by sarchertech | 2025-05-27 13:55:35+00:00
>In the last 10 years I have never used physics developing software, never needed calculus.

If you never studied it in-depth, it's hard to recognize when it would be useful. It's not like your boss is going to tell you that you need to compute the differential of some function. But understanding physics and calculus are incredibly useful when you need to think about how things grow, or when you need to model some process.

But calculus isn't even remotely the most useful branch of math for CS. I use discrete math, statistics and probability constantly. Just last week I had to come up with a plan to validate that a data migration of several billion rows was working correctly and it's nice to be able to understand how to calculate sample size to give you an appropriate confidence level. You don't even need to remember exact formulas just remembering enough to look things up is a huge productivity benefit.

During the first part of the data migration project, we realized that we need to migrate accounts that shared users directly or indirectly at the same time. I looked at the problem and realized it was just a graph theory problem to find all of the connected components of the graph and was able to whip up a little visualization tool that showed us this was impossible, and then showed us a few superusers that we could eliminate to break the graph up in to much smaller components.

The graduate level networking class I took has been insanely useful. A month ago someone at my company had spent weeks working on a system to keep 2 systems in sync and he asked for help. I could recognize immediately that his solution could just never work and essentially he was trying to solve the 2 generals problem, and then help him find a solution that can solve a relaxed version with tradeoffs we can live with.

I use what I learned in Automata all the time as well. Computer Hardware and Assembly have been incredibly useful for understanding how to write high performance code.

I 100% could have learned everything I learned in college on my own. But I never would have. I never would have developed a holistic understanding of how the whole system works together.

> Are you like 2 years out of your degree program or something? I have a liberal arts degree, from a little over 10 years ago. I can't remeber most of it. How is it shaping my thinking at this point?

I remember a ton from the first time I went to college 20+ years ago. I took a business law class that has been useful many times in my life. Biology was incredibly useful.

I know someone who went back to nursing school much later in life. She told me that before she went back to school and took anatomy, her model for the human body was that all your organs just floated around inside your torso and when you ate food it just mixed in with all of it. Everyone has gaps, but a general education does a lot to make sure that they are hopefully not so large. Even just looking at vaccine hesitancy by education level, college is probably worth it for that alone.

Micro and macro economics have been great for understanding the world. I'm fairly certain that Austrian economics is mostly just people that don't understand calculus.

I used what I learned in physics constantly in wood working, 3d printing, CNC machining and other hobbies.

Again you can 100% pick all of this stuff up on your own. But vast majority of people don't have the discipline to do it.