Programming

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.

Depends on the career path. Some need only the very basics - for example in frontend development, you'll mostly use % and basic +/-.

tbh. Most of the useful programming related knowledge you'll learn at yoyr first job, not at uni.

The curriculum sometimes will force you to learn something unrelated to your career and it has multiple purposes:

People learn the fastest in the topic where they already know a lot. And the slowest where they know very little.

Learning stuff outaide of your comfort zone literally works out your brain. You learn to learn. And your thinking becomes more flexible.

You should not become somebody who is only good at one narrow singular task and a complete idiot at anything else.

You never know if it becomes useful later in life. So I suggest still trying to do your best at any topic. And studying more for the exams where you are not as proficient.

As to which career path to go for:

Don't be afraid to change midway, but make sure that you enjoy it. If you enjoy compsci, keep at it. (Or if you have student loan, put some more thought into the cost of switching).

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.

If you end up working in the medical/insurance field in the USA, you don't even need basic math! The numbers the programs output are just all made up!

I had the audacity the other day to ask in what order we apply deductibles. (YOU want a deductible applied to something covered at 10%, not 100%. The insurance wants it applied to something covered at a100%) I was told it just picks some at random and hopes for the best, so we use the word "best effort" when it comes to estimating what insurance will pay, since they'll make that up anyway.

So yeah, just another throwing in that it super matters where you work. At my job we plug in what is industry standard for medical accounting, and say it's just an estimate on everything else.

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.

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.

I tried to go to University for CS but never quite got the hang of the math part. Instead I got a Certification in Computer Science from an apprenticeship (idk if that's the right Translation, in German we call it "Fachinformatiker für Anwendungsentwicklung") within 1.5 years and with extreme ease, because it was way less math-heavy and more focused on actual programming.

I stayed with the company that I did the apprenticeship with and got promoted from Junior to Regular within a year. I work exactly in the field and position I wanted to work in when I was going for the CS degree. In fact, I have the exact same responsibilities and the same pay as my colleagues with CS degrees. It might not be like that in every company, but it did work out for me.

Just for fun, I actually went back to Uni this semester to try and actually finish one or two math modules, but dropped out within 2 weeks because I was hopelessly incapable of even understanding the basic concepts lol

You often need to be pretty good at math. But not because you're "doing math" to write the code.

In real world software systems, you need to handle monitoring and alerting. To properly do this, you need to understand stats, rolling averages, percentiles, probability distributions, and significance testing. At least at a basic level. Enough to know how to recognize these problems and where to look when you run into them.

For being a better coder, you need to understand mathematical logic, proofs, algebra/symbolic logic, etc in order to reason your way through tricky edge cases.

To do AI/ML, you need to know a shitton of calculus and diff eqs, plus numerical algorithms concepts like numerical stability. This is kinda a niche (but rapidly growing) engineering field.

The same thing about AI also applies to any other domain where the thing being computed is fundamentally a math or logic solution. This is somewhat common in backend engineering.

I'm not "doing math" with pen and paper at work, but I do use all of these mathematical skills all. the. time.

I am an SRE on a ML serving platform.

The most advanced math a typical developer needs is Fibonacci, and if you can't remember it someone will show you a cheat sheet.

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.

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.

The field is incredibly broad. Choose a field or employer or project that's not doing that an you're fine.