"You know most of the greats on the pure research side did not have CS degrees at all - Knuth, Kay, McCarthy. A good many of them ended up with Turing prizes."
Cheap shot. They were educated *before* CS really took off as a field (which was in the 1960s and 1970s).
Nevertheless, CS touches other fields so there is oppty for someone in other fields/depts to contribute to CS and vice versa. E.g. any good applied mathematician can work in theoretical computer science and/or algorithms, if they want to study those problems.
As one of my applied math profs used to say:
"Whats the difference between CS and applied math?"
"About $10,000 a year" (more for the CS profs)
What's tragic is the amount of work done today by people who don't seem to have ever read Knuth.
BTW, I find it interesting that the original Pentium bug occurred in long-division with some immensely-complicated circuitry that was needed to do two bits at a time. I came up with a simple method for doing many bits at a time (turns out someone else came up with it to); someone who read Knuth would have gotten a clue to the method, though Knuth (at least in 1969) didn't take it all the way.
Actually its a fair observation. Mike Karels (chief principal programmer for 4.3BSD at UC Berkeley) has his degree in Microbiology from Notre Dame. I started life as a Molecular Biologist in 1976. Computer science and electrical engineering (all self taught) have served me well for almost 30 years. My colleague in Mclean, VA has a masters in Math from Stanford and a PhD from Yale. He writes some pretty amazing digital signal processing algorithms. Another colleague is a medical doctor. He excels at Oracle database design. He teaches the subject at a local college when not performing top quality work on contract at my office.
In general, a CS grad arrives for work with just a passing familiarity with a broad range of CS topics. Most lack experience working on team projects. What passes for a "big" project in a classroom is generally a trivial exercise for a sharp CS professional. In the process of hiring, I treat a CS degree as a sign of aptitude for the subject. The field moves so fast that you must constantly read the latest books to be current enough to be marketable.