My understanding is that computer science is more theoretical and mathematical and studies things like algorithms, data strictures, complexity and computability, while engineering is concerned with the practical design,development, testing, and production of software.
Yes. Computer science is quite different from computer programming. Unfortunately, no one outside computer science knows that computer science exists. They think it means “really clever computer programming”.
No government agency funds computer science research. Only a few places in the world (Google, Microsoft, IBM, Sun) fund computer science research. So computer scientists very rarely direct research. They may get venture capital for a startup, if they went to MIT, Carnegie-Mellon, Stanford, Harvard, or maybe U Waterloo or U Mich. I can’t think of a single case of a VC investing money in a comp sci startup where the founders weren’t from one of those schools. My impression, though I can’t back it up well, is that VCs would rather invest in a firm run by someone who failed out of Harvard than someone who graduated from Brown.
If you’re brought onto a project run by someone who isn’t a computer scientist, they think a computer scientist is a programmer, and they will tell you to write and optimize database queries.
Ayup. One of the odder moments of my professional life, back when I worked for Lucent, was being asked to find ways to integrate the Bell Labs team into our software development team.
The short answer is “I failed.” We made a game effort with respect to the real-time elements of the converged prepaid/postpaid rating system we were building at the time, but ultimately it just didn’t work… we had about a week’s worth of computer science we needed done, and about ten person-years of computer programming, and the two just aren’t fungible. They were nice guys, though.
Yes. Computer science is quite different from computer programming. Unfortunately, no one outside computer science knows that computer science exists. They think it means “really clever computer programming”.
No government agency funds computer science research. Only a few places in the world (Google, Microsoft, IBM, Sun) fund computer science research. So computer scientists very rarely direct research. They may get venture capital for a startup, if they went to MIT, Carnegie-Mellon, Stanford, Harvard, or maybe U Waterloo or U Mich. I can’t think of a single case of a VC investing money in a comp sci startup where the founders weren’t from one of those schools. My impression, though I can’t back it up well, is that VCs would rather invest in a firm run by someone who failed out of Harvard than someone who graduated from Brown.
If you’re brought onto a project run by someone who isn’t a computer scientist, they think a computer scientist is a programmer, and they will tell you to write and optimize database queries.
Ayup.
One of the odder moments of my professional life, back when I worked for Lucent, was being asked to find ways to integrate the Bell Labs team into our software development team.
Wow. What happened next?
The short answer is “I failed.” We made a game effort with respect to the real-time elements of the converged prepaid/postpaid rating system we were building at the time, but ultimately it just didn’t work… we had about a week’s worth of computer science we needed done, and about ten person-years of computer programming, and the two just aren’t fungible. They were nice guys, though.