Say hi to Youtube!
"Hi Youtube!"
*keyboard typing*
Hey everyone! What's happening? I'm sorry I've been a little MIA (missing in action) recently
I got sick last week and my parents visiting and work was really busy but I am back in full force.
#FULLFORCE
Today I wanted to answer a common question that I've gotten from so many of you.
Do you need to be good at math to be a Software Engineer?
The overall answer that I've been giving to everyone and I'm just gonna tell you right now is
NO you don't have to be great at math to be a software engineer.
But you do have to be able to reason logically.
"Okay Mayuko but what do you mean by that?"
Well other Mayuko, I am going to dive into that today.
I want to note that I am a mobile engineer and have been for my whole career
and so I don't have very much expertise in the other areas of software engineering
and so I'm going to try my best to talk about them
If you are in these other areas of software engineering, I would love for you to leave a comment down below
explaining how you use math in your jobs.
So let's jump in!
First of all, there are several different kinds of software engineering jobs out there
You could be a:
Mobile engineer, infrastructure engineer, game engineer, frontend engineer, backend data engineer
Well this list isn't exhaustive, I would say these are the most common types of software engineering jobs
and all of these require different technologies and different areas of expertise in software engineering
and it's because of this diversity in software engineering jobs that you can be working on some really math heavy stuff or not at all
Game engineers to my knowledge use a lot of math in their jobs as they use code to model the laws of Physics in their games.
For instance writing code for how gravity works when a player jumps up and down
or how light should reflect on the character from different angles
In contrast, I write apps that require very little math.
The code involved is usually making an app out of parts that Apple provides.
And usually taking data from a database and showing them in a user-friendly manner in an app.
One thing however, that is common to all areas of software engineering in terms of math
is the ability to reason logically.
Code is just a series of logical statements and so logical reasoning is really important for reading, writing and fixing code.
So while math could be important to a software engineering job, it usually plays an integral part in computer science related degrees
Most universities require college-level math classes as a prerequisite to take more advanced computer science classes
At my school I remember needing to take Calculus,
Differential Equations, Linear Algebra and Probability and Statistics
Also, some computer science classes are more math heavy than others and some require needing to do
bit-wise calculations and for others— vector calculus.
But it makes sense that they require these things because a computer science degree is set up
so that you could go into any field of software engineering.
Although I don't use most of the math-y topics that i learned in college
they did serve as a very strong foundation
for me to get into any software engineering career that I was passionate about.
So to sum this all up, most universities will require a decent amount of college-level mathematics courses
and math knowledge for CS classes but depending on which software engineering career you choose,
a strong foundation in Math could be really important to your day to day job but it also could not be.
The most important thing to remember though is that logical reasoning is
probably the most important math related skill for any software engineering job.
Again if you have had any different experiences from my own
Please leave a comment down below and let us know what your experience has been
Cool! That's it and thank you so much for watching. I hope you enjoyed this video.
I know that math can be kind of a scary topic
and especially if you want to go into software engineering, it can be kind of the big wall
but I hope this inspired you.
With that said thank you so much to everyone who has liked, commented and shared my video
and also sent me a message
you all continue to be my biggest motivator in the scary new adventure called YouTube
I'm working on a couple videos and one of those videos is a Q&A with my friend Jarvis who's also a software engineer.
We'd love to answer your questions mainly around college and studying computer science.
So if you can shoot me a tweet @hellomayuko or use the hashtag
#askMayuko we will hopefully be able to answer your questions in this video.
All right I'll see you next time and have a good day!