As a coder who has largely done what I'll call "engineering", I think the word is misaligned in all its disciplines. Real "engineering" occurs (or should be occurring) in endeavors that require the efforts of multiple people to build things that no single person alone could practically build (yeah, don't engage me on where to draw THAT line...). Real engineers, IMHO, spend their best time making Effective Communication between practitioners in all the disciplines in order to build big stuff with "quality" and "reliability" (yeah, don't engage me on how to define THOSE words...)

So there.

Thank you, Nodar, for the only really insightful post of this whole discussion.

Up to a master's degree, "job-qualifying" seems to be pertinent. For a doctorate degree, however, it becomes very much less about checking a box than really exploring a particular discipline, in ways you cannot anticipate.

I got my DCS at age 40, primarily to explore a particular topic in software engineering, but also to credential myself for university teaching. Since, the teaching thing has gone to the ditch, between university politics and this push to do everything 'on-line', both not for me. I now work for a large aerospace company that has given me really good opportunities as a result of both my education and experience, but the work I'm currently doing only occasionally encounters my academic 'training'. Looking back, the doctorate was more about perspective-building than specific training or qualification for particular jobs.

My career experience just reinforces the only good career advice I've ever heard, from a Canadian Air Force major general: 1) do your current job the best you know how, and 2) as much as possible, take on the opportunities that come to you. I think #2 sometimes isn't fully appreciated, but the resume you'll build in practicing it is the single most valuable thing you'll ever acquire...

Command-line-only OSs will use less memory than GUI OSs. GUI OSs are more prone to memory leaks than CLI OSs because GUI OSs continually allocate and deallocate memory, CLI OSs can use the same input buffer over and over. I think MS is finally realizing the inherent vulnerabilities of GUI OSs for server applications in their introduction of a headless version of Windows 8 Server: http://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/01/13/1455242/windows-admins-need-to-prepare-for-gui-less-server

For server applications, CLI OSs will always be my preference. http://ttylinux.com/

With buddyglass, I also vote "you're an idiot". There's plenty of both good and bad going on in those institutions, so go sort it out instead of just simplistically writing them off in your moral tableau. I work in the military/industrial complex, on defensive systems; what's wrong with defending yourself? I came to my present career partly on such moral considerations. So, get your head out of your ass and use it to give your predilections more precise consideration.

With that out of the way, if you're so inclined, go look for creative uses of the things you've become good at. Your scenario in the OP implies doing the bidding of someone else who's doing just that...

... in three computer degrees the most useful course I've ever taken was Business Law.

There is absolutely nothing keeping you from rounding up the four or so undergrad courses required for prerequisites by most midstream accredited universities to get into their master's CS programs. Most of the so-described 'analog' math required for a BSCS has nothing to do with the science of computing. So, change horses and come on over!

Now, my current job working with computing in and around rockets has kicked my math ass, so YMMV....

#!/usr/bin/perl

use StupidShitIveWritten::Tetris(tetris);

tetris;

At our age, the resume says it all. While not originally a technical opportunity, after three years in academia I got a cold-call to interview for a testing job from a major defense contractor based just on my resume. Got that job, used the first three years with them to demonstrate technical chops, and was able to successfully compete for a senior engineer position, happiness ever since. Now, it's not a coding job, but I'm responsible for technical direction, setting the expectations and mentoring for both our developers/engineers and our suppliers' folks. I keep my skills by hobby-programming and such; indeed, I learned networking by dorking around in the basement with 10BASE-T stuff; now, I occasionally conduct failure investigations on long-haul network problems.

Also, look for a company with a solid technical culture; mine has a technical fellowship that forms the basis for senior technical promotions (note: I'm not in that fellowship, replaced that with advanced degrees), also look for signs that they value the technical input. Oh, the most telling aspect of that where I work is that there are separate and distinct paths for pursuing technical versus management careers; I can't just walk into work one day and suddenly find I'm supervising people and trying to figure out earned-value reporting shit. Conversely, managers are specifically forbidden from sitting as members of our engineering boards, and nothing gets done until our boards hack on it.

I Just Love Where I Work...

The big aerospace companies are grappling with the impending mass exodus of old people like me, and most are looking to hire enthusiastic young folk like you. Go to a decent (regionally accredited) school, get good grades, maybe look for an internship.

One thing to consider: the larger the company, the more opportunity available to you over time. As programs and contracts come and go, you'll stand a better chance moving within a big company than one with just a few things going on.

Thanks for conjuring the website I've come to daily for about a decade for everything from giggly entertainment to real insight immediately useful in the day job.

Thanks for keeping it largely the same in all that time, I don't brook change very well... :D

I wish you the best in whatever comes next your way, and hope you find another gem to polish and foist upon us...

Glenn Butcher
Colorado Springs, CO

1. If you really don't want to take the GenEd stuff, go overseas. When you get back, look us up after a year or so of job-hunting, tell us how it's going. Note this is not meant to be snarky; I am truly interested in how such a pursuit would work out.

2. If you don't want to spend any more time with the GenEd in a US program than possible, take the CLEP/DANTES tests, make sure your school awards appropriate credit for them. This is a seriously good way to meet the requirement, IMHO.

3. If you go into GenEd courses with an open mind, you should come out of your degree with a far greater perspective of your chosen profession in context with the rest of the world than if you hadn't sat through them. YMMV, really; if you take such courses without the motivation to get something out of them, they truly will be wasted time.

4. Speaking of mileage, take note of this: In three degrees (BS CIS, MS CS, DCS), the most perennially useful course I've ever taken was Business Law, of all things. Turns out, every job in my career has been on one side or another of a contract, and having that short introduction to contracting law and the UCC has helped me understand why some things are the way they are, more than any other experience.

For what it's worth, I was a college prof a few years ago, spent a year doing academic advising. After all that, I really have come to believe there is a larger place in our commerce for careers based on targeted training, because the college path does not fit all propensities (maybe the OP is an example), and programming should be a discipline targeted such. But, if you have aspirations larger than just chunking out code, a well-rounded US university program is a good place to hone them.

When they figure out how to let us read from our devices below 10,000 feet on airplanes, I'll start reading more ebooks... :D

Conversely, traditional books are heavy. I recently schlepped along a textbook on vacation to cover a class I'm teaching, danged thing weighs 3 pounds! Really cut into my wife's souvenir space, and I ended up not even taking it out of my bag...

I do appreciate the discourse on this sea change in the promulgation of literature, but I think the really important dynamics are that people continue to be compelled to write, and that the rest of us can get ahold of their works to read. I think the medium is secondary...

The smallest glibc distro I know. Doesn't come pre-configured with cluster tools, doesn't even have prebuilt packages for them. But, it'll easily compile most of the software you require (C++ is one exception, I had to rebuild the compiler), and, most importantly, has a build system you can use to put together your own .iso which can be installed in under 5 minutes, probably even less. Has recent 2.6 kernel and latest glibc, which means it'll also run executables built in other equivalent distros. I've run the Sun (oh, Oracle....) JVM with it, no modifications required.

...over my career, both as an academic and as professional software engineer, I appreciate fully the distinction made between the mathematical foundations of computer science and the application of computer solutions to mathematically oriented problems. To start a four-year degree in computer science with the same calculus-oriented math series that the "physical world" majors take is a bit wrong-headed IMHO, but not completely. First, the math of computing is discrete, and this deserves first attention in a good discrete math course right after college algebra. And for most of my career, a solid foundation in logic, sets, relations, etc. served me well in both professional software development and college teaching. Indeed, my schooling went as follows: BS CIS, MS CS, and DCS (that's Doctor of Computer Science, as opposed to PhD...), where my bachelor's program had both a solid business core as well as just enough "continuous math" to understand the foundations of calculus. Missing was the discrete math I mentioned above, but I got that in my MS.

But now, I find myself smack in the middle of the defense/aerospace business, and the day-job application involves aspects of both calculus and statistics for which my schooling did not fully prepare me. Now, my role is more about technical leadership than practition-ing, so I'm not floundering, but I've had to dig out the old texts and learn some math on my own that most of you learned (or slept through) in your earliest years of college, or even in high school. What's really important for me to understand are things like the computational complexity of a proposed solution, that a branching structure in a code segment covers both nominal and corner cases (they do let me sit in on peer reviews...), and other foundational computer science things that the schools, in their increasing "IT" orientation, aren't covering much anymore.

I was an academic advisor for a year, probably the worst on the planet, because I told my students things like, "major in CIS, then switch to CS for your masters, avoid the calc hell" and "don't be doing school unless you're really motivated in the major" (ha, the admissions advisors LOVED that one... NOT!)

So, if I were king, I'd make all computer science students take discrete math, so there. After that, the math depends on what industry (domain, applications, whatever) in which you plan to work. For some, that may be statistics, for others the calc series. But the point is that the primary math of all computer professionals is logic, sets, relations, and the rest of the "discrete phylum", and that should be learned for competency, first. Doggonit.