Which background is a greater advantage for a software engineering career?

偏执的太偏执、 2022-07-30 14:27 40阅读 0赞

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Which background is a greater advantage for a software engineering career: electrical engineering or computer science?  
对于软件工程师，电子工程专业有优势还是计算机科学专业有优势呢？

在国外网站上看到的这个，原因就是曾经某时某地，面试过曾经风光一时的人人网，面试官看看我的专业说：自动化专业，对代码的要求一点不能降低，甚至要更高。

还有就是刚刚看了一篇博客，写的是软件工程师与学历的关系。

不想去评论，也不想去猜测，于是就聊一聊软件工程与专业的关系而已。

There are many talented software engineers whose formal educational background is in engineering (electrical, among others), not computer science. In practice, is this non-data structures, non-algorithmic background an advantage or a disadvantage in a professional software engineering environment?

CS指的是计算机科学专业：  
The 2 items are orthogonal to each other. CS is going to show you how to program, engineering is going to show you how physical things work and how to design them. You might be able to use the one in the other, but only at specific points in specific domains. E.g. an electrical engineer might understand how to manufacture the components needed to make a computer, while a CS graduate (note not necessarily graduated from a CS course) would know how to make use of those components after they’re made. Of course, nothing’s stopping anyone from learning both!

I know many engineers (electrical, mechanical, structural, civil, etc.), architects, surveyors, etc. who’ve become “programmers” for the sole purpose of making / extending software to help them in their “real” work. Most of them didn’t learn to program simply in order to become programmers, though there are exceptions, and life has many twists and turns - so some of them did end up becoming professional programmers.

As a sample, many of these professions working in the “more physical” world tend to use CAD systems. The most used one (since the late 80s / early 90s) is arguably AutoCAD. And since the early days many users tended to extend it using its built-in scripting language (named AutoLisp).

A lot of these people have furthered themselves by using even other extension APIs, like the C++ based ObjectARX plugin system, or VBA, or since around 2005 using DotNet. Some of these people have turned to making such extensions and then selling them. But in the greater majority they would still be focused or even specialized on the domain where they originally started - very few of them might become backend server programmers, or systems, or compilers, or …

> There are many talented software engineers whose formal educational background is in engineering (electrical, among others), not computer science

There are also many talented software engineers who majored in other things. I have known some who majored in English and theology, but I don’t think either of those prepared them for a job in software engineering any better than a computer science degree would have.

Electrical engineering (which I started off majoring in) has some things in common with software engineering. In addition to the word they share, there’s some degree of formalization of thought and logic, and being able to think well mathematically comes in handy.

So if you’re saying “I want to major in one of these two things to prepare myself for a job as a software engineer,” it’s clearly computer science. But if you’re asking “I majored in electrical engineering. Can I still be a good software engineer?” Of course you can.

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