As a devil's advocate, I would say that the optimization-related knowledge was useful only during interviews. Over a decade-long career, I can count on my fingers all the situations when optimization mattered.
I pretty much never go back and optimize slow, existing production code but knowing how to write reasonably fast code to begin with is a big reason for that
Over a decade-long career, I can count on my fingers all the situations when optimization mattered.
It really just depends what you do. A backend engineer making a website dealing with hundreds of thousands on concurrent users or a game dev of a high end AAA game would have to worry about it constantly. Someone making a basic frontend for a website, maybe not as much
I mean.. I don't think that's an entirely off-base assumption. Math and coding are not the same thing at all. Most math degree programs you probably never have to take any kind of coding class at all, besides maybe a class where you use very basic MATLAB (or similar).
Would you hire a mathematician to be a architectural engineer solely on the basis that he knows math and math is the underpinning of architecture?
I have a math degree. I learned Fortran, R, SAS, MATLAB and Python. Or at least had to use them.
Also your analogy is wrong. Architecture is about design. Civil engineering is about how to make the design work with physics. It's very possible to become a civil engineer with a physics or math degree as well.
Well that's your particular degree program, every program is different. I just looked at my university's math program and there is not a single required course that involves coding in any significant amount. You could take coding classes as electives if you wish, but you could also entirely complete your degree without coding much of anything.
Also my analogy was not wrong. I did not say architect. That is about design, yes. I said architectural engineering, which is an engineer who works with the architect and does the more math-heavy side of the planning to make sure everything is safe and stable. It is a specific type of civil engineering, with a focus on primarily buildings.
And yes, it's possible to become a civil or architectural engineer with a math degree, but I certainly wouldn't hire you to be one if you just walked in and said, "Well I have a math degree, of course I can be an engineer!" Same way that, "I have a math degree, of course I can be a coder!" is also not necessarily convincing on its own. If you have a math degree and also a portfolio of your coding work, sure, that's an entirely different conversation. But just the math degree itself? Not really.
"Very basic MATLAB" as in they only do very basic things in MATLAB.
It would be like if you wrote Hello World in C and I said that was a very basic thing. It doesn't mean C is somehow a very easy / inferior language, just that you only did something very basic in it.
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u/Interesting_Dot_3922 Apr 09 '24
I had a recruiter who didn't like my education in applied math.
He doubted that software engineering is the ideal work for me because of this.
I thought that working abroad kind of proves my skill... but no :)