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Zurich15313 Posts
On June 09 2016 08:26 DickMcFanny wrote:Show nested quote +On June 09 2016 07:08 zatic wrote:On June 09 2016 05:43 DickMcFanny wrote: This question is mostly for Morfildur and Zatic:
Do you guys know if vocational training (Ausbildung) in software development (Anwendungsentwicklung) will get me anywhere? I mean, would you hire people who only have vocational training and not a degree?
I'm asking because I want to get into developing, but I can't afford going to uni full time. I have a BA in English / history already, so I blew my load on a useless degree and now, of course, the government won't fund me again for a second go. I also do not want to do a Duales Studium, because I'm enrolled in a Mechanical Engineering course (Uni Dresden) course, simply because I enjoy the maths involved.
Do you think it's a viable option? What are you goals? What kind of work are you aiming for? Software development can mean a lot of things. I am unsure what your reasoning against Duales Studium is though? To me that sounds like the obvious choice. Not much longer time wise than vocational training, won't cost you anything, and the most straightforward path into employment. Of course, you need to be accepted to it first ... I would be a little hesitant to recommend vocational training in software engineering mostly because it'll likely lower your starting salary compared to say FH or Duales Studium. If it's not so much about the money for you I guess it mostly depends on the company that takes you in for the training. Honestly, my main goal would be getting into security / cryptology. I find that endlessly fascinating. The thing about Duales Studium: First of all, it's difficult to get at the best of times, but for me it's impossible. I'm far too old to find a company that would choose me over the 15 candidates per position who apply. My CV is a mess, I'm old, and I don't have that much experience. Second of all, you can't be enrolled in two unis at once. I'm learning a lot of fun maths in my mechanical engineering course, even if it's part time, and I don't want to quit. I see.
Cryptology is the one area where you would probably massively benefit from a formal university Math or CS education. But if that is not an option I don't think going the vocational training route is the right choice. I'd rather use those two years to work my way up from an entry level coding gig. You'll just have to accept that you will be starting from the bottom.
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That's no problem at all, as long as I can work a job in which I can learn and progress, the wage doesn't matter to me much.
I'll see if I can find suitable courses, but studying without any financial aid is a bit difficult.
Thank you for the replies, I will probably pop in again when I have a bit more concrete information.
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On June 09 2016 06:14 RoomOfMush wrote:Show nested quote +On June 09 2016 05:43 DickMcFanny wrote: This question is mostly for Morfildur and Zatic:
Do you guys know if vocational training (Ausbildung) in software development (Anwendungsentwicklung) will get me anywhere? I mean, would you hire people who only have vocational training and not a degree?
I'm asking because I want to get into developing, but I can't afford going to uni full time. I have a BA in English / history already, so I blew my load on a useless degree and now, of course, the government won't fund me again for a second go. I also do not want to do a Duales Studium, because I'm enrolled in a Mechanical Engineering course (Uni Dresden) course, simply because I enjoy the maths involved.
Do you think it's a viable option? Where are you looking for work? Within germany? I know that companies within germany are very desperately looking for competent programmers and software developers. At our university they are talent scouting weekly. They often complain about university students having too little practical experience. Universities often focus on the theoretical backgrounds. If you get an Ausbildung as a software developer (and we assume that it is a proper one) then you can certainly play this to your advantage. You just have to be confident and convince your future boss that a proper training and firm knowledge of practical work matter is more important than a fancy university degree. On which website can I find jobs that don't require German language skills and are for very skilled developers and don't try to measure experience using years in the industry?
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guys I'm going to apply for a masters degree in a couple of days. They are asking for a letter of intent about what kind of area I want to study on. I'm thinking about writing something related to different programming approaches.
For example, functional programming, reactive programming and like. I studied oop in bachelor's and at work, couldn't find time to study a different thing. So I see this as an opportunity to learn different approaches. Question is, can a masters thesis be written about programming? The most theses I saw are about more theoretical stuff like machine learning and such with a little programming for demonstration at the side.
My other option is to write machine learning in the letter just to pass it for now and decide what I want to study later
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On June 09 2016 16:57 zatic wrote:Show nested quote +On June 09 2016 08:26 DickMcFanny wrote:On June 09 2016 07:08 zatic wrote:On June 09 2016 05:43 DickMcFanny wrote: This question is mostly for Morfildur and Zatic:
Do you guys know if vocational training (Ausbildung) in software development (Anwendungsentwicklung) will get me anywhere? I mean, would you hire people who only have vocational training and not a degree?
I'm asking because I want to get into developing, but I can't afford going to uni full time. I have a BA in English / history already, so I blew my load on a useless degree and now, of course, the government won't fund me again for a second go. I also do not want to do a Duales Studium, because I'm enrolled in a Mechanical Engineering course (Uni Dresden) course, simply because I enjoy the maths involved.
Do you think it's a viable option? What are you goals? What kind of work are you aiming for? Software development can mean a lot of things. I am unsure what your reasoning against Duales Studium is though? To me that sounds like the obvious choice. Not much longer time wise than vocational training, won't cost you anything, and the most straightforward path into employment. Of course, you need to be accepted to it first ... I would be a little hesitant to recommend vocational training in software engineering mostly because it'll likely lower your starting salary compared to say FH or Duales Studium. If it's not so much about the money for you I guess it mostly depends on the company that takes you in for the training. Honestly, my main goal would be getting into security / cryptology. I find that endlessly fascinating. The thing about Duales Studium: First of all, it's difficult to get at the best of times, but for me it's impossible. I'm far too old to find a company that would choose me over the 15 candidates per position who apply. My CV is a mess, I'm old, and I don't have that much experience. Second of all, you can't be enrolled in two unis at once. I'm learning a lot of fun maths in my mechanical engineering course, even if it's part time, and I don't want to quit. I see. Cryptology is the one area where you would probably massively benefit from a formal university Math or CS education.
Where do you think would I best go for that? Munich? Augsburg? Hamburg? Maybe some FH?
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Zurich15313 Posts
On June 10 2016 19:21 DickMcFanny wrote:Show nested quote +On June 09 2016 16:57 zatic wrote:On June 09 2016 08:26 DickMcFanny wrote:On June 09 2016 07:08 zatic wrote:On June 09 2016 05:43 DickMcFanny wrote: This question is mostly for Morfildur and Zatic:
Do you guys know if vocational training (Ausbildung) in software development (Anwendungsentwicklung) will get me anywhere? I mean, would you hire people who only have vocational training and not a degree?
I'm asking because I want to get into developing, but I can't afford going to uni full time. I have a BA in English / history already, so I blew my load on a useless degree and now, of course, the government won't fund me again for a second go. I also do not want to do a Duales Studium, because I'm enrolled in a Mechanical Engineering course (Uni Dresden) course, simply because I enjoy the maths involved.
Do you think it's a viable option? What are you goals? What kind of work are you aiming for? Software development can mean a lot of things. I am unsure what your reasoning against Duales Studium is though? To me that sounds like the obvious choice. Not much longer time wise than vocational training, won't cost you anything, and the most straightforward path into employment. Of course, you need to be accepted to it first ... I would be a little hesitant to recommend vocational training in software engineering mostly because it'll likely lower your starting salary compared to say FH or Duales Studium. If it's not so much about the money for you I guess it mostly depends on the company that takes you in for the training. Honestly, my main goal would be getting into security / cryptology. I find that endlessly fascinating. The thing about Duales Studium: First of all, it's difficult to get at the best of times, but for me it's impossible. I'm far too old to find a company that would choose me over the 15 candidates per position who apply. My CV is a mess, I'm old, and I don't have that much experience. Second of all, you can't be enrolled in two unis at once. I'm learning a lot of fun maths in my mechanical engineering course, even if it's part time, and I don't want to quit. I see. Cryptology is the one area where you would probably massively benefit from a formal university Math or CS education. Where do you think would I best go for that? Munich? Augsburg? Hamburg? Maybe some FH? HPI Potsdam probably the best, but unsure how hard it is to get in. Erlangen, Karlsruhe, Munich, Augsburg, Aachen, Berlin are all top stops for CS.
For compsec / cryptology you actually want university over FH I would say.
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Thanks, I appreciate the reply.
I have to consider cost of living as well, unfortunately, so the Bavarian unis are all pretty difficult to make work. Perhaps I'll stay at SAP for another year to save up some money, whilst getting some credit points via Fernuni Hagen and then switch to a proper brick-and-mortar uni next year.
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Zurich15313 Posts
On June 10 2016 20:49 DickMcFanny wrote: Thanks, I appreciate the reply.
I have to consider cost of living as well, unfortunately, so the Bavarian unis are all pretty difficult to make work. Perhaps I'll stay at SAP for another year to save up some money, whilst getting some credit points via Fernuni Hagen and then switch to a proper brick-and-mortar uni next year. You are working at SAP right now?
What do you need a degree for then if you don't mind me asking, isn't that like the dream shop as far as corporate programmer jobs go? Also, maybe look out for contacts in the company that can get you into HPI more easily?
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Well I'm not working as a programmer for them. I work in support for Cloud solutions, and you can't really move up the food chain without having a CS degree.
But my motivation isn't about moving up the company, I just find myself increasingly fascinated with the software side of things, especially the maths behind that, and I just want to learn more.
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On June 10 2016 16:40 mantequilla wrote:guys I'm going to apply for a masters degree in a couple of days. They are asking for a letter of intent about what kind of area I want to study on. I'm thinking about writing something related to different programming approaches. For example, functional programming, reactive programming and like. I studied oop in bachelor's and at work, couldn't find time to study a different thing. So I see this as an opportunity to learn different approaches. Question is, can a masters thesis be written about programming? The most theses I saw are about more theoretical stuff like machine learning and such with a little programming for demonstration at the side. My other option is to write machine learning in the letter just to pass it for now and decide what I want to study later 
It looks like you are interested in Programming Language Theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_language_theory
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On June 09 2016 15:10 Cyx. wrote:Show nested quote +On June 09 2016 08:54 Nyxisto wrote:On June 09 2016 08:01 TheEmulator wrote:I have a simple question and I'm sure most of you are Linux enthusiasts so hopefully someone can help me. I'm looking to get back into programming as a hobby and I want to install a new Linux distro. I've taken CS classes in university and did some casual learning afterwards, all of which was on Ubuntu (this was at least 2-3 years ago). Most of my command line knowledge is still there and I wouldn't consider myself a complete rookie that needs to go the Ubuntu route again. BUT I'm kind of stuck on what Linux distro would be a good alternative. I'd be interested in converting to Arch with a little bit more experience, but probably not yet. I don't really crave a desktop/windows style experience that mint or other ubuntu clones offer either. Opinions on distros like Fedora/Debian/etc would be helpful. Mostly looking to do some web dev as a hobby although I want to explore/learn as much as possible (for fun at first but who knows what will come of it). Might even learn some server/sys admin stuff at some point  If it's too hard to suggest something since I didn't give you too much info maybe just talk about what you use and why you like it. Thanks. Aside from the install process which is very doable step by step with help of the arch wiki (which is very comprehensive) daily usage isn't very different. Arch is a rolling release which means that you won't have to do big release upgrades every few years but arch has less out of the box support for some proprietary software (vpn clients for example). They AUR (user repository) for additional software on the other hand is more convenient than Ubuntu's PPA system. But I personally feel that the lack of third party support for proprietary stuff on Arch is really inconvenient so I just use Ubuntu forks on any system, also the defaults are saner and for some licensing reason fonts on most other distros look really horrible. You can develop and learn on all distros so in that regard there's no difference. I'd honestly stick with one of the *buntu distros or Fedora. Especially for learning's sake, I'm actually really enthusiastic about Arch - it's been my main (and only) distro for a couple years now and it's never caused me problems, but it *has* encouraged me to learn a lot about how the system works and to explore a lot of different options on my own. I started out with Arch first when I switched to Linux and I've stuck with it, I think it's really good for someone who just wants to explore and figure things out.
The thing is though that people who want to learn to code or work with linux tend to do distro hop a lot and I really don't have the feeling you're getting the most out of your time if you're learning on that level. Sure you learn to configure your stuff but there's not much meat to it, you pretty much end up copy pasting stuff you find on stackoverflow into config files .
If you're genuinely interested in learning code I think the time is better spend grabbing a language of your choice and a book and working on projects you're enthusiastic about and just forgetting about what distro you're using.
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Well - applied cryptography is quite different than designing crypto systems. It's like popular physics. On the surface, it's all fun and games until one blows himself up trying to invent a new and 'better' code. But if you want to be serious, it's heavy math. By the way, I think both these books make cryptography look cool but they barely scratch the surface.
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Huh is SAP really considered gold standard in terms of software employment in EU? Don't really hear too much** about it in the US, except maybe that trying to integrate with their APIs is a pain and ABAP is the work of the devil incarnate (probably both exaggerations, idk).
**From an employment perspective, not sales, since a lot of huge companies use SAP.
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On June 12 2016 02:04 phar wrote: Huh is SAP really considered gold standard in terms of software employment in EU? Don't really hear too much** about it in the US, except maybe that trying to integrate with their APIs is a pain and ABAP is the work of the devil incarnate (probably both exaggerations, idk).
**From an employment perspective, not sales, since a lot of huge companies use SAP.
I think purely by size it's the big prize in the EU. It's the largest non-American software company, but that's not saying much.
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Has anyone got masters degree or is anyone considering it for software development? Why would one go for it? Why would one not go for it?
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I'm in the same boat. Actually going to apply for it tomorrow.
If you are considering working about big data, machine learning, image processing etc. a master's degree can give the necessary theoretical background. Or the management side of software development, it can be learned (and proved that you know it) with a masters.
For regular, traditional software development, like a webapp, I don't think a masters can give you much in terms of knowledge and practice.
Money is also a strong factor, at least for myself. I wouldn't spend much money on a degree if I'm not considering academic career. I will apply for it because it's free. Because in the end courses can only teach that much, and they often come with much unnecessary burden, you do the learning yourself.
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On June 13 2016 05:27 Shield wrote: Has anyone got masters degree or is anyone considering it for software development? Why would one go for it? Why would one not go for it? Get one if you need it to get a better job. That's basically what it boils down to. If you're finding employment prospects right now that you're happy with, you may just not need it.
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If you want to develop actual applications for users, you don't really need a masters. If you want to do cryptography, neural networks, AI and such, yeah, you probably should get one.
Most programming is actually straight forward application of pre-existing libraries or implementation of simple APIs. It gets tricky combining all of them to a useful product, but it's really not rocket science. It has it's own set of challenges, especially with poorly documented APIs, buggy libraries, ancient services that need to be used and all of that. Personally I prefer people that had vocational training since they have plenty of real world experience and a lot of what universities teach just doesn't apply to that kind of work, some of it is even harmful and results in overengineered products and frameworks, because some overeager student learned about recursion yesterday and decided to use it for everything, because he didn't learn when not to use it. Most programmers are still too bad for even that fairly simple line of work, but if you are dedicated you can do that kind of job even without any formal programming education.
The specialized fields of cryptography and such are very different in that they are far more theoretical. There are a lot less of those jobs and they require far more specialized knowledge, so people that have a masters will fare much better, I'd say it's even required to have a good chance at one of the rare jobs. You can probably get one with a bachelor, but a master will increase your chances significantly. That said, I don't have any personal experience with that kind of work.
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Zurich15313 Posts
On June 12 2016 02:04 phar wrote: Huh is SAP really considered gold standard in terms of software employment in EU? Don't really hear too much** about it in the US, except maybe that trying to integrate with their APIs is a pain and ABAP is the work of the devil incarnate (probably both exaggerations, idk).
**From an employment perspective, not sales, since a lot of huge companies use SAP. It's the biggest tech company in Europe. They probably hire more programmers in Germany than all other tech shops combined. And at least here they are considered a top employer.
Also, everything I hear from all the new age SAP stuff (HANA, Cloud, Fiori, etc) is pretty sexy. It's not all writing reports in ABAP anymore.
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