Rant – The Perils of being a CS/IT student.

Every time you tell a friend or a relative that you are studying computer science or IT, its like you have opened yourself up to every kind of bogus questions about problems affecting their devices-- laptops, smart-phones, tablets, digital TVs etc.-- and whatever software runs in those devices. Recently I had a conversation with a childhood friend of mine, the conversation was going on well until he delved into the fact that I was studying computer science and he started asking questions about the problems facinghis device a Microsoft surface pro that was running windows rt. To be more elaborate the question was about how he had trouble installing the VLC media player in his tablet and even after installing it from the windows app store it was still not playing some videos in the tablet. To be honest I don't know anything about the windows surface pro, I was not involved in the design of the device and I have not had the chance of using the device myself. I was not involved in the design or the implementation of the program that is the windows rt or the vlc media player for that matter and since these two softwaresare not open source, I can not claim to be able to view the source code to the software and try to fix the bugs that are causing the problems. I think its wrong for people to have all this kinds of expectations oncomputing and information technology students. But why do people have all these expectations in the first place??

For one most people always look at computer science or IT as the study about computers and all the devices that are used in computing which is a wrong view considering that computer science has very little to do with computers. Edsger Dijkstra the famous dutch computer scientist was is famously quoted as saying that computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. Computer science at its core is about solving problems the fact that we use computer to solve our problems doesn't make us experts in the inner workings of the computer hardware(though it doesn't hurt to know something about the computer hardware). Of course we spend a lot of time with computers hence making us a little bit more savvy than other people but still this doesn't mean that I can fix your computer hardware problems.

Two most people also expect cs students to be able to solve any problem that are caused by the software running in their devices. This is wrong since most cs students are not involved in the design and the implementation of the software running in those devices so its so unlikely that they can be experts in those softwares and if in any way they appear to posses some expert like characteristics its not because they know everything about the softwares, its because they were faced with the same problems before and they googled their problems and found answers on-line or asked experts in those softwares or even read the documentation for those softwares. All these methods for finding solutions to problems affecting your devices either hardware problems or software problems I believe are ways that the average person can use to find solutions to his problems.

In fact the only way I think CS/IT students are better at finding solutions to problems affecting their devices is their willingness to find solutions to problems themselves using various methods such using Google to find answers before asking another person and their ability to find better answers to problems.

You will obviously have to learn how to ask questions effectively if you are to find the correct solutions to your problems, Eric Raymond has written a great essay about how to ask questions the smart way in order for them to be answered in the first place, it will do you no harm to read it.