, not out the gate.

But majoring in math is (or should be) a sign you actually enjoy math. That's important for a few domains like computer graphics and data science/machine learning.

I think most CS majors are good at math, but that doesn't mean they enjoy it. Furthermore, there is a huge gap between getting good grades in math and actually understanding it. For most coding jobs, that's OK.

The workaround is simple: get a graduate degree. If you get a CS PhD (maybe an MS) specializing in a math-heavy domain, you'll end up with the fundamentals and domain knowledge you need. For many positions, it could be a requirement.

EdoPut• 11 years ago

Software engineers? Hell no. Programmers? Maybe if you add Latex in the list of programming languages.

A mathematichian who knows some code

pan69• 11 years ago

I don't think education is a great indicator of intelligence in the first place. Some people are really smart and an education can bring them to a next level but there are also people who are just good at remembering stuff. These people pass all the educational tests designed to test their "intelligence" but they're actually just tested on their memory capabilities. To me, intelligence is creative problem solving, not memorizing information. However, if you have both, that would be a great advantage.

To the question, Math is an exact science. Building software is a creative architectural and design process. My guess is that Math can be very helpful on a algorithmic level but not so much on an software application level.

Ask HN: Do pure math grads make better software engineers than CS grads?

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