Same sentiments, if you had an MCSE you were hirable everywhere. A+ put you ahead of the pack and was lifetime back then.
The early 00s were def a time. This is how I started too and also just recently completed my bachelors and now doing a masters.
> Group projects were also a common complaint. You were randomly assigned a group, but it was often unclear if the participants were even doing the course - many people were in completely ghost groups.
I see that nothing has changed in 20 years. Even when attended the courses physically in person, group project usually had 1 or 2 people doing all the work and the rest nowhere to be found, or just hanging out. :p
Today I’m a senior software engineer at a FAANG company. The lack of diploma has never been a barrier and I progressed very quickly in the company from junior to senior (4 years).
But this has always been a perceived pain point and limiter for me so I decided to get a CS degree during COVID online from a college from Brazil. Just finished last week :)
I do look for a stronger school name on my resume and got accepted at Johns Hopkins Masters in AI (online). Anyone had any experience with that program? Thoughts?
I'm not affiliated with the engineering school or familiar with their curriculum. It may not be as famous as the schools of medicine or public health, but in general they are quite good.
do whichever one of these online MS which permit you to leave off the "online" part (i.e., are awarded through the conventional faculty). i'm not sure johns hopkins does but OMSCS from gatech does.
Not worth the tuition.
GATech and UT Austin is highly respected and they only costs $6k and $10k respectively for their OMSCS.
The only online CS degree programs I can think of that are actively taught by top faculty and don't break the bank are GT, UT Austin, and UIUC.
I also suggest reading Dr. Joyners’ Reddit posts and books, they helped me quite a bit and I do want to reiterate that if you need help on admission and completed the EDX cs50(?) course, you can personally email him, as it’s stated on one of the last slides.
All around an amazing program that I hope to one day do, but I went the UIUC for business for now.
If you're looking at the potential returns to a graduate degree in a high paying field, $60k spread over a few years isn't an insane investment, but yes, it is worth considering the value vs. GATech/UT Austin.
Stanford HCP is great (I've worked with plenty of their grads), but a large portion end up switching to FT.
As I progress in my professional career I'm more convinced that pretty much everything in tech is on-the-job learning, and universities are little more than a social club. Nowadays you can learn everything you do at university and far more online and for free.
Universities (elite ones particularly) still give you credentials that have some value getting a job. However I wonder for how long that will still be true. Learning by doing and building a portfolio sounds like a better way of getting in the industry today than getting a multi-year degree with nothing or little to show for it.
Nowadays I wouldn't recommend anyone to get a tech degree in a university unless it's a world class one. And even then, I would focus on networking and finding like-minded people rather than necessarily getting good grades.
Over time, many CS degrees shifted toward producing software engineers, and it sounds like this person's experience was closer to that. But the problem is that as an engineering discipline, software engineering is just profoundly underwhelming. There are basically no universally-respected design best practices, no governing bodies, no calculations of safety limits, no nothing. You grab left-pad from npm and run with that. Or, now, Codex does that for you.
So CS is weird because it's what you're supposed to get if you want a job at Google, but it's also not very useful. It's a very inefficient and expensive way of testing if you're "serious enough", can complete assignments on time, etc.
Not every day, maybe not even every month, but I've faced plenty of problems I was well equipped to solve directly because of the formal study of them.
I'm jealous. My university did not make that a core class of our degree. While in hindsight, I wish they did. I did have the luxury of a lot of low-level exposure, which has served to be quite useful at times (digital logic, assembly, etc.).
In the place of hard math, models, proofs, quantitative analysis of past approaches, etc. there is simply an “Architecture” section with much navel gazing. The paper topic is not a formal analysis but merely a description of a thing that was made.
Ironically, the least important part of an engineering research paper is the part describing the thing actually built/simulated. That is merely validation of the theory.
I somewhat disagree: there exist a lot of deep questions in software engineering, and there do exist some (very, very partial) answers.
The problem rather is that most people don't want to listen to and/or do deep literature research about the few answers that we do have, but rather want to aggressively push their private political agenda about how they want software to be built. With some literature research, it is often not too hard to disprove the "foundations" on which this political agenda is built. But this does not make you admired because you showed serious knowledge about software engineering, but rather near to an outlaw.
TLDR: the problem is not software engineering, the problem is organizational politics.
Some places you see people pushing their Shiny New Rewrite, basically as resume fodder or promo packet material.
I describe that kind of decision as political because it doesn’t seem to come with a legitimate cost-benefit analysis.
- If it's about manipulating people, it's politics.
It's fairly rote - you need good judgement and to stay current in latest state of the art but generally speaking you're not researching (nor should you be) cutting edge algorithms or anything.
Add a new button, add some parameters to this analytics call, implement dark mode. These are the things that everyone is doing at their six-figure tech jobs.
This is choose your own adventure. You can be writing any kind of code you want, including stuff at the frontier.
imagine if people regularly had tires fall off on their way home from the mechanic. or regularly having to get bones rebroken to set them correctly.
I can agree that much of the work is not true "engineering" but most of what I've seen produced over the years is closer to fraud than anything else.
I have no degree and that is arguably worse and there are exceedingly fewer people with my background in technology on the coast. On the other hand, I spent a lot of my career writing applications that solved Software Operations problems. I spent a lot of time working in small teams rather than huge ones, I often did not have product or project support. I used to loathe that chapter of my career because of how toilsome it was in my memory. Lately I've come to appreciate it a lot more because I am much more self reliant and I often have the skills and familiarity to run much larger teams as a tenured engineer.
Long way of saying, the value of an experience or thing is often not immediately realized or appreciated.
Earned experience is objectively valuable. The problem is people don't want to be fools so "working hard" looks suspect when you see plenty of people do well because of network and social aspects.
When it comes to school, there's obvious value in the social/status/network aspects and debatable value in the actual content, but what I find most discussion worthy is how one's background shapes mentality toward "putting in the work" when there's no explicit reward for said work.
The simple difference is that school promises you results. One at least leaves with a paper that's supposed to be worth something. Doing anything else, provides no such guarantees.
I have to admit though that they were right, in that they were indeed able to make a career at some multinational companies even after barely getting through a bachelor's with bad grades and with many more years needed than the normal time.
Real mass-scale software jobs are indeed significantly easier than the math courses in CS university programs. At least in a cognitive capability sense. There can still be many other kinds of challenges that are more about social skills which are not much needed for passing college courses but are quite important in jobs.
it’d be disingenuous to assume the conversation is about anything other than the economic trade off. That said, wholly agree that if school was about learning, it’s great for advancing and curating an environment for learning as its own value.
fwiw in high school, authority figures justified college as a way to counteract the failure scenario of dead-end jobs. success looked like a good paying job and opportunities to do what you’d like like vacations and raise a family. Maybe thats the right framing for the rank and file public school, but it’s why I didn’t even apply to college, let alone attend.
edit: it is objectively economically more valuable to hold a degree, the data is clear. my issue is that it’s reverse causality as is always the issue with data signals.
when you go back to the scenario of what to tell a public school kid, going to college actually works as a negative motivation tool, because the majority of kids won’t go to college so you’re basically telling them their economic value is shit before they are even grown. I don’t believe in that.
To me it seems hollow and sad to think about higher education purely in job and money terms, but maybe I’m weird. I studied what I wanted to learn about, and was naïve about any economic trade offs. There were a few companies I thought were cool and dreamt about working for, and at some level I knew it’d take a degree to get in, but in my book school was quite valuable beyond the jobs I’ve had, in many non-financial ways.
> you’re basically telling them their economic value is shit before they are even grown. I don’t believe in that.
Maybe I didn’t understand, but I can’t quite reconcile your suggestion to only look at college as an economic trade off, with not believing in recommending college due to your pessimistic interpretation of the message. It’s a fact that in the US, people with 4-year degrees earn more than people without, statistically speaking. (And the factor is a lot bigger than I thought.) People with advanced degrees statistically earn a considerable amount more than people with 4-year degrees. If you want to look at this as an economic trade off, it seems like there’s only one recommendation that makes any sense, no? Like, based on the numbers and my own experience, it doesn’t feel like going to school has particularly strong negatives that offset the positives. (BTW I went to a state school, and borrowed money to pay tuition.)
In most of Europe, the PhD contains no formal training. It's just what you informally pick up while working with other PhD students, if you do collaborations (depends on whether the supervisor likes that), or from postdocs (if there are postdocs), or from your rare meetings with the supervisor (which are often about updating the supervisor on new developments, not getting much actionable insight from them), but many many are simply left to their own devices and just do stuff and cope with the inevitable rejections, etc. At other places the supervisor organizes things like retreats, internal poster sessions, lots of internal presentations, discussions among the group etc. While in other places there is none of that, in some places many PhD students simply work from home and don't even meet much.
The winning strategy for prolific professors is to get a good early-career reputation, then hire really smart and conscientious applicants (proven through already published papers) and let them carry out the research. It's nothing about training them in any practical way. There are some who do that but it doesn't scale. You have to hire 20 PhD students and they will deliver enough papers for you to preserve your status and be able to hire the smartest applicants again and again.
But again, there's huge variation. Even at good universities.
> It's about picking up research independence, confidence, and a strong capacity for critique.
lolol maybe in the days of yore. today it's about pumping out questionable papers that your advisor tells you to pump out and targeting the right conference.
> It is supposed to be suffering of a special kind
are you also one of those people who takes cold plunges every morning? this myth is what perpetuates the same horrible relationships with shit advisors. it's not supposed to be suffering. it's supposed to be challenging. there's an enormous difference.
> an experience in grinding and radical unproductivity when the problem really is that hard
there are no problems like this in academia (at least not CS) because it's absolutely impractical (re graduation, tenure, etc.) to set out tackling problems which are intractable.
in summary: this entire comment is "phd virtue signaling"
> there are no problems like this in academia (at least not CS) because it's absolutely impractical (re graduation, tenure, etc.) to set out tackling problems which are intractable.
There's a difference between problems that are intractable and problems that require "grinding and radical unproductivity when the problem really is that hard". Maybe the problems in CS are easier. In math, many of the problems are very much of this flavor, and the point often isn't to solve the original problem but rather to use your investigation into that problem to discover new techniques or more tractable problems that you can solve. Of course, the pace of publication is far slower in math, so I'm sure this is a factor in the choice of problems.
On the other hand, I do mostly agree with this:
> are you also one of those people who takes cold plunges every morning? this myth is what perpetuates the same horrible relationships with shit advisors. it's not supposed to be suffering. it's supposed to be challenging. there's an enormous difference.
Agreed, there should be a difference. Unfortunately, in many modern PhD programs I'm not sure there is much of one....
my BS and MS were in (pure) math (my MS thesis is on convergence of the ito integral...) and my PhD is in CS systems. CS outside of theory is worse than an empirical discipline - it's a "throw spaghetti, lasagna, burgers, caesar salad at the wall and see what sticks" discipline. it bears literally no resemblance to math (pure or applied).
> Maybe the problems in CS are easier... Of course, the pace of publication is far slower in math, so I'm sure this is a factor in the choice of problems.
yes and that should tell you everything you need to know - there are kids in my department graduating with 5 first author conference papers (i had "only" 3). how much of those papers do you think is original work really?
> today it's about pumping out questionable papers that your advisor tells you to pump out and targeting the right conference.
That's called a garbage supervisor. I'm sorry that was your experience, nobody deserves that. There has been only one student I have personally experienced where I felt some of the papers were questionable, but they were not strong, and should not have done the degree in the first place (unfortunately, I have no choice in the matter and just need to get them through).
> it's not supposed to be suffering. it's supposed to be challenging
Immense challenge is suffering because you encounter failure over and over and over again. Eventually success will come, but the interim is tough on the mental state. No human likes to fail repeatedly, but it is important to experience that at least once in a research career. It only needs to happen for one project; afterwards, the student tends to develop an incredible autonomy because they've been through the worst of it. But of course, this is where the supervisor is supposed to be responsible to find the right balance, since the difficulty of the task needs to be judged to ensure the student can finish it, while being as ambitious as possible within reason. It's pretty difficult to get right, and many supervisors don't even bother, choosing instead to push their own career. To any PhD student out there experiencing that, find another PhD supervisor please, before it is too late.
> there are no problems like this in academia (at least not CS) because it's absolutely impractical (re graduation, tenure, etc.) to set out tackling problems which are intractable.
No, this is precisely what the PhD is supposed to be for. It should be the most challenging topic of your entire early career, or your supervisor wasted your time. You have a handful of years to impress people, so they have to count.
> this entire comment is "phd virtue signaling"
Honestly, it just sounds like you were unfortunate enough to have been in a supervisory relationship where you were used as part of a paper mill. I'm really sorry to hear that; it isn't uncommon, but it isn't what the degree is supposed to be, and it seems you did not experience what you should have. The program doesn't work for everyone, but it does have a purpose, and it is frustrating when selfish academics bastardize that purpose to give this kind of false impression of the degree.
yes my advisor was garbage but also
1) my advisor is literally in the top 500 most cited researchers in the world
2) every single other student in systems had the exact same experience
in summary: your "no true scotsman" doesn't work here because by all measures all of these people are the scotsmen.
> Immense challenge is suffering
this is facile - torture is suffering, deprivation is suffering, prison is suffering. immense challenge is ... challenge. stop with the exaggerated language please. stop writing these paeans for research. it's not some ethereal pursuit. for a select few it's a calling. for most it's just a shitty job.
> find another PhD supervisor please, before it is too late.
bro you are so out of touch it's laughable. there are departments full of your so-called "not true advisors". what do you recommend to the students in these departments who are post-quals and are just now discovering the truth? you recommend to them they what? transfer schools? drop out after 2-3 years of reduced earnings? will you compensate them?
> No, this is precisely what the PhD is supposed to be for. It should be the most challenging topic of your entire early career, or your supervisor wasted your time.
again my guy: take a look at literally any top conference and tell me how many papers do truly novel work? as i commented below: i grew up in math where novel work meant a truly original theorem. that kind of quality is 1/1000 in neurips.
> you were used as part of a paper mill
did you catch the part where i attend a US T10? how do you square your assessment with that?
> isn't what the degree is supposed to be
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman
stupid is as stupid does
> The program doesn't work for everyone, but it does have a purpose
there is literally no program. you're completely full of shit. there is no "standardized phd". every single department around the world completely makes it up to be whatever they want.
> it is frustrating when selfish academics bastardize that purpose to give this kind of false impression of the degree.
have you looked at the mirror recently? the frustration comes not from the craven/mercenary individuals who admit their cravenness - it comes from gaslighters like you who claim there's some idealized version of it that exists that everyone supposedly falls short of (hint hint: have you ever heard of this convenient concept of original sin?).
EDIT:
> it seems you did not experience what you should have
i got exactly the experience i needed to disabuse me of the illusion that academia was a priesthood in pursuit of truth/knowledge/beauty/whatever. so that was perfect (i will never step foot on another academic campus again and i will warn everyone else off from it too). in addition i got a job in FAANG so that was a nice consolation prize :)
Then I had the opportunity to start working for a remote company writing 2 webapps in reactjs (no guidance on the code, I had to learn all by myself with courses, youtube etc. because I'm the only one writing the frontend)
In the meanwhile I stopped the university for a year to only realize later that I was missing my academic education. After all, having a guidance on what to study makes you feel safer, the world is so complex and full of different things, that the university gives you the illusion of learning the "right" and "indespensable" thing. Trust our path, they say.
But now I'm here again, 1 exam left (on ancient Artificial Intelligence, based on Norvig's book), and I don't really know what to do - Artificial Intelligence Master ? - Computer Science Master ? - Sabbatical Year to learn by following rabbit holes, hoping to find my real self ?
In the meanwhile I'll probably see the AI take my job.
The great future I once imagined seems so unreachable now, I'm demoralized. I wanted to create cool and hard things, but I find myself chatting with LLMs nowadays, and I think, is this worth?
(How I migrated my tech career into a plumber career - coming soon.)
How did this work? They actually waited for you before holding an exam?
In CS, for Bachelor, I can understand. You perhaps do it just to show the paper and get a job.
For Masters, I can somewhat understand, as the Masters is becoming the "new Bachelor's"
For PhD: It's all on you. No one makes you do it, and the downsides are well documented. In many (other) disciplines, you do a PhD because you want to do research, and you'll never otherwise have the time to dedicate to a research problem. You don't do it for the certificate - unless you want to go into academia.
So: Why did you waste your time on the PhD? Why did you stick to it if it wasn't furthering your goals?
I spent years pursuing it, and eventually quit when I realized it wasn't taking me where I wanted to go. So what's your excuse for sticking with it?
It just sounds very silly to complete a PhD and complain about it. It was your bad decision, after all.
I'm in Europe where education is mostly free or inexpensive so it may be different in the US, but it sounds like terrible advice. In most fields, it will be virtually impossible to get a job without a degree, and even in tech it'll be hard. I work in a big tech company, and as far as I can tell, most SWEs do have a degree of some sort. I'm sure there are exceptions, but they are rare.
the productive takeaway is that of course its safer to come with a degree but it’s hardly proof that one needs the degree. Nobody is going to risk their or their kids livelihood on being the variant for the a/b test though.
Bachelors - You can communicate in writing.
Masters - You can plan and prepare business documents for planning and proposals
Doctors - You can do research
To me uneducated people can still have skills, but their utility into management becomes questionable even though education certainly does not make anybody a better manager. I do however question the future value of education if most young people have never read a book or cannot write a simple essay without AI.
For me the ability to communicate is the most important skill, because programming is a form of writing. So, if I were hiring for a software team manager I would have absolutely no reservations about putting them on camera and watching them hand write a 5 page essay within an hour. It’s one of those don’t waste my time and I won’t waste yours kind of things.
(Free self-learning/paced/online CS curriculum)
No comment on the advisability of the degrees.
I disagree: I have fond memories of my university time. I also do really like programming. The problem rather is that there are hardly any job where what you learned and loved at the university (and why you studied - in this case - computer science) is of much use. Keep in mind that your degree was a huge part why one was selected for the job.
I honestly ask myself quite often why employers are so fond of university degrees for programming jobs. If they put much less relevance on this criterion, employers would have a much bigger group of applicants among which they can select - and this means employers could use this to level down salaries.
It is also true that the software development jobs that don't need much CS knowledge to perform are the ones most vulnerable to being automated away by LLMs. If a kludge is sufficient, AI can kludge it cheaper than a human.
There are other options for online CS bachelor's programs (WGU is the most famous).
After a few years in the workplace I don't feel behind at all, and I'm grateful that I have more potential back up plans and won't be just another unemployed CS major if there's a real contraction in the job market. I've been considering pivoting to being an actuary, or possibly teaching high school.
If you want to be a plumber get an apprenticeship.
BTW, does anyone recommend doing a masters degree in bio-stats or not? Or something similar, bio-tech-like?
But I did get my degree when it was 5x cheaper than today (inflation-adjusted). There is that.
One thing about on-the-job learning is that employers are increasingly reluctant to pay for that. So non-degrees will still have to get on their indy learning.
And, yes, networking is king more than ever now.
> Learning by doing and building a portfolio sounds like a better way of getting in the industry today than getting a multi-year degree with nothing or little to show for it.
Graduates do this too. The industry has gotten highly competitive. So who do you think employers would rather hire, a CS grad with a portfolio or high school grad with a portfolio? It takes a lot more for apps to impress today, in no small part because LLMs expedite the process.
Going so far as to as to found a company might be necessary if the goal is to work at a FAANG co or whatever, but most developers don't work there.
I am a teenager and I am currently going to college. I am not going into a world class one college but its a decent college.
I think that you might be right in terms of pretty much everything in tech is on-the-job learning, but the rationale behind going to a bachelor's college is that as someone else has said here: you all are treated equally and companies come to select you. So you are competing in a much smaller pool and are able to stand out much more.
Also, I get 4 years to do what I do best so much so that I did it these 2 years as well, I just can't resist myself because I have tried to do so I just love tinkering with computers and this also puts me up to an comparatively decent advantage.
Sure, there might be some rote-learning and some things which are a bit theoretical but they might also be practical. I was learning on my own a month ago IIRC about what the 7 layers are and I am probably going to read some on my own time before going to college the book of "networking a top down approach"
This has given me 4 years to do the things that I like, the job market right now is a bit not too good but reading books about history of the dot com bubble etc. I feel decently confident that its very cyclical. Just reading the book of "how the internet happened" made me realize all the similarities with things happening right now. Every 20 years, a new generation happens and we forget the old things which have happened (IMO).
That being said, I am unsure about 11 years of the free time at the same time but honestly, it really just depends upon your subjective nature and personal preference and for someone genuinely interested within research... it could be an interesting path. I am open to every opportunity that comes in front of me and wish to try my best :-D
> Nowadays I wouldn't recommend anyone to get a tech degree in a university unless it's a world class one. And even then, I would focus on networking and finding like-minded people rather than necessarily getting good grades.
Networking is a multiplier. You realize the ability of multiplier because you have the base-line. Were you able to form the base-line because of the time spent within those 11 years, partially yes, and other comes from your natural interests and curiosity judging from the fact that you are on Hackernews for the sake of it itself.
Would a person with the strongest of networks but failing to have the baselines of (technical & managerial?) tastes/intellect and just this feeling of learning be able to do something with networking. Absolutely, people are using these top grade colleges as just a way to network and so there is a lot of froth/hype in the market. Theo Baker (a 22 year old journalist who lived in stanford) has written a book about it ("How to rule the world")
I still think that its interesting that they get to become the startup owner at such an young age and there are benefits but also tradeoffs and realizing both of these is important and making the decision wisely is important. I do envy them in some sense as well but also not so, its nuanced! and I wish them all success hopefully :-D (and I think one should keep the options open), If an opportunity comes for me to open an startup say even within college and upon proper careful thinking I get the answer to be a serious yes, I will try to follow that as well :-D
but my main point is that after a particular point in life: the multiplier feels much more important than baseline but before that, the baseline is just as important if not more, so I will try to get good grades hopefully if interests align with the subjects which I think they do.
From my understanding of the world, the world is nuanced and complicated so there isn't one size fits all so its best to keep your options around and do what you feel rationally so but rationality can also only go so far so it also depends a bit on the emotions involved and many other factors but we can't also think infinitely in recursion for everything so we need to have good instincts and ability to think deeply when needed and basically being adaptable to the situation thus me suggesting that there might not be one size fits all.
These are the talks that I have had with myself over the conflict that I myself had over going to college or not and some reasons behind going to do so, so I do realize my bias in that and I am not entirely an unbiased source but perhaps a truthful source. It so much depends on the situation of the person to decide if they should go to college or not and all factors involved imo.
Have a nice day if someone has read it till here and take care! :-D
This is horrible advice. Hiring is a zero sum game, and a college education is treated as a table stakes requirement which won't change.
When trying to get hired, you are competing against other candidates, and if a tiebreaker is needed, the less risky option will always be hired.
Additionally, where you get your degree doesn't matter too much, but getting one is critical. It can be a BSCS from WGU for all that matters, but getting one is important. Also, bootcamps are useless now. Don't waste money on them.
The only exceptions remain veterans from the armed services assuming they were trained in the right MOS.
Then it's almost trivially easy to cheat with a VM, or, failing that, a KVM switch with real hardware.
Often the reason is something like _"that's how it is in the workplace"_ which is a blatant cop out, imo. It's clear the reason that Universities force group work is because it's a cost cutting exercise.
They need to pay the hours for people to mark assignments. Make groups of 2, and you've cut the number of hours that need to be paid by 50%. Make groups of 5, and you've cut the cost by 80%. Of course, this comes at the cost of some students unfairly carrying others.
So you’re going to put me in a room, under extreme time pressure, where I can’t access the internet, reference books, modelling tools or talk to people?
Versus an office where you often have to collaborate, or ask for help or approval from someone more senior, where important decisions are reviewed over and over by multiple people? Where you need to use tools like the internet, books and modeling software. Where you need to talk to people whether they are engineers, business people or machinists.
Not only that but exams I think are better for people who are good at solving mostly math problems quickly with reasonable accuracy, where as most mechanical design roles require intense attention to detail that rewards taking your time to make sure there are no mistakes made. And most mechanical engineers end up being projects managers anyway I suspect in my country.
I was in the inaugural class and it was pretty smooth other than one professor there who was an asshole and felt that online classes were beneath him. It felt like we got scraps from the table (then Covid happened and online was everywhere). Also, one prof quit just before the semester on a required class that seniors had to take and a replacement couldn’t be found in time. They offered us alternatives which weren’t really good class replacements.
Strongly recommend if your time and money is limited.
Writing detailed blog posts about the experience is rather usually a signal that the person is an annoying self-promoter. :-(
Some people with certs and some people with blogs are legit.
A lot of them are really eager to be seen and that's it.
Kinda sucks that the first barrier to interviewing at most companies is HR, and they generally are the least qualified or motivated to properly assess candidates. I don’t fully blame them, as there are just too many resumes and interviews to go through for the limited time we have in a work day, but great candidates can come from any background and demographic. Edit: Sample size of 1 here, so take with an appropriately sized (whale?, school bus?) grain of salt.
OP would just put "BSc Computer Science from Goldsmiths, University of London" on his resume and LinkedIn.
... because they know less about programming, and thus think much less deeply how a novel abstraction could look like which solves the problem much more elegantly.
In other words: these applicants more obediently do their work instead of regularly questioning whether there could be a better way and thus rocking the boat too much. :-(
I do work with people who have a math major. Let me put it this way: if they were interested in finding and applying novel abstractions for programming, they would for sure often be very capable in this, but people who majored in math often rather love to apply these skills to more mathematical problems in their area of interest.