College is not where you find a career. College is where you have fun and drink beer

[Perry Winkle]

Originally Posted by tw

What exactly is CS? Many college computer programming courses are about teaching Word, Excel, and Access. That's computer science?

So, yes, it is a problem for an educated worker who is 'over qualified'. Especially when a boss only understands Word, Excel, Access, e-mail, and stock quotes. So what really is computer science?

The "science" of computing. Applied math, really. My program was theory heavy. Lots of mathematics, formal methods and systems programming (assemblers, compilers, etc.). We wrote C, LISP, various assemblers and Prolog. My favorite project was creating a VM for a hypothetical machine from the ground up.

We didn't touch the end-user stuff like Office, unless you count writing an HTML parser and an email client in C.

I've had excellent "IT" managers. My current one, the CTO of the company, has an MS CS from CMU. He can handle more information than any single person should, knows our business domain very well, and can still talk PL-theory when it comes up.

* IT is such a weasel term in my mind. It's like lumping butchers and surgeons into the same profession because they both cut meat.