Slashdot Mirror
Computing's Lost Allure
khendron writes "An article in the New York Times, describes how the number of students majoring in computer science in university has dropped off with the rest of the hi-tech economy. The bright side: the students who are enrolling are doing so because they love computers. Not like a few years ago when students were enrolling because they wanted to make a quick buck. I'll take quality over quantity."
The question is how do the interested learn anything from an education designed to carry the weak through? Looks like it's still a case of learning more in one week of spare time than a month of college.
The other side of the coin that Computer Science graduate admissions are inundated with applicants this year. Hordes of people, after getting a bachelor's degree a few years ago, went off to industry to get rich instead of persuing advanced degrees. Now that the market has cooled off, many of them are returning to graduate school. It sucks to be a recent graduate trying to get into CS grad school, because you have to compete with many more applicants for the same few slots.
Whatever is the trendy growth (even more than money) field when kids are juniors/seniors in high school, will then have a glut of kids taking a relevant major in college.
They never seem to think, for whatever reason, that the job situation won't be the same in 4-8 years..
That's one of the reasons teaching (I was married to a teacher, and have a number friends who are)degrees take such gigantic leaps from feast to famine and back. The news says "there's a shortage", and a few years later says "there's a glut"
The only thing new here is this is basically the FIRST time this cycle has taken place in the computer industry. The field has changed a lot, due to it's newness, but that also happens to every field going through it's infancy.
"If, therefore, any be unhappy, let him remember that he is unhappy by reason of himself alone."
~Epictetus
The assumption that because someone loves computers they will excel in working with them is false--somewhat like the idea that someone who loves poetry will excel in writing it is also false
The truth is that most people who have an aptitude for a field will at least dabble in it. But that doesn't mean they will care much for it.
An example of this is simple: In high school I was very good at Biology. It came naturally to me, and I made excellent grades in my Bio class. None of that changed the fact that I hated it. To me, Bio is not very interesting or even especially challenging. So I avoid it, even though when I have taken courses, I have always gotten an A in the class.
How does this apply to Computer Science? Well just the opposite is true. I love it, but that doesn't mean that I am particularly skilled. Sure I can do some limited web deisgn, and I understand hardware and software concepts fairly well, but I know that many of the people on this site are much better at all of that than I ever will be. Why? Because I am not really a much at calculus, which is necessary if you want to be really good at Computer Science.
This is why career counseling is so important. People need to get a grip on what they are both good at and enjoy, and concentrate there. This is one of the major failings of American Education--we focus so much on the idea of going to school to get a better job that we miss the point that if you are doing what you enjoy and are good at, you can almost always find a way to make money--if you put forth the effort to be the best.
That said, I would definitely see people that are going into a field because they enjoy it, not because they think it will make them money. Any field.
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
Of course this would happen. Five years ago (give or take) being a doctor or lawyer was the most desired of all professions; and enrollment was high. I was reading just recently that both have declined in the last few years; much like CS. The reason? Money. When the market is flooded with opportunities to make money in a certain industry there will be an up turn in degree seekers for that field. Now that the 'bubble' has burst the field isn't so attractive to prospective new techies. This is not a bad thing it's just the result of the society changes and morphing. It's like the balloon theory; there may be less CS degree seekers, but there is probably more of some other field. It's very natural that this should happen and kinda cool for techies like myself who actually love what they do. I never looked at computers as a route to make money; rather something I enjoyed experimenting/playing with. It's a happy bi-product that I'm able to make a living with it.
"Reality is a crutch for people who can't handle drugs" - George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)
Totally. I did this for just under a decade. Work for 10+ hours, go home and learn some more. Read 1 giant computer book per month, reinstall constantly, tinker with OSes, try to learn every language I can. It almost drove me to early retirement. Balance is good. Having other hobbies is good. Pushing away from the computer is good. Being well rounded is good. Being a computer snob is just stupid.
To be honest I think this might wind up accelerating the development of new computing approaches since you will actually have people who understand computers more intimately. I think part of the reason for the stagnation in the field WAS the 90s e-Bubble. It attracted the sheeple who were solely interested in making money. Those people tend to NOT be very good technologists. The people with a real feel for technology who DO become rich usually do so incidentally.
Un-news
I went to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to study CS. This was in the late 90s, and I recently graduated. When I got to school, there were lots of people who really just were in the field thinking they could be the next dot-com millionaire. Over the years, it was pretty easy to see who was in it for the money and who was in it for the love of the field. The problem right now, as I see it, is that for even for people who "love" CS, the job prospects aren't that great. So, if the people who really love it aren't doing well, then how's some guy who hardly knows what he likes going to fare?
Furthermore, consider the idea that CS students typically become programmers or software engineers somewhere. For those that "love" the field, they will still more than likely end up in a position where they not allowed to truly work in a free environment where the CS love is oozing and creativity is encouraged; more often, they are thrown into an environment where the salaries are mediocre, and where the deadlines and demands of marketing take precedence over the love of CS. 9 times out of 10, even the best get burned. Software companies don't tend to want the people who love the work; they want people who are drones who will just do what they are told. There are some serious misconceptions about how things work with regards to people who genuinely love what they are doing. It's hard to see any glory in this position.
Finally, I'd like to point out that there is nothing really that ties the American student's job to the US. I fully expect that most engineering and science jobs will be performed by immigrants, or by firms in India within the next 10 to 15 years. This further removes the glory of being a computer science graduate.
Enjoyed that (although half the class were married or practically married and the other half had never said boo to a real live woman), drank lots, did some work, had a great laugh and came out with a BSc(hons) Computer Science.
Then started working.
Worked for a consultancy developing telemetry systems for big water companies. Suddenly I realised that what was my passion - translated into the worlds most mind-numingly boring job.
Sitting all day, every day at a computer looking at over a million lines of code written in C (with macros to make it look like ALGOL-86) not understanding how it all fitted together, not having anyone talk to me, getting boring work packages and generally hating every minute of it. I saw no fruit of my labours, got no recognition and whilst the company made record profit I got penuts pay-rises.
So I left, moved to management consultancy, worked with short projects, people and things that actually came to light. I did project management and operations management and ... enjoyed it.
I don't claim that all IT is like that, indeed it's not, but my initial experience of it put me completely off for life, and, if i hadn't left, could have completely put me off computers full stop.
Now I just tinker - but it's a damn sight more fun doing that, than for a job.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
I work on mainframes all day and would list "PCs" as my favorite hobby. I soldered my first three Z80 motherboards together myself, starting in '79, and I guess I haven't burned out yet.
While not a true indicator of someone's competency, there is some face validity in the idea that someone who is passionate about something will tend to be more proficient at it.You were 80% angel, 10% demon. The rest was hard to explain. - Over The Rhine
"Math in a song is good."-Linford
like many of the others in the high tech bust. The most threatening thing to the American high tech economy at this time is continuing economic globalization. Interestingly, this trend is now expanding to threaten other agendas that require higher education. Just this week I heard that CPAs are now losing jobs to India because the average college trained CPA in India makes $6000 per year.
Why have we become so vulnerable to foreign competition? In my opinion, it is due to the way that we have commoditized and dumbed down our higher education process. We've concentrated on creating a manufacturing line like education process to turn out droves of programming/financial/engineering/etc robots. OF COURSE THIS CAN BE COPIED!!!
The education process used to turn out thinkers who, instead of being brainwashed in the current mantra de jeur, solved problems without a toolbox full of fix-alls that never quite fit the problem. In creating the mass manufacturing style education system, we've neglected the necessity to continue to produce the thinkers.
A step back in volume might be a good thing to allow some of the education to return to a more renaissance approach.
Long term, if we hope to maintain our lead and not spiral into deflation across all sorts of technical areas, we need to look toward an education system that adequately provides for both types. The current prevailing CS curriculum is more of a tech school approach to education and should be moved to the tech schools. Then the colleges need to return to teaching the best of the best who have the special abilities needed to develop the technologies to keep us from being commodotized down to $6000 / year salaries. And their education should not be full of mantras but instead concentrate on teaching basic facts (instead of beliefs like OOP, structured programming, etc), and approaches to analyzing and solving problems in a manner that fits the problem, not the tools.
Well put. You just got a friend (Not that you care, but I figured I might as well have one friend on slashdot...)
I am salf taught as well, and it scared me to find out one of the guys in another programming group has a Masters in CS. He is slow at coding and writes poor code.
It's amazing, the majority of guy in my group are self taught and our customers (internal to the company) love us. We go out of the way to make sure that our systems do what they need to do, when they need to do it. The other group all have degrees, all are certified and write systems that routinely crash, are slow and bloated and take FOREVOR to be released.
I do know that not every case is like this. There are good people with degrees and bad people without degrees.
Maybe I am just bitter...
I suppose only time will tell. From everything I've heard though it is a pretty major hassle to incorporate a programming division 1/2way across the world unless you are a very large player. There will always be startups and mid sized companies that either can't afford to or don't want to do that.
Driving backwards on the highway of life
I hope you speak Hindi.
Have faith. There's an element of truth to what he said. The achilles heel of the indians isn't poor people skills, poor communication skills, poor hygiene, or 3rd world code, (to quote a few common complaints) it's their culture. In general, they're all climbing the ladder. I've noticed that a lot work as programmers for only five years or so before becomming managers. So there aren't many indians with 10 or 15 years of experience. To quote morpheus, they will never be as strong or as fast as you can be. This will be amplified by the lack of people coming out of college. It will be more expensive (because of low wages) to get to the 10 year mark. After that, you're employable again. You'll do the design and fix whatever 3rd world code comes back. That's your niche now. Exploit it. Avoid indian dominated technologies like oracle and java. Learn new technologies before they make it to the schools in india. I think things will return somewhat for the more experienced people. The new grads are still fucked.
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
I'm a faculty member in the math/CS department of a liberal arts college. I'm on the "math" side of things but teach nearly all of our CS and CIS majors at one point or another. What I notice is:
:-)
1. Most students we get in CS/CIS have no conception of what computing really *is*. They are not getting into the field to be rich -- because they don't really know WHY they are in ANY field at all. Some major in computing because their parents push them into it (they have a 6-7-year old idea that computing jobs are growing on trees, still) or because -- seriously -- they love playing video games and want to "do" video games as a career. Virtually none of our CS/CIS majors have any previous coding experience coming out of high school. There's very little sense of the breadth of the computing field, the major ideas and current issues in the field, or even that being a CS major means learning several computing languages and writing usable code in them. THAT side of computing never gets portrayed on TV, does it?
2. Most students in CS/CIS -- maybe because they don't have that sense of the meaning or depth of the computing field -- absolutely revolt when math or science are brought into the picture. For instance, I just taught a course on cryptography, and the idea that good cryptosystems (esp. public-key systems) are based on good (= hard) math problems, and therefore we need to understand the math to be good at the systems, was very hard for the CS majors in there to swallow. In general when math shows up in CS, a lot of CS majors suddenly become business or sociology majors. I can't help but think that the decline in CS majors is tied in a fundamental way to an overall decline in interest in math and science here in the US.
3. I see a general trend among all our students that, while they are generally bright and pleasant folks to teach and work with, they don't have much in the way of a big picture idea of who they are and what they want to do with themselves. In particular, a lot of my students don't particularly "enjoy" ANYTHING -- in the sense that they like to spend spare time working on or reading about something, like slashdotters with computers -- that could be remotely considered intellectual or academic. Their hobbies tend more toward passive things like sleeping, watching TV, playing video games etc. rather than computers, reading books, or even playing sports -- things that demand persistence, skill, and discipline.
So from my point of view the decline the article talks about is just symptomatic of a larger shift in the culture to which college students belong. I do think that the students who stick with CS will be the true believers (a lot like math majors in that sense) but every freshman class is going to be the same as it has been composition-wise.
But to end on a positive note, the whole reason I love being a prof is that I get to be counter-cultural all day long and get paid for it.