Computer Science and Software Engineering

My impression of how people become programmers is that it's only weakly tied to education and much more strongly tied to what you do in your spare time (namely whether the thing you do is programming or not). I would expect an impressive GitHub repository and history of good answers on StackOverflow to be much more relevant to people hiring programmers than what you did in school.

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.

I've never seen a software engineering undergraduate program like the one you describe. Can you point to one? (Update: after a bit of googling I found a few such programs, but they don't seem nearly as common as CS programs. Personally I don't recall ever meeting a graduate of such a program, and I meet a lot of new grads with CS degrees.)

I would be surprised if you found a statistically significant difference in outcome. Software development as a field has vigorously resisted professional certification of the sort practiced in other engineering disciplines like EE, CE, and ME. Frankly I'd argue that in practice software developers are not engineers in the same sense that civil engineers, mechanical engineers, and electrical engineers are. Employers of software developers don't seem to care about "professional engineer" titles, at least not in the United States. Perhaps it's different elsewhere in the world.

I also suppose this might change over time, if employers develop a preference for SE degrees and professional engineer titles. However, while such an expectation might affect the preferences of today's students, it would be hard to measure in the present.

The curriculum for software engineer isn't hugely different from the curriculum for CS. I suppose if the skills taught in the SE classes proved more useful than the skills taught in the CS classes that are omitted by an SE, then employers might become more interested in hiring SE grads. Right now I suspect most employers don't really distinguish these two degrees.

Long term, I suspect any differences wash away. I wouldn't expect to find any differences in long term salary or promotability between CS and SE grads from the same school. That's because I'm finding it hard to imagine what entry level jobs an SE might be suitable for that a CS grad isn't or vice versa. If there is a difference, it might be that a CS grad is more likely to continue on to a Ph.D. program, and that could certainly have a negative effect on lifetime earnings.

If I were going to post asking for this kind of advice, I would ask in the Open Thread.

Try google and the appropriate stackexchange.

(My answer will be very US-centric.)

These degrees will be regarded almost the same by most employers. A much bigger factor is where you will get them--your choice of school affects how valuable the degree is more than the major, what your next four years will be like, and how much money you will spend on it.

A PE in Software Engineering is a brand new thing. The PE is very important in some transitional engineering fields, but actually doesn't mean much practically in many others. In the software development industry, certifications have traditionally meant very little outside of government, government contracting, and internal software development at large, non-software corporations. (Think words like "enterprise", "requirements specification", "Java"...) If you are interested in stable work, go into government contracting. Mostly avoid the latter category, where you will be undervalued most places.

If you are interested in working for tech companies or startups (think words like "agile", "free energy drinks", "Python"...), then your degree is of a lot less value and certainly the subtleties of it are. Strengths here will be showing cool projects from your degree (CS wins a little here), personal projects, professional experience, etc. help a lot. A strong github profile or other portfolio will impress.

If you're interested in doing interesting, stable, well-paid work but still want to program, consider a dramatically different degree. People who can program in science, engineering, economics, etc. get to work on really interesting problems and are considered really special in their fields. There is a lot of money for people who are really good at it and know how to sell themselves. Hopefully a few decades from now "programmer" won't even be a career and domain knowledge will be the norm.

I work for the US government, so this is my experience.

The career track of someone with a CS degree is more likely to be a programmer. Their career will focus on the "front lines" of the project, doing the grunt work. Mainly, these will be our contractors. Software Engineering is more of the leadership track. These will be the project managers, the eventual CIOs, etc. They focus on guiding the contractors on the project, keeping up with the burn rate of the finances on the project, the requirements to tackle on the project/preventing requirements creep, etc.

I'm more on the SE track than the CS track, so most of my duties lean towards the leadership aspect. It doesn't pay as much as the contractor side of the project, but I have more job security than the contractors :)

Speaking from my perspective in the software industry: There is little difference between the two, and after a few years, no one cares what degree you have.

The general rule is that a highly theoretical training in computer science is correlated with higher salaries than vocational training. The software engineering degree you describe is in between. These distinctions have more to do with signaling of ability than with actual learning.

FYI, I started a Computer Science B.S. with a concentration in Software Engineering on Monday of this week at ASU. My startup is doing well enough that I was able to quit my night-job, but I keep seeing (what appears to be) low-hanging fruit that could be exploited with software applications in my industry, so I figure getting a degree should put me in a good enough position to know whether these apps are feasible and if they are how to go about getting them developed (plus, I love logic and missed school). PM me if you want to collaborate or compare notes.

I suspect that the impact of degree choice (at least between these degrees) on career success is largely mediated by the impact of degree choice on your own enjoyment and satisfaction with what you're learning.

Which do you find more interesting?

(While I'm making unevidenced guesses, here are some more. 1. Computer science degrees are probably harder to get into and harder to do well in, and even if they aren't they're probably perceived as being so, and a large part of how education affects your career is that employers use it as a rough gauge of how smart you are. So if you're hoping for "high-end" software jobs, and if you expect you would do well in a computer science course, that might be a better choice. 2. You might try to supplement whatever official learning you do with something on the side that broadens your knowledge. Doing a software engineering degree? Read up on computer science topics. Doing a computer science degree? Get involved in an open-source software project, or build some things yourself and put them on Github, or something. 3. The prestige of the institution you attend probably matters, at least if it's a good one.)

Depending on your personality, how much you know already, and the kind of places you would want to work, a programming dojo might be a good complement or alternative to college. I would guess that most companies don't care much about the difference between software engineering vs. computer science degrees.