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<p>Uh, I believe I made precisely this point in my post. A lot of what you learn in college, you will never use.</p>
<p>But I dispute that knowing the theory is necessarily part of the field. I suppose it all depends on what you mean by ‘the field’. I would daresay that most chemical engineers who’ve been in industry for years don’t remember how to calculate thermodynamic enthalpies or chemical fugacities. Sure, they knew it back when they were students, but they never use that knowledge on their job and that’s why they don’t remember how to do it anymore. Yet I don’t think anybody would dispute that these guys aren’t part of ‘the field’ of chemical engineering. Heck, you said it yourself: most practicing engineers never really use multivariable calculus. </p>
<p>Look, the point is, the definition of what is ‘the field’ changes all the time. For example, it wasn’t that long ago when the field of economics was just a a hybrid of philosophy and political science, with some sociology thrown in. Hayek, who won one of the early the Nobel Prizes in Economics, was basically a political philosopher with relatively little quantitative training (and in fact, many of his most famous works don’t contain a single mathematical equation). Herbert Simon, despite being a stellar quantitative thinker, won another early Nobel not for his quantitative pieces but rather for his entirely qualitative works on the sociology of organizations. His book Administrative Behavior, which was his UChicago doctoral thesis and became the basis of his Nobel Prize winning work, doesn’t have a single equation in it. Not even one.</p>
<p>Nowadays, the field of economics has become so quantitative that it has basically become a sub-branch of applied mathematics and applied statistics. For example, 2005 winner Robert Aumann is basically a mathematician (he earned his PhD in mathematics) and his Nobel was awarded for his highly mathematical work on game theory. The 2003 and 2000 awards were given to guys who are basically statisticians. Things have reached the point where, as former Chair of the CEA Greg Mankiw has pointed out, it’s extremely difficult to even get admitted into a top Econ PhD program without an excellent background in mathematics/statistics. Former Secretary of the Treasury Robert Rubin, who graduated summa cum laude in economics as an undergrad from Harvard and was admitted to the Harvard econ PhD program freely admits in his autobiography that he probably wouldn’t be able to get into any of the top Econ PhD programs if he had been born even just a few years after he was, because that’s when the economics discipline started to become highly quantitative. </p>
<p>[Greg</a> Mankiw’s Blog: Why Aspiring Economists Need Math](<a href=“http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2006/09/why-aspiring-economists-need-math.html]Greg”>Greg Mankiw's Blog: Why Aspiring Economists Need Math)</p>
<p>The takehome point is, the definition of ‘the field’ changes all the time. For example, lately, there has been a strong pushback within economics because a lot of people feel that the field has simply become too quantitative. Similarly, I am quite sure that what you need to know within the ‘field’ of computer science can and will change over time. As well it should. </p>
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<p>My source is simple: it is precisely that career data that you mentioned. Look at it: most of them are jobs that involve significant coding. </p>
<p>Now, I agree with you that many Berkeley grads won’t remain as newbie coders. But you said it yourself: Berkeley grads will be newbies at some point. Hence, they will end up as coders doing the grunt work of coding, at least initially. And of course, logically speaking, those who do well at that initial coding job will be the ones who will tend to be promoted upwards. But those who don’t do well will tend not to be promoted and in fact will probably be fired.</p>