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Ask HN: Going to a community college as an experienced engineer?

1 points by olzhasar ↗ HN
I’m a back-end engineer with about 6 years of professional experience. I live in Central Asia and have been working remotely in US for the past 3 years. Due to the large time zone differences, it’s becoming harder to cope with this schedule as I age. So I’m looking for ways to immigrate to US.

I tried applying to big tech companies, but it’s been pretty silent so far, perhaps due to the recent layoffs. So I was thinking about obtaining a masters in cs in US which could be helpful considering the fact that I don’t have any formal CS education. However, it’s pretty damn expensive to afford.

I recently discovered a community college phenomenon for myself but I am not sure whether they worth the effort. Does anyone have experience studying CS in a community college? Do you think it’s a good time investment for an experienced engineer?

6 comments

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bombcar
The normal “trick” is to find a community college where you can transfer to a state school after half the degree or similar.

Then you graduate from the state school and nobody knows about your community college experience.

I’ve done some studying at CCs and I’d say it’s decent if not phenomenal.

olzhasar
Thanks for the advice. Can you transfer to a graduate program after CC or undergrad only?
bombcar
You can do both but the first can be “guaranteed” whereas the second you just graduate with an Associates or whatever and then have to apply for a graduate program separately.
linguae
When I was in high school, I took a few computer science courses at my local community college. At least in California, the community college curriculum represents the first two years of an undergraduate education. In computer science, this means courses in introductory programming (typically thought under an imperative or object-oriented paradigm), introductory data structures and algorithms, discrete mathematics, and computer organization.

The challenge for someone who already has years of software engineering experience is that the courses may be too elementary for you, depending on the type of work that you did. However, it might be worth taking a course in discrete mathematics since the topics learned in that course will appear repeatedly in subsequent upper-division courses that you’d take at a university should you continue your education.

olzhasar
I am a back-end engineer with a pretty solid foundation in computer science, I believe. Topics I'd really love to study are compilers, operating systems, and computer networks. As I understand, these topics are absent in CCs.
linguae
Yes, these are all upper-division courses, at least in the context of American higher education. You may be better off looking into inexpensive options for completing a bachelor’s degree in computer science, such as online education, and seeing if you could test out of some of the intro-level CS courses. Unfortunately I don’t know if any specific programs off hand.