Comment by foobarian
14 days ago
As far as undergraduate work goes EE is harder due to the math background required, indeed. However, the thing is, if you take the same brilliant minds who would ace EE, and reallocate them to software, they won't magically throttle down and limit themselves to undergrad CS concepts; they will find and tackle all the complexity they can withstand. You end up with the JS ecosystem, CI/CD, IaC, columnar databases, and so on. So I wonder if some of this is happening where thinking that AMD doing undergrad CS-level effort is all there is, where there is actually invisible complexity that is being missed that NVidia managed to tackle.
Yeah I agree with you, if you see these programmers doing very advanced stuff they often have degrees in physics and the like. The hardest problems in CS today are all very math-focused.
The original quote from the OP was about why Lisa Su decided to go EE bachelor though and EE bachelor indeed is one of the hardest ones out there.
What I was trying to highlight is that although EE is harder, CS has a bigger workload due to all the personal projects you have to build. But given enough time and persistence you can get a CS degree even if you are not the sharpest (speaking as someone who is not the sharpest). To be honest in my own degree I didn't have much trouble with the content (besides a few math-heavy classes), just the workload.
I remember me and my roommates study time, my time was usually implementing algorithms on my PC while theirs was usually pouring over text-books and solving differential equations. Although one of my roomates was a huge nerd who had to get max grades, he spent much more time than me studying. The other one spent about the same amount of time as me.