CS or Physics

CS.

If you go physics, you will also need to go for a masters.

Masters is 1-2 years... negligible

Would like to work in private sector, far away from teaching/ academia. Optics & lasers are cool but so is theoretical work

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>Would like to work in private sector, far away from teaching/ academia.
if you want to make this difficult, study physics. if you want to make this less difficult, study cs.

Physics > Codemonkeys

Cs
But keep in mind cs isn't just programming and it is actually some hard shit. People from shit schools and those who never actually took the courses tend not to actually know what cs is.

A few reasons for CS.
>you only need a ba to get a good paying job
>you can work in almost any field you want. Everyone needs cs people
>Its not actually limited to programming

A few negatives
>you will need to continuing learning forever. Physics too but cs is constantly changing and new things come out every year you will need to know about.
>can be just a math intensive as physics, or it can be no math at all depends what you go into

Physics as a whole needs more education to land a similar tier of job and it has a narrower set of employment opportunities as well.
The otherwise physics has some really cool shit going for it plus you get to play with big toys. And that's always fun.

Thank you so much :)

It would help more if you had a specific thing in mind as well.
For example CS touches a lot of things other people touch as well. Robotics and AI go together a lot, but basic robotics and electronics rely more on electrical and computer engineers rather than CS. And my computer algorithms professor worked on a lot of things like genetics and DNA stuff (don't know the details) but this is also worked more so from the biology and medical side of things.
Things like microcontrollers or actual hardware and the software to run them typically falls to the engineers as well. And you get a taste of all of those as CS and sometimes people realize they're on the wrong side of what they wanted.

And CS is a lot of perfectionist and tedious work. It's rewarding when you're solving problems but 90+% of your time will be doing tedious work.

But I don't know how physics works on that end either.

Eletronics/Eletrics? U get to learn both things and u can work cs with the coding they teach u there plus a 6 month course on a few other languages like html/javascript if ur thinking web designing or C# if ur into games/simulation designing

Jessica Beppler

both

There are so many people flocking to CS that I see wages trending downward in the near future.

Do physics major and get some experience doing computational work. No one cares about CS degree, they care about CS skills. So get some CS skills while studying some physics problem you find interesting. You can go from physics to anything but CS degree = CS job.

This is misinformed. Literally no one does a physics MS as a terminal degree. An MS in physics means you quit your PhD.

Don't do a PhD unless you absolutely want to be a professor. Even then the odds of getting a professorship are TERRIBLE.

>Even then the odds of getting a professorship are TERRIBLE.
not at a community college!

The odds of getting a full-time professorship at a community college are not as terrible, but they are still very bad. The most likely outcome is that you end up in the adjunct churn for a few years before washing out.

I was originally CS, but then I switched to physics.

CS is easy as shit, physics is much harder. I would argue that they're about the same in terms of value.

random user here. you may be right, but in my experience Jow Forums has been, ironically, overly discouraging.

This is actually the first I've been on this board but I do have a physics PhD. The big problem is that professors tell their students to get PhDs and they can be professors, but they don't tell you how lucky they were to get their jobs. Actually they don't even know how lucky they are. So maybe Jow Forums is discouraging but people should be discouraged from doing PhDs unless they have a burning desire to be a prof. And even then they should know that you have to be very good and very lucky to become a prof anyway

Try being a slut. YOu look like one

I'm just at the end of my 3 year physics degree. Hated every second of it, wish I did CS, doing physics was the single worst decision I've made in life so far. Much prefer working on coursework assignments than memorising long ass equations for fucking days on end. Maybe it was just my university, but in my experience 3/4 of physics academics are complete assholes who will happily fail the whole year and are only there for the research. I'm likely to get a high 2:2 for physics wheras I could probably have gotten a 2:1 or even a 1st in CS with less effort required. Ask me whatever you like, will check the thread later if it's still up

Better for what? The work is different, it feels different to do. There's a lot of aspect to it. Physics can get your into a Homer Simpson position or work at CERN (protip: my physics flatmates were in the library from 6am-12pm). CS can get you into a meeting with people who don't know what a browser is and thing your work is magic. They might start setting deadlines based on when they would feel like using the product rather than by how long it actually takes to make. You get treated like this www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg Or you might get ping pong and easy work, who knows.

Physics grad here, in the tech field as a software engineer. I minored in CS so I did take a lot of the higher level courses in it, and I did do a lot of self learning. My father is an old PhD physicist who worked in the tech industry and now is a consultant.

Physics is MUCH harder than CS. I was a star student though, with a 3.9 GPA, and the CS classes seemed like a joke in comparison. But if I had to do it all over again, I would do CS I think. Most of the industry value in a physics background is the physics degree which people tend to respect quite a bit, not the material you learn. This isn't true for CS majors unless you came in to uni as an experienced programmer.

If you want to pursue physics itself, then PhD in physics is a requirement, not a meme. You will need it if you want to do research/academia or it will guarantee you a good job in industry. From my pov (father is a PhD physicist and I had the grades, gre scores, etc to get into a top program), you are smart enough to get a PhD if you are smart enough to get a degree with a decent gpa, but you need to love the science if you want to not give up. Mind you, your friends in both physics and CS who didn't go for a PhD will be advancing their careers real fast and earning bank, doing cool work, while you slave away doing research that most people will never give a damn about.

In general, physics degrees are fine if you aren't dead set on being a software guy. You can always choose a focus in your degree that allows you to take CS courses and chances are you would be doing some sort of programming if you work for your professors. You can also transition towards hard engineering or even bioinfo as a physics major. You don't have to have a PhD to get a good job, only if you want a good research job. If you are sure you want to be a programmer, do CS. That's what the degree is for.