I’m working my way to a CS degree and am currently slogging my way through an 8-week Trig course. I barely passed College Algebra and have another Algebra and two Calculus classes ahead of me.
How much of this will I need in a programming job? And, more importantly, if I suck at Math, should I just find another career path?
Depend on what programming you do. Graphics will be math out of the wazoo, whereas generic web or desktop app programming has very little math involved
Being comfortable with basic back-of-the-envelope math can be a huge benefit. (Full disclosure: i am a math major who is now a programmer)
Over my career I have several examples of projects that have saved weeks worth of dev time because someone could predict the result with some basic calculations. I also have several examples where I have shown people some basic math showing that their idea is never gonna work, they don’t listen and do it anyway, and I see them 1 month later and the project failed in the way i predicted.
A popular (and wise) saying is that “Weeks of work can save you hours of meetings”. I think the same is true for basic math. “Weeks of coding can save you minutes of calculation”.
You can definitely be a successful programmer career without great math skills. Math is a tool that can help you be more effective.
Can you share the full story of the projects that you could predict could fail using maths?
Depends on the programming job.
In my amateur experience, the most difficult math I had to do was use the Pythagorean theorem to calculate a point that was spinning around an other point.
But I can see needing to be able to use matrices in some instances.
Being good at math allows programmers to code more efficient systems. Instead of doing multiple complicated lines, it could all be incorporated into a single efficient equation.
Most of programming is just logic based. Although math is also logic based. So take from it what you will.
Yep, truth tables mostly. Math is mostly useful in game programming.
And graphics.
Statistics is also important in a lot of areas if your doing data analysis.
Anywhere from very important to not important at all, depending on your specific job.
There is some good news though, you’ve been lied to about sucking at math. Whether by yourself or other people I do not know, but the education research I have seen has been pretty clear that the main difference between people of normal intelligence who are ‘good at math’ and those ‘bad at math’ is how long they’re willing to work on a problem to ensure the correct answer before moving on.
I know ‘try harder’ sucks as an answer but it’s the best one I know of and at least in this case will actually make a difference.
Well being able to figure out 1 complex math solution per day vs 1 complex solution per 1.5 days for the person who just has to work on the problem for longer is balloons a lot over the long term.
Like how the average calorie burning difference between people is only 400 per day out of ~2000, but over a month that is like 1.5kg difference of mass burned which is 18kg per year.
But I don’t know if I am interpreting the result you said correctly.
Agreed. Math, for the most part, is very rule oriented and problems only have one answer and often one strategy to get to the answer. If you work on many different problems (in the same subject) you should start to get used to the rules.
Overall I would say a strong math foundation is important to CS but CS isn’t just about coding. You can absolutely get a coding job without strong math skills or even without a degree, it’s just a bit harder to get started. If the discipline still exists you might consider a Business Information Systems degree (we used to call it CS lite). Depending on the position a company might equally consider BIS and CS majors.
i would disagree that math problems only have one strategy for getting to the answer. there are many things, particularly in more abstract math, which can be understood in multiple different ways. the first example that comes to mind is the fundamental theorem of algebra. you can prove it using complex analysis, algebraic topology, or abstract algebra. all the proofs are quite different and rely on deep results from different fields of math.
i think the same thing holds in the less abstract areas of math, it’s just that people are often only taught one strategy for solving a problem and so they believe that’s all there is.
problems only have one answer and often one strategy to get to the answer
Totally disagree
You’re thinking of equations, which only have one answer. There are often many possible ways to solve and tackle problems.
If you’ll permit an analogy, even though there’s “only one way” to use a hammer and nail, the overall problem of joining wood can be solved in a variety of ways.
You’re absolutely right. I was referring to equations which, in my experience, is 90% of undergrad math.
Do you have a link to the research? I’m a math educator and I’d like some good materials for encouraging my students.
Programming and math are both heavily rule-based and logic-based, which is why people say if you’re good at math you may be good at programming.
I’ve been a full stack dev for about 11 years. I do some basic algebra but that’s about it.
I think folks saying you don’t need math are right. But if you are having trouble with college algebra you might have trouble with CS. Or the teacher is bad.
Math really builds on itself at the stage where you are. Without good algebra calculus isn’t going to work well.
I’d try a different teacher. Online courses or repeating the course with another professor or something.
As many have already said, the math needed will depend on what type of work you’re looking to do. Writing business software, for example, rarely requires more than basic arithmetic.
However, I think that the logical thinking skills that are needed for math are also necessary to be a good software engineer.
Depends on what kind of programmer.
If you’re doing data engineering/science (more of an adjacent field), you need to know linear and probability pretty well to build models, or have data harvested in ways that can be put into vectors.
If you’re doing relational DB stuff (like SQL) set theory helps a lot.
Basic boolean operations in general is also good to know. You don’t need to go too deep in the weeds of boolean math unless you’re also doing a lot of hardware-level stuff.
Any field you go into (not just programming), I would say just basic math for regular financial competency is good to know. Also to analyze your budgeting, your costs, time spent, effort needed, etc.
If you’re a frontend programmer, you only need to understand rectangle width and height lol
I was doing full stack dev for 20 years until very recently. Never needed anything beyond basic algebra EXCEPT for while I was getting my CS degree…had 2 classes, i think, where we were doing matrix math/Fourier transforms, but iirc they were electives…one was writing a very basic 3d graphics driver and the other was working with very simple computer vision…things like recognizing handwritten letters.
Math underlies programming in a similar fashion to how physics underlies automobile driving. You don’t ever need to know about newton’s laws of motion to pass your driver’s license and never get a ticket until you die. At the same time, I will readily claim that any driver that doesn’t improve after learning about newton’s laws of motion had already internalized those laws through experience.
Math will help your intuition with how to tackle problems in programming. From finding a solution to anticipating how different constraints (notably time and memory) will affect which solutions are available to you, experience working on math problems - especially across different domains in math - will grease the wheels of your programmer mind.
Math on its own will probably not be enough (many great mathematicians are quite unskilled at programming). Just as driving a car is about much more than just the physics involved, there is a lot more to programming than just the math.
Very much depends what kind of programming you’re doing. Graphics uses shittons of maths. Data analysis/data science is maths/stats heavy. Other types less so!
Totally depends what you end up working on as a programmer. If it’s web apps, you’ll be totally fine. All you need is basic arithmetic. Writing a game engine? You’ll need to know some basic to moderate matrix maths…
If you’re doing formal verification using unbounded model checking… good fucking luck.
On average I would say most programming tasks need very little maths. If you can add and multiply you’ll be fine. Definitely sounds like you’ll be ok.
I’m a front-end developer. I sometimes need to solve algebra problems. I’m pretty bad at it because I , but my knowledge that a problem is solvable by math comes in handy maybe once or twice a month. It’s just that on the few occasions that there’s algebra that I can’t figure out how to solve (maybe once a year), I may ask for help from a colleague.
Examples of cases where math comes in handy:
- Pythagoras when I need to figure out the x/y components of a diagonal distance
- Width/height calculations from a variety of parameters
In summary, as long as you know what math is capable of, you probably won’t have major issues. There will pretty much always be someone around to help with the math part if necessary.
As for calculus… I forgot all about the one calculus class I’ve taken and I’ve never suffered for it.
It really depends on the role you are looking for. If working with data and doing analysis, you need some knowledge in stats and probability. If you are working on simulations, you will need basic calculus and algebra. If you are looking at game development, you will need basic trigonometry and vector arithmetic. The one thing you don’t need is mental arithmetic because you have a computer.
That being said, you can get by without these skills, it just becomes harder to see what you need to do, even if you would know how to implement it. This is alleviated if you are working in a team however.
