The program did not initially allow remote TAs, but they started allowing it after a year or two. The latest data I’ve seen is that about 50-60% of the TAs are also OMSCS students and the rest are from the resident program in Atlanta. It was my experience that GT professors preferred to have a senior TA or head TA from campus (usually one of their PhD students), but they were comfortable letting most of the graders be remote. Some online TAs earn a reputation for being awesome and wind up as head TAs, and some profs don’t mind having fully remote teams, etc., but that’s the gist of it.
My path was BA philosophy -> MS Finance (worked as an investment advisor) -> after a year break I went back for a post-bacc certificate in CS during which I interned as a software engineer -> OMSCS, which I started the same month I started my first full time software engineer position. A year later I transitioned to a junior DS position, and am now a DS. I'm 30.
People say that web dev (the javascript/react/python/c#/java) fullstack kind is boring and mundane. But what else do people actually do? Sure, there's ML and embedded work but aren't most engineers doing CRUD work anyway?
There’s big data which is like crud mixed with systems programming and some data structures + algorithms. And there’s of course regular systems programming too.
At certain companies there are definitely people who get paid to write compilers or develop frameworks (for any which thing), operating systems, backend cloud tech, robotics, etc. but it would probably be seriously hard to break into this without a CS degree or relevant experience
I agree that most modern programming work boils down to “put this into the database, take this out of the database”. Probably the biggest exceptions in terms of job numbers are embedded, which often requires an electrical engineering degree, and game development.
Most ML jobs are sitting around scrubbing data. The fun math part is like 5% of the job, and usually there's some guy (or a small handful of guys) that's a PhD who is hired to do all of that because he was in the research area before he left academia.
Agreed. We call that team "operations research" and they are all PhDs. The ML devs build the pipelines and deal with engineering concerns around having/moving/securing lots of data.
That too. So how is all computer science not 'web dev' and not a viable career choice? Assuming we are talking about the "right" kind of web dev, I guess.
Yes. Ask specifically about roles on our Gamma X team, which has more of an engineering focus. Feel free to drop me a note at daniel@bcg.com if you have questions.
