A few CS questions

turbo93
Tue, 12 Feb 2013 00:05:03 +0000

Mrs. Turbo, a CS/Stat double major among her other degrees has worked for a bank software company, for a major pharmaceutical company, an electronics manufacturing firm, and has had offers to work in healthcare R&D. She currently works as an IT Consultant for the Mother of All IT Consulting Firms (MAICF) doing manufacturing IT.

I would not say those are non-tech firms. If the OP is expecting that only the big 3 out west are tech firms, well, I have news for him/her. It ain’t so. While coding the exact type of animation one sees on Foobook when they click on Like may sound like tech, try writing the software that, say, controls a
network of machines that make pharmaceuticals.

Information security - hmmm. A friend studied at Purdue this one under The Man.But, in each big company there’s usually very few such types. So…

What type of work they (we) do? I’m CS & Human Factors myself, and have done a decade of tool development (compilers, config management systems) to web page design (sigh, HTML by hand), and the last 15 years consumer electronics software (read, internet connected entertainment devices).

Can you get a job from Directional State U? back then, sure. Today it’s a factor of where these companies recruit. If you have friends in the industry, probably. If not, not so sure. UCBAlumnus called it right, a lot of hiring is local so act accordingly.

Programming for a bank could indeed be a cool job but a lot of it has been outsourced aeons ago. Mrs. Turbo did a bunch of software for the computer that talks to the ATM’s and reconciles them (boooooooooring, your basic message protocols) and also was in ground zero of the housing debacle when she worked on mortgage qualification analysis software (we still laugh about what criteria counted for what points). Definitely non-cool.

Financial Engineering is a different story. It’s lots of finance, high math, and algorithms galore. Nothing that your friendly bank does. Purdue has a good program for that.