You must be good at Math

If you want to know how computers work, do electrical engineering. If you want to know how electricity works, do physics. If you want to know how physics works, do mathematics. If you want to know how mathematics works, too bad, best you can do is think about the fact it works in philosophy.

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/purity.png

Had a graduate Dev who did not have a fucking clue about anything computer related. How tf he passed his degree I have no idea.

Basic programming principles? No clue. Data structures? Nope.

We were once having a discussion about the limitations of transistors and dude's like "what's a transistor?" _#

Tbh, as a dev knowledge of transistors is about as essential as knowledge about screws for a car driver.
It's common knowledge and in general maybe a little shameful to not know, but it's really not in any way relevant for the task at hand.

good they escaped early

I have been coding since I was 10 years old. I have a CS degree and have been in professional IT for like 30 years. Started as a developer but I’m primarily hardware and architecture now. I have never ever said I was a computer scientist. That just sounds weird.

wow you have a degree I'm soooooo impressed

I literally have no idea what this picture means, and at this point I'm too afraid to ask.

The typical holder of a four-year degree from a decent university, whether it's in "computer science", "datalogy", "data science", or "informatics", learns about 3-5 programming languages at an introductory level and knows about programs, algorithms, data structures, and software engineering. Degrees usually require a bit of discrete maths too: sets, graphs, groups, and basic number theory. They do not necessarily know about computability theory: models & limits of computation; information theory: thresholds, tolerances, entropy, compression, machine learning; foundations for graphics, parsing, cryptography, or other essentials for the modern desktop.
For a taste of the difference, consider English WP's take on computability vs my recent rewrite of the esoteric-languages page, computable. Or compare WP's page on Conway's law to the nLab page which I wrote on Conway's law; it's kind of jaw-dropping that WP has the wrong quote for the law itself and gets the consequences wrong.

My ex boss describes himself as such. King of the dickheads.

Be me, a computer scientist who still struggles with XOR.

Wait til you see XNAND

Depends on the context. When my company proposes me to a client for work I am, but oddly during my yearly performance review I am just some smuck who programs.

Surely you must be a master of linear algebra and Euclidean geometry

tbf all good programmers are good at math. Not classic arithmetic necessarily, but at the very least applied calculus. It's a crime how many people used a mathematical discipline every day, but don't think they're "good at math" because of how lazer focused the world is on algebra, geometry and trig as being all that "math" is.

A senior firmware engineer said to the group that we just have to integrate the acceleration of an IMU to get velocity. I said “plus a constant.” I was fired for it.
Serious question; how does Calculus apply to programming? I’ve never understood.
- Graphics programming is the most obvious one and it uses it plenty, but really any application that can be modeled as a series of discrete changes will mostly likely be using calculus.
  Time series data is the most common form of this, where derivatives are the rate of change from one time step to the next and integrals are summing the changes across a range of time.
  But it can even be more abstract than that. For example, there's a recent-ish paper on applying signal processing techniques (which use calculus themselves, btw) to databases for the purposes of achieving efficient incremental view maintenance: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.16684
  The idea is that a database is a sequence of transactions that apply a set of changes to said database. Integrating gets you the current state of the database by applying all of the changes.
- PID control is the classic example, but at a far enough abstraction any looping algorithm can be argued to be an implementation of the concepts underpinning calculus. If you're ever doing any statistical analysis or anything in game design having to do with motion, those are both calculus too. Data science is pure calculus, ground up and injected into your eyeballs, and any string manipulation or Regex is going to be built on lambda calculus (though a very correct argument can be made that literally all computer science is built of lambda calculus so that might be cheating to include it)
- Lotta infinite sums in loops
- that can't be right. maybe they meant lambda calculus? programmers are definitely good at applied logic, graph theory, certain kinds of discrete math etc. but you're not whipping out integrals to write a backend.
- Computers are just big calculators so to program them you need calculus.
- good physics/graphics engine require calculus

IT stooge != science Sorry fellas.

If a C- is enough to pass Analysis of Algorithms, then a Computer Science degree can make me a Computer Scientist. :P

You need C++ for computer science, though!

I mean, nowadays you need to be very smart and educated to google efficiently and avoid all the AI traps, missinformation, stackoverflow mods tripping, reading reddit threads on an issue with half the comments deleted because of the APIcalypse etc... sooo you could argue that you're somewhat of a scientist yourself

I’m something of a scientist myself

Yeah, we do both numbers here, ones AND zeros

Nope, it means you're a Computer Engineer.

computer engineer refers to someone who engineers computer hardware. more like being a (digital) electrical engineer.
- Yea I dont think people are catching the sarcasm of not having capital E Engineers in all countries.