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
The field is incredibly broad. Choose a field or employer or project that’s not doing that an you’re fine.
There’s a lot of programming you can do with zero or very basic math skills. But some stuff can require a lot. But I’m quite sure you could manage a career very nicely without ever touching those areas. People who do that are probably seeking those things out.
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.
90% of programming I have seen after a decade plus of doing it full time is minor changes being made to code that was already made by someone. Likely not documented. Likely already changed in a dozen little ways. Math isn’t the problem. Understanding what the guy who wrote it is often the problem.
Oh and you can’t ask them because they likely don’t work here anymore.
Being a programmer is more like being a detective than anything else unless you work for a small company.
Spot on. And I’ve found it’s even that bad at small companies too, if the company is more than five years old.
Calc 1 and 2 are going to be substantially harder than algebra or trig. People who consider themselves good at math still struggle with calculus. A lot of the people I knew who were not good at math ended up taking one or both calculus courses twice, and in many of those cases, switched their degrees.
More than math courses - logic courses in general helped me rethink and structure things in a variety of ways in how to approach problems. If nothing else it improves your “if-then-else”-fu to understand when you are not(not(not something))). My math degree required logic courses though at the same time so it made sense. For higher level math logic plays a heavy role and so leveraging that aspect helps in a lot of ways.
I’d argue it’s a bad career path overall. You will get laid off working as a dev, it’s just how it works, and if you haven’t managed a 10+ headcount by your mid 30’s you will find yourself facing ever escalating ageism 35 on as an old man dev. It’s not a field that generally professionally rewards experience beyond 5-ish years.
That’s not my experience here in the EU.
Depends on the industry and depth you want to go to, gamedev for example you can do without any, but all lower level custom graphics and physics are pretty calculus heavy.
Website dev can be entirely independent of math
Depends entirely on your definition of “gamedev”, IMO. If you’re trying to write a platformer in basic C with no external libraries, you will absolutely need to use algebra/geometry/etc. and maybe even some more advanced things like physics/calculus depending on what features/effects you want to put in your game.
That’s a really ridiculous example though. No one is doing that.
I’m doing that. I know several others who have as well.
I would uh consider that pretty in deep gamedev, even lower than some shader code lmao - so yes you would need to know some math.
Cracking open Godot and using a bunch of premade assets hardly even requires programming, much less mathematical knowledge
Be that as it may, I personally wouldn’t consider someone to be a very knowledgeable (on how games actually work) game developer if they didn’t at least know how to use things like linear algebra to make a character run and jump naturally and such, even if they’re not coding like that day to day and just using a higher level framework.
You don’t have to agree with me, and I still respect your opinion either way.
Ya, in gamedev you just need triginometry, lerp, quaternions, matrix multiplications and basic 3D math and maybe some more.
Me opening rpgmaker to do some matrix multiplication
I don’t think you necessarily need to have studied a lot of math to be successful in programming, but you will need it if you want to get a CS degree, which in turn can be a good lever to a fruitful programming career.
My advice when it comes to math - math skills build upon the concepts you’re expected to have learned before, meaning that if you didn’t fully get everything in the past, then your foundation is not in great shape and you will struggle at higher levels. Going back and repeating the fundamentals just so that you fully understand everything is very helpful in my experience.
I also think that understanding math is rewarding in itself, for what it’s worth!
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.
If you’re doing really complicated stuff then you at least need to understand algebraic logic and concepts. You’ll also need to understand stuff like logarithmic scales for optimization. But it’s entirely possible to go years without using any math, especially as a website developer. I’m about as senior as you can get in the field, and I’ve only had one job for around 4 years where I used advanced mathematics on a regular basis. That’s 4 years out of a 25 year long career.
That said, a CS degree is going to require all of the math classes as part of the curriculum. My degree program involved fun classes such as finite mathematics, statistics, trig, etc… If you’re doing a program that requires advanced mathematics courses, for goodness sake do them all in a row!
TLDR: it depends entirely on the job. Jobs that are data intensive, with data manipulation, hardware interfacing, and automation type jobs will require more math than jobs like making cool-ass interactive websites.
Edit: PS, I suck at math. I’ve always sucked at math. Yet I’m what most people consider an amazing engineer. Weeee!
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.
As others have said, It depends on what kind of programming you do. Some areas requite a lot. Others not so much. It’s logic, not math, that is needed the most.
You may want to check if your college has a different kind of programming degree. As I understand things, there are basically two kinds of programming degrees. “Computer Science” has much steeper math requirements and focuses on applications that deal with Science or engineering issues. “MIS (Management Information Systems)” degrees focus on actual programming that businesses need, not programs that are science or engineering focused.
As a kid, I learned to write i = i +1, before school maths taught me it can’t. The point is, computers do iteration well, especially to model dynamics of real non-linear systems, while classical maths is good at finding algebraic solutions to equilibria - typically more theoretical than real. Calculus is great for understanding repeatable dynamics - such as waves in physics, also integrating over some distributions. But even without knowing that well you could still approximate stuff numerically with simple loops, test it, and if an inner-loop turns out to be time-critical or accuracy-critical (most are not), ask a mathematical colleague to rethink it - believe in iteration rather than perfect solutions.
