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?
If you enjoy the work you’ll do well. There are a lot of different roles and specialties in CS with some of them being highly math focused and others quite divorced.
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.
Math skills can occasionally be useful, but I don’t see it as a dealbreaker.
The good thing about being good with math is that it usually means you’re a good problem solver, and problem solving is an important skill for programming. But the reverse isn’t necessarily true. You can be good at problem solving but still be bad at math.
I would say if you’re struggling with the programming courses, then maybe look somewhere else. Otherwise, go ahead.
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you can program without math, but it will be hard to pass a rigorous interview without math.
You should strive to learn symbolic math at least, and make sure you can do all the leet code problems and explanations using whatever math you are comfortable with.
Don’t need a degree, but computer programming is fundamentally logic and algorithms. You need to have internalise reasoning logically. In some ways critical thinking is closer to programming than trig is.
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!
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That’s not my experience here in the EU.
unless programming something math intensive like 3d graphics, then basic arithmetic and just a general intuition of numbers is more than enough.
I failed calc2 and am gainfully employed as a mid/upper level software engineer.
One guy at work really saved the day because he’s good at math, and made a very slow process much faster because he knows … uh… vector math? He did magic with numpy
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.
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.
Practical programming itself does not require this kind of math. The stuff you’re trying to make a program do might; but even then I don’t think you’ll have difficulty in that context. The stuff you’re learning now will have had time to “settle”, and you’ll be working towards a concrete goal, which makes it easier in my experience.
Another thing is that just because you’re struggling right now doesn’t mean you’ll be struggling forever. Math didn’t really click for me until I took calculus. I had a math professor who it didn’t click for until their junior year of college as a math major.
So don’t sweat it. But it’s always a good idea to have another career idea or two in your back pocket just in case. There are lots of reasons you might not want to be a programmer as a career. You might hate it. You might love it enough that you want to be able to do it freely instead of at the behest of others for money.
These kinds of anxieties are normal for someone your age (assuming you’re not nontraditional student). But one day you’ll look behind you in all these worries will seem unjustified. Everything will almost certainly turn out fine.
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.
The field is incredibly broad. Choose a field or employer or project that’s not doing that an you’re fine.