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U.S. Students Shun Computer Science, Engineering
n9fzx writes "The San Jose Mercury News reports on a study by the Computing Research Association which finds that 'Undergraduates in U.S. universities are starting to abandon their studies in computer technology and engineering amid widespread worries about the accelerating pace of offshoring by high-technology employers.' Enrollment in those fields has dropped by 19% in the past year alone." Update: 03/24 23:40 GMT by CN : jlechem wrote in with a related story: "Wired News has a story about how American companies are outsourcing not because of cheap labor but because of the American school system not being up to snuff. In a report by the AeA, they contend that American schools don't teach enough math and science anymore."
I'm a freshman in college this year, and I'm still going to major in computer science... the idea being that in 3 years the economy will be out of the toilet.
And a second dot-com bubble would be nice, but it won't happen.
This is my sig. There are many others like it, but this one is mine.
This might actually result in a higher quality crop of students in the next few years.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Excellent. Maybe these departments will start to be populated by students who actually have a passion for computer science (in its actual definition), not those who simply want to graduate with a working knowledge of VB and C++ and make their way into the world of "software engineering."
I have discovered a truly marvelous
duh duh duh duh.
half of them didn't care about computers anyways and were just going to where the money was. now that the money is moving, so are they.
are people really this dumb?
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
More jobs for me!
This may be a good thing for those of us who choose to stick with our CS or Engineering majors. This may leave more jobs available to those who really desire to be involved in those fields.
those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do. -isaac asimov
Please let the enrollment drop, I am in that field and the people that will drop out of it are most likely to be the ones who sit in the back of class don't pay any attention and then ask the question that was just answered. Please don't make this to be a bad thing, as it isn't, the bad thing may be over where you have people who don't like the field entering it because they think they can make good money doing it.
lawyers
sulli
RTFJ.
Most of the people getting out are the ones who were just going into it for the money. They thought that Computer Engineers/Programmers/etc were going making tons of money no matter what. That time is long gone.
Hopefully this in the long term will mean those who graduate in CS/CE/EE/etc. will be much stronger then some of my classmates have been (class of 2002 in Computer Engineering here).
Is this much of a surprise? All the newspapers talk about the continuing layoffs and/or low employment in the CS fields. Why would any smart college-bound student go into a field where there are already thousands of qualified people who are unemployed? I count myself lucky to have survived (thus far, knock on wood) with a decent job in the field.
"PC Load Letter? What the $@#% does that mean?!"
I was just discussing this in my assembly language class today... I'm a Computer Engineering Technology major and I swear it's looking worse and worse as the semesters tick by. It's *not* just because of this outsourcing crap either. I don't know what to do... try to tough it out, go straight to graduate school or just leave the country.
People must be starting to realize that to pursue it means to continually shift and change. I dropped out of the IT field because education was inadequate, and the constant curve was ridiculous to keep up not only in terms of material to know, but also in terms of hands-on experience needed. That, and there's no decent jobs to be found.
Was it challenging? Sometimes. But what's the point to a challenge? I'd rather pursue passions.
Neutiquam erro
The other problem is that most of what is taught in comp-sci these days is not so great. There is a tendency to focus on algorithms (get them out of a book) rather than how to contribute to building large projects that work.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
No data structures class? That's like the cornerstone of a decent CS degree. That and some decent theory classes.
Blaze a trail to the New World
I'm fortunate to be employed in IT, especially because I love what I do. However, I know a number of people who jumped on the IT bandwagon thinking it was easy work for great pay. As they find it becoming harder to find a job, and those that do find dwindling pay, these people are abandoning IT in favor of things they really enjoy doing. This is a good thing, because it means a less saturated job market, and those who remain stay because they at least partially enjoy what they do, which generally implies an increase in overall quality of work.
here there's a massive plumber shortage and even people with PhD's are retraining.
Is this the beginning of a blue-collar revolution? Do you think its time to crack open each others skulls and feast on the goo inside?
If we're going to keep the jobs what we already have here in America, then we don't need to see any of that. It's cowardly moves like that that sends our jobs off in the first place -- why not work hard to keep what we already have, here in the first place?
They are not taking classes because our jobs are offshoring... well, I wonder why?
"Instant gratification takes too long." - Carrie Fisher
Am I the only one who read this and thought, "Yeah, more job opprotunties for me."
I do see the downside of people not taking Computer Science and Engineering seriously. But the law economics states that with decrease supply the remaining demand can be spread across fewer applicants.
Go Gusties
This is only the next step in the re-regulation of the tech. industry. The balances were wildly thrown back during the (in)famous bubble, and have been tettering precariously for the past several years. I have never been terribly worried about the off-shoring of jobs; people are wont to be afraid of what they are unaccustomed to. I always figured this migration of jobs overseas was merely a balancing effect (as seen all throughout nature) to reregulate things. "All energy flows according to the whims of the great magnet," as HS Thompson said!
Of course, I'm still in school, biding my time until the (admittedly brightening) economy swings my way again.
yeah then they really wont be able to find a job
love is just extroverted narcissism
I think that the people who are truly interested in computer-related fields won't change their major solely based on job outlook. This might mean that a lot of people with marginal interest in computers will consider other fields, which I think is a good thing for the industry.
My blog
Yeah, you're talking about a two year community college -- it's not going to have much of a CS program. If you're really interested in CS or Engineering, go up the road a bit to CSU, Chico, where they have a very nice CS and Engineering departments.
With a liberal arts degree, after you discover that the only thing to read is the script your training partner hands you and that the only language you'll ever use involves varying the accent on "Y'want frizewiddat" from English to Ebonics as appropriate for your store's demographics, you'll derive existentialism from first principles.
So skip the philosophy, because it's redundant.
People are realizing that a degree is irrelevant if you're going to be a help-desk lackey (and getting an MCSE doesn't require that you understand what context switching is, or pipelining, etc.), and that there are people overseas who learn programming languages as one might learn a spoken language here.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
I changed my major from computer science to Music and Recording Arts. I think that I'm going to make more money as a musician an audio engineer. . . .
In my opinion, you go to school to study things that interest you and that seem interesting to learn. Kids already "know" computers, can check email, write html, download warez, porn, and music, why would they want to learn how to program, maybe a good job?
Study what interests you, get a trade to make money.
Like KRS-One says, MCs should have more ways of making money than just rapping, same thing if you are a computer programmer.
peace, Sam
Maybe all the tards will finally leave CompSci and stop wasting the time of everyone else who actually wants to be there. Im sick of students who cant even code coming up through the system because they dont really care and have cheated their way as far as they have come. They are overcrowding the program and ruining the name of universities who would otherwise have impressive graduates coming out of their programs.
Im not here now... Im out KILLING pepperoni
The numbers haven't really changed in many years. Just like the fact that the current unemployment rate isn't much different than the last Administration.
h tm l
The economy of the US churns more jobs PER MONTH than are out sourced. When we had the big tech boom we had more jobs than people! Guess where we got them filled? The current focus is simply politics as usual.
Want a good article with some straight views on the subject?
http://www.freetrade.org/pubs/briefs/tbp-019es.
As for the decline in students. Good, CS doesn't mean fast bucks, booth babes, and games. Its a JOB. JOBS in the CS field are just like many others, they are work. If you are out sourced and haven't scored a job within 6 months something is wrong. Move, change careers, or realize that there ISN'T a job beneath you. Lastly, most people I know who are out of work that bemoan outsourcing lost their jobs because of their own actions.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
... I know mine is! A lot of this stuff has nothing to do with what i consider computer science. (I have been programming for 10 years). Why do I need to prove that the PowerSet of Set A intersection Set B is the same as the PowerSet of A intersection the PowerSet of B (P(A inter B) = P(A) inter P(B)).
/rant
Even worse last semester in Comp Sci 309 "Software Engineering" in which a group project is 40% of your grade, and EVERYONE must write some of the code and some of the documents, I got stuck with a complete group of imbeciles that had no business being in that class and only passed the previous ones because they could implement a function given a function header and a description of what it does - not write a program. Needless to say I failed that class beause the other group members are completely incompetant - and then the professor refused to believe they were that bad. I just about printed out my entire CVS repository on sourceforge [which includes what code was written for that project, all by me], walked into his office and slammed the stack down on his desk.
PS: These group members were so incompetant that they couldn't even follow the SF.net site docso n how to setup CVS - I had to GO TO THEIR APPARTMENTS MYSELF and set it up.
If you cannot keep politics out of your moderation remove yourself from the Mod Lottery.. NOW!
I have been a technology-oriented student for quite a long time (well, ever since 6th grade, really, and I'm a high-school senior now). While I have worked with electronics and robotics to some extent, I have the most experience in computer science and computer engineering, and have spent the majority of my time learning in these areas. However, as it has been college-applciation time, I have had to decide which field I am more inclined toward, I have chosen electrical engineering. While I may find CS and CE more enjoyable at the moment, I doubt that I could find a good job in that area now, due both to the glut in the market during the internet explosion and because of outsourcing. I may minor in CS, but I don't have high hopes of getting a good job because of it...
If you can't say something nice, make sure you have something heavy to throw.
University costs a lot of money, so much now that you really have little choice but to make your investment count.
Sad as it is, if I am objective about it, I would have to discourage young people I know from going into the discipline myself. Even if computer science has a future in this country at all, young people today can only look forward to the long, painful and endless contraction of the domestic market for these jobs.
Software engineering is especially vulnerable to offshoring - much more so than previously decimated domestic industries. There are no tarrifs and no transportation costs. This is freer trade than most had previously dreamed of.
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
I jumped ship early and at the end of this year i'll have a degree in managment. I will miss all the hardcore programming classes and all that, but I feel i'm a lot more hirable. Plus I don't have to get used to indian food if i don't want to.
You do not need a CS degree to work in CS in many cases.
I have a CS minor. Some I work with dropped out of college.
Of course, I'm working as a programmer as an intermediate step, myself. If the right non-IT job came along, I'd still program but it would be back to being my hobby.
Yes, applications to US Universities are down in EE and CS, but you'll find the biggest drop was in international student applications. Recent restrictions on international students have made the US a painful choice for higher education. I think this facet of the enrollment drop has been glossed over for the most part in the media. I was unaware until I spoke with some people in my EE departement's graduate admissions office. Granted, exporting jobs causes some of this, but let's take a look at all the causes.
Do you flip out and write matlab code? Do you calculate ALL the time and don't even think twice about it?
Isnt this a good thing?? When there are less people in the industry itself there are actually less jobs being taken away in the tech arena.
Thats a good way to go for the american economy as all the surplus techies who are just there for the money or due to everyone else doing it are gonna contemplate and move to other viable fields.
Lord of the Binges.
those people who are sincerely interested in computer science will have a hard time making money in the field and not exercising purely academic interest.
Good. When I was a CS undergrad at UC Berkeley a few years ago during the boom, the department was inundated with people who were just out to make a buck. When it came time for computer science, most of them couldn't have cared less. Finding project partners was a real pain, since most people didn't have much genuine interest in the subject--they just wanted to get their degree and immediately move on to a $70K job.
Maybe departments like Berkeley's will get back to being populated mostly by people who have a real interest in the subject...
Do what you love and the money will follow. While I think this is just an appropriate example of market forces at work, job markets can be hard to judge (I have degrees in engineering, physics, and astronomy and the job market was supposes to be great when I started, turned out not to be so much later). There will be jobs for the excellent and hard working in pretty much any field they enter. If you're just chasing the jobs, please rethink your major, unless you want six figures and a company car with a BA in philosophy. Really though, be a life-long learner and a good human being and you'll probably get by OK.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
And people still have this freak perception that most college kids are puffed-up and dumb.
We just have to acknowledge that the majority of the IT industry was in it because it was, well, the "it" industry of the '90s, with huge salaries and cool toys.
Besides, it's the low-level support/code monkey jobs that freshmeat grads usually get hired for -- except these days those kids are hired in India, so people of my generation recognize that we'll never even get a toehold.
Freedom isn't free; its price is the well-being of others.
FYI, management is often full of those who couldn't hack it as a techie. Furthermore when a company gets cut back, management is often first to go. Don't worry though, I might drop a quarter in your cup when I see you begging for money on street corner after this happens.
Instead, take the time to study things that are interesting and really mind-expanding like literature, philosophy, and languages.
./
Sounds sarcastic but can't be too sure on
Anyway, (theoretical) CompSci can be mind-expanding, just like linguistics or philosophy.
Oh yeah?? When we evolve into pure energy beings you guys are SCREWED!
There is a design flaw in our society that sees developers and workers as a lower caste than the management and all power executive group. Perhaps this is why US management loves to outsource to India, as there is already a well established caste system in place and less fear of engineers trying to break from their caste just because they have more sense than the rulers in management.
Boring? Computers, science, mathemathics and physics were among the most exciting classes I took in school. Studying business politics is what bores me to tears. Unfortunately, if a student were to ask me which path to take, I would probably have to concede that, if the student is ambitious, the most lucrative opportunities all lie in the political side of business.
Whether or not this is a blessing or a curse. The problem is that if there is job pickup(whether there will be one or not is up to debate) and companies cannot find enough people to hire, then the call of going offshore will be even greater, and if a company does it for one project, then next time they will be even more(or less depending on the success of the project) to continue to offshore. This is the so called "critical mass" that is required for innovation, which is why I actually don't buy the whole offshoring is great for this country bs we are being spoon-fed.
In order to sustain innovation and progress in this country, we are going to need more than lawyers and managers. People tend to look at economic benifits strictly in terms of short-run GDP growth, and then they have a point, in the short term, offshoring may help GDP grow, but if it scares away our best and brightest(once again, not s\aying that those are the people going into the cs field but still) then the US will lose innovation, new stuff won't be invented here, and we will continue our slide into a 3rd world nation.
The earlier post about the Bell Labs demise is just another symptom of the "hollowing out" of the American economy. Now we don't even build our own stuff, but also we are moving away from designing it too. It's a slippery slope, and I feel that this is just the beggining of our long decline.
On the other hand, I think the person quoted as proceeding to an MBA is doing the right thing. If you can't beat them, join them, as they say, and that's precisely what I intend to do myself. Better to be the outsourcer than the outsourcee. Of course, this argument will fall through when they shift those jobs overseas as well.
I didn't see where these 19% are going though, apart from this one quote. In my view, the safer bet nowadays is migrating to jobs where you physically -have- to be there to do the job. Medicine jumps to mind, though the robots are coming, I know. And, God help us, lawyers.
When I'm the last person on Earth who know how to debug a C program on AIX, ALL SHALL BOW BEFORE ME!!!!
That's "Mr. Soulless Automaton" to you, Bub.
To some extent, this has already started - many of the pro-Outsourcing types argue "theres a lack of qualified people here in the us" (my addendum: willing to work these hours for a $7.95/hour and no benefits). But seriously, how long before industry groups start to complain that there aren't enough people going into the field?
Undergraduates in U.S. universities are starting to abandon their studies in computer technology and engineering
Employment Opportunity
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Education: Two Years of College, Associates Degree or Equivalent Experience
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Joe was an engineer. He worked hard, studied hard and took pride in his work. He was also faithful to his wife, raised two children to be solid members of the community and attended church every Sunday.
Finally after a full life Joe died in his sleep one night.
On awakening he found himself facing St. Peter at the Pearly Gates. Peter looks in his book, and finds that Joe is not in the Authorized list. He looks at Joe and says, sorry!, pulls the trapdoor lever and Joe starts falling. Joe yells "Wait there must be some Missstaaakeeee".
A few hundred years later God is auditing the Big Book and finds that Joe should have been listed as Authorized. We, he goes on a rampage, thunder and lighting, assorted Vengeful God stuff. After calming down God picks up the cellphone and rings up the Devil.
God: Hey Dev, remember Joe, that Engineer I sent you a few hundred years ago?
Devil: Yeah, I sure do. I want to thank you for sending him down here. He's got the A/C fixed, and we now get broadband and digital cable. He's now working on beer-on-tap. Whatta guy!
God: (Pissed Off) Hey! You have got to send him up here. He should have never been sent down to you. He belongs up here.
Devil: Yeah Right. Finders Keepers. No way am I letting him go!
God: (Really Pissed Off) I'LL SUE!!!
Devil: (ROTFL) HA HA Where are you getting a lawyer HA HA.
- -
So that's where we are heading. A country of lawyers where the A/C and cable doesn't work. Not a pleasent prognosis.
yeah, right... (i'm referring to the parting blurb in the article).
most of the remaining problems are in management:
the dude is dropping out from tech and going directly into management w/o any grounding. that will only add to the problem; he will be like the puppies before napoleon and squealer...
Who the hell is ed rug, and what is he trading online?
The general population has been shunning computer scientists and engineers for years!
Have you Meta Moderated t
I ponder doing something else, but CS appeals to me the most. I've resigned myself to future uncertainty and I'm just learning for the pleasure of it. Always keeping in mind how what I learn can apply to other jobs/disciplines. Everyone else I know getting English Majors or Religious Studies degrees isn't exactly pursuing the almight dollar. I'm in good company. Poor, but good. :-)
-buzz
Prescription for Viagra? What are you talking about? You can just order it over the net... right?
First: Corporations are here to make money. When American students forgoe education in technical fields US corporations will be forced to give the available positions to workers from coutnries outside the US. This is the equivalent of exporting money. The lazy culture American prosperity has fostered is about to cost the US its place as the worlds most dominant economy.
Isn't mainly programming jobs that are being offshored, not computer science/engineering jobs?
I think it was Dijkstra who said computer science has about as much to do with computers as astronomy has to do with telescopes.
Unfortunately, these lower enrollments will give Corporate leaders yet another excuse to offshore NOW, due to the appearance that talent is becoming more scarce domestically, driving up salaries and bottlenecking development, like in the 90's. Instead of bringing the talent to the job (H1-B), the job will be sent to the talent (offshoring).
Good heavens Miss Sakamoto - you're beautiful!
Leave the geeks to their machines, let the rest of us rule them from management.
Philosophize about how HR found all that pr0n on your computer, and how your letter of resignation got emailed to the CEO. He who controls the data, controls the department.
BOFH LIVES!
"Lame" - Galaxar
I would have to echo the sentiment that this isn't as dire as it seems. I was in CS from 92-93, 95-96, and 98-00 (I have an alergic reaction to large amounts of unsecured debt) I noticed in the 98-00 timeframe that there were a lot of students in CS that plain old dind't belong there, and quite frankly would have (and for one I saw was) happier elsewhere.
Seeing the dot com bubble and microsofts valuation many incoming studens thought that it was spelled $oftware and Computer $cience, when they are really interested in Bu$ine$$. I mean if you want money go to business school, you don't have to graduate. Then there is the "plug and chug" crowd can now see there is more stability in the Engineering disciplines. There is no drop from the hard sciences because "anything that needs to put the word science in it's name isn't a science". As for the others... well it's only a 19% drop.
People who are truly passionate about computers programming, algorithms, languages, etc. will still do Computer Science, and in my last school stint it was a minority (as far as being passionate) in the overloaded senior level classes. The down side is there seems to be a strong gender correlation to being passionate about CS. For of the femenine persuasion when they are passionate about something it tends to be in the liberal arts/musical/medical side of things. (and when I say medical it's more the RN/NP side than the MD side: passionate != stupid WRT insurance liability).
--Shemnon
I think the reason for the exodus of computer science isn't as much to do with the money as it does the challenge of the work. Bright people like interesting work. Being a code monkey gets old real quick. And most of the computer science programs out there are focusing too much on being a code monkey (or at least that's what the students want out of those programs).
These bright people are realizing that computer science isn't the way to get into the interesting jobs. There were many really cool jobs out there during the dotcom boom. But people mistakenly thought that the cool jobs were had by the programmers. They didn't realize that the programmers were the factory workers of the current economy. The cool jobs were the people coming up with the new ideas, trying to make things work. Some of those people were programmers, but they didn't need to be and many weren't.
People are realizing that code monkey does not necessarily mean a cool job, and as such are trying to get into more interesting professions. Now, code monkeys are definately needed, but that's what offshoring is for. But there are many routes to take that can lead to cool dotcom-like fun jobs that aren't programming, and many programming jobs that aren't fun.
Having said that, I feel into the same trap. That's why now I'm currently in a CS PhD program, doing interesting work because I decided that being a code monkey would be boring in the long run.
I say hooray.
I, of course, decided to major in CompSci after all the recent impediments the industry has had, and after heading a few dozen slashdot posts telling people not to major in CompSci anymore.... I definitely didn't do it for the money; I did it because I (think I) like it. I can tell from the people around me in the 100-level CS classes who's there because they have a passion for it, who's there because they couldn't think of anything else to major in (bad choice at my university; CS is 76 credit hours), and who's there because "them computer guys are making so much money." The money crowd actually seems to be fairly small; maybe they all changed their minds after the first C++ class.
Anyway, I'm thrilled. The fewer people pursuing my path, the more opportunities I'll have. I'll be able to get closer to the profs than I could if the classes were bloated with money-grabbers. And maybe, just maybe, in about 3 years the market will be looking desperately for CS majors again. Well, I can hope, anyway.
Personally, I think it's great. I'm an undergraduate in CS right now, and it's amazing how many people I encounter that know and care only a little about the field. I witness rampant academic dishonesty daily, and a general ``who cares'' attitude among my peers, save for a select few.
I've met several people who rely on others excessively (through forums, or in person) to function as a computer scientist. It's troubling when you are asked to help someone with their software, only to discover horrible gaps in their basic CS skills. I've encountered the most awful design flaws in software, written by grad students! Imagine a large Java program, that could have been rather elegant (for Java) using proper OO design... except the program is written completely static! Or, for example, a large if-then-elseif block that looked like it came out of the BASIC days!
Even worse, before I was asked to help, this individual wasted lots of other people's time requesting very basic code that anyone could figure out after spending a bit looking through the Java API. Developer forums can be an excellent resource, but they can also be abused, to the detriment of many helpful individuals.
I honestly believe that the CS discipline is clogged with people who see only dollar signs, not hexadecimal.
On the flipside, less CS enrollment may mean researchers have less options when selecting grad students. Given the large amount of current CS grads, I think it will be some time before there is any shortage of skilled research talent.
In the mid-late 90's, there were a lot of people in my computer scinece classes that just stood out as someone who's first real experience with a computer was when they started the undergraduate program in computer science. Then there were those who had been messing around with computers since the early 80's, and they are the ones who have always excelled beyond everyone else. I have even worked with several people who never went to college and were much better programmers than what some college grads in CS turn out to be.
I'm still working on my CS degree (took some time off), and the few remaining classes I'm taking now have most of the money-only-seekers gone.
"It is a good time to go into a medical field though. We need lots of people who can write prescriptions for Viagra."
I thought setting up a spam server was an IT job.
"Derp de derp."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
CS is a great degree for someone who is interested in math and logic and programming but not so much so for anyone who isn't into all 3. For everyone else it can be a hellish nighmare of not sleeping, forgetting what the sun looks like and getting terrible grades.
I almost flunked out of CS [I suck at coding], took some time off from school and reevaluated my priorities. It turns out I was more interested in psychology so I got a degree in that instead and worked on design as a side project. I got great grades finishing school, got a career started and had time for a social life [not that CS majors can't have them, but it's a lot easier].
I'm hoping some of this will help people realize that you don't go to undergrad to get a job, you go to get an education. Most of the people I know who are programmers nowadays don't have CS degrees, they're just good coders.
It would be interesting to see how much of this 19% enrollment drop-off may be attributed to the increased difficulty and harassment involved in foreigners getting student visas to attend colleges in the United States? A great many of these foreign students seem to enroll in technology-related programs such as EE/CE/CS/etc.
To tell the truth, spam has never once made me sprout wood.
(/local/home/curiosity)-#who -u|grep thecat|cut -c 44-49|xargs kill -9
And FYI, techies are usually those who can't hack it as management.
There must be sarcasm somewhere in a post with the title "follow the money" that exhorts readers to major in philosophy.
I'd rather be lucky than good.
- America will be the leader in knowledge based work. Isn't it wonderful to lead the world? OK, so leading means sacrificing your job. That's just a minor technicality.
- The American dollars that left our country as we opened our economy have to eventually return. Heck, our trade deficit is only half a trillion dollars a year now! Apparently, what the economics prophets really meant to say is that we'd be giving away twice as much without their great advice. Half a trillion dollars in annual donations of our capital to the rest of the world is not as bad as a trillion. Right? The prophets of the economy sure are wise.
- As long as you have a college education, you'll profit from the global economy. Wow, are they right. You can major in anything and succeed today, if you define success as having at least one job before you are on long-term unemployement. At least with a college education you are educated enough to calculate how much your living expenses are than your unemployment check, and how quickly you'll be homeless.
But, hey, the good news is that you can watch all these prophecies unfold on your nice imported TV. It sure was cheap, wasn't it? So what if you can't pay your light bill. Just plug that TV secretly into any outlet you can find on the streets or on the outside of any garage you'll be trying to live in.
I've been wondering, and would love to hear what /.'ers have to say, what advice do we give to children to on how to financially secure their future? What college major do you recommend for our next generation?
Open Standards Portal
It almost begs the question if American programmers DESERVE to be outsourced.
I propose more involvement at all levels of industries and government in education. Cheap programmers( aka college interns ) aren't just in India & China.
Like I've said at least a dozen times on this site, people need to add value to compete. Experience does just that...
Robo-Blogs of the world: UNITE!
Not all engineering is suffering, but the computer and EE areas certainly are. Civil, chemical, biomedical, mechanical engineerings are strong and growing.
I've talked to a number of executives of engineering firms and they indicate that offshoring is not really a major trend. Yes, it is impacting some areas very heavily such as support, but for programmers and engineers, it's a rather minor situation, and the good engineering/programming jobs are likely to always remain local to the company.
The weak job situation for most programmers is not due to offshoring, but rather to simply a lack of jobs, and the fact that the peak of students entering computer majors was around 1999/2000, so they are graduating in highest numbers right now - there's simply more demand than supply. The Merc and other publications are hollaring 'offshore' at the top of their lungs, and unfortunately some people can only hear what they hear the loudest.
Companies do things for profit. they outsource for profit. it's totally dependant on cheap labor. We can kid ourselves all we want. bottom line is they want more profit.
Yes, I am in graduate school (Masters) hopefully finishing up in May....June....oh God please let me graduate.
Please slide the pizza under the door and depart quietly.
I'm fortunate in that I'm a decent programmer and a pretty good artist... this has opened many doors for me. What do other /. readers think about more cross disciplinary students? I know there will always be a place for pure programmers, but I also hope to see more programmer-minded people in different fields. Will the declining enrollment in SE/EE possibly result in this trend?
Let's hope that the quality of education also rises. I am in my senior year at a CSU school, and sorry to say it, but I am _highly_ disappointed in the quality of professors at both of the CSU's I have studied at. Teachers who are not passionate about their field, and students in my systems programming course who have never used a terminal emulator before or even really know what linux is. It is sad when seniors in a BS CS program don't understand basic concepts. I had several students in my compiler course not understanding how to even implement a hash table. Another student had his source code headers included via "c:\dir\to\file" even though the source had to be compiled and run on sun workstations at school that are accessable remotely. My compiler teacher had his *nix environment so messed up that he couldn't even compile or run utilities that linked to libstdc. *sigh*
Here's to the future.
Sig* sig = theOneSig();
As a warning to readers, the Cato Institute is hardly a respected academic or politically neutral source for information. In general, I consider their positions on the issue convoluted enough that I guess they are actually intended to deceive.
Cato advocates what could be called classic Laissez Faire capitalism, and since they oppose the worker reforms that have made America rich over the last 50 years, they are naturally proponents of Free Trade, a political sleight-of-hand for eliminating those progressive reforms.
Free trade is about benefiting from illegal corporate practices (such as worker abuse) by simply allowing American companies to do it overseas, and letting the market do the rest.
If you're interested in some actual straight views on the subject, read more here.
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
This flies directly in the face of comments by Carly Fiorina, Andy Grove, and other CEOs that
outsourcing will end up helping this country by exporting the "menial" jobs out to 3rd world countries. In the same breath, they say that the US needs to invest more in high tech in order to maintain their competitive edge.
Their comments are just bullshit, because as the US starts outsourcing their entry-level jobs to India, it leaves no jobs for graduating students. Why would a student pay $80k+ for a degree in which they need to compete against someone making $200/month?
By outsourcing our entry and medium level jobs to 3rd world countries, it is simply compounding our high-tech problem by creating zero incentive for new students to pursue careers in high tech. Because there is no new blood entering these professions, more jobs and more experience is being put into the hands of these 3rd world countries, and countries like the US and Britain end up losing. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, and then these CEOs turn around and say, "Well, we said that the US needed to invest more, but they didn't. And because they didn't, we're going to move all of our development to India." It's the fact that they care more about their bottom line over the health of their company and their countries that will cause this problem.
This is a clear indication that the outsourcing strategy has already had a pronounced effect on the US, and is damaging to its competitiveness in high tech.
Any lines of work that require a significant slevel of autonomy will be the next candidates for Outhousing.
*** Sigs are a stupid waste of bandwidth.
Heh, well if you didn't answer to all that penis enlargment spam, we probably wouldn't be tripping on your dick.
gg
Sig* sig = theOneSig();
I hope the trend has shifted whereby people that would have otherwise sought an MBA were moving towards a CS degree and let the real CS people get back to work.
There's a freshman in my Russian II class who was majoring in CS.. After hearing him complain for a while about how much his programming classes sucked, I deemed it necessary to inform him of the problems with outsourcing and the difficulties of getting a job as a CS graduate. He's now an undeclared major, and has his eyes on auditioning for acceptance into the university's guitar program.
To tell you the truth, I didn't lie to him either. I simply told him that, right now, a lot companies are looking at (and using) India as a viable market for employees, and that CS grads have a difficult time getting a job right out of graduation, and tend to make less than $50k a year.
So hopefully he and all the other CS students jumping boat will find something they enjoy, instead of a dead end tech support job.. But in the meantime, here's to those of us who see computers as a form of enjoyment, as opposed as a means to money.
This statement is false.
Nobody goes into comp-sci for the money any more, like they did in the dotcom craze
One of the interesting things about the dot-com craze, though, was that you had English majors and other humanities and sundry graduates doing HTML (and sometimes more) programming. Not to mention graduates of various certification schools.
Not everybody who labors in the field of I/T studied CS... this isn't a guarantee that the I/T field is going to get less competetive. It means that the labor pool of the academically disciplined is going to shrink.
Tweet, tweet.
I'm a Computer Science Pre-Major at the University of Utah and I can say that the engineering program at the U is up to snuff. This is why it is one of the highest ranking engineering departments in the nation. However, spending time at the U I have often thought about how most schools out there probably aren't doing as good of a job as the U is. I did attent a State College for a year before going to the U and it was certainly less effective, by a factor of 100! There are certain aspects of computer science which are the basis of the entire discipline. These are very high-level math and science ideas (or should I say math and engineering?). This is precicely where shools are slacking. But hats off to the guys at the U. I knew after just one semester that I was working with individuals that knew what they were doing. People who are interested in the technology and the knowledge behind the science unlike so many egotistic morons out there who "know more than you" because they went to [place name of ivy league school here].
one could always work at autozone, they run linux! ;)
This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
I'm currently a freshman in college and a Computer Science major.
I have been worried about the state of the tech industry...I'm worried that when I get out of college, I'll not be able to get a job anywhere.
But then another thought comes to me, namely: ``What the bloody hell else am I going to do with my life?''. Computers are among the few things I have any passion for.
So I've got a choice between doing something I'm good at and I love, but possibly not being able to get a job, or doing something I'm not good at and/or I hate, but making money. Neither one is desirable, one is inevitable. I'll go with the former--I'd rather not be one of the people I see all the time who are successful but miserable because they have no passion for what they do for a living, and are stuck doing it.
I support the Center for Consumer Freedom
Why do you think a small business is less able or likely to outsource?
I submit that, in fact, they are, if anything, only more motivated to do so.
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
I look at that stat and think that it is good news. Why? Because that means that people that are really interested in IS and CS will be the ones majoring in it. It was yesterday, I think, that /. reported that only 1 out 7 IT professionals are really happy in their jobs, and the dicussion went to talk about people that had fallen into IT because of the money. Well, with these stats, it means that less people are are chosing IT because of the employment outlook and going someplace else. Maybe, for example, they liked computers, but really liked History. So instead of taking IS they chose history. Which is fine. It just means that those of us that are complete freaks when it comes to computers, where it be IS or CS will have the opportunity to recieve an education where our peers are interested in doing the job instead of the money. Further it also gives me more of an incentive to spend some time studying IS and looking into developing outside skill development. Those of us that actually spend time looking into getting some software or network to work will develop skills that the classroom can not teach. For example, I have spent time studying network security. My university does not really offer much in that way, but I have learned quite a bit about hacking, and defending against hacking. So in short, if you spend a little bit of time outside class and a potiential employer sees that you have a passion and have taken the time to learn what was not required it will be a great benefit. I mean who would you take if you were hiring -- the guy that spent time in the classes but really didn't care, or the freak that spent a year building a super cluster out of 386's, 486's, Pentium 1-4's? I can say that out of those that are in my University, only about 10% are excited about their subject in computers. One good buddy of mine is just doing it because he likes computers, but he doesn't know anything about them. It is truly commendable, but at the same time, having the passion to study and learn is the adantage that will help you to get a job in the IT field.
The views expressed are mine own and do not express the views of my employer.
When I was in grad school most of the stipends and scholarships were being given to foreign students. It bothered me then and now that my tax money and my tuition money was being used to educate people who aren't Americans. I will admit that many of them worked very hard at studying though and made top grades but I honestly don't think they were any smarter than American kids. They just didn't have anything else to do. Being in a foreign, money and sex oriented culture what else could they do with their time? They were like Fez from the 70's Show.
How much longer can grad school here stay 'excellent' if all the jobs go overseas? Not long I think. The high level tech jobs will follow and then the multi national corporations will make their donations to universities near their manufacturing and research facilities not way over here where education costs a fortune.
Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.
Perhaps you, dear reader, see it otherwise, and that's OK.
But either way, if a U.S. student asked you whether opportunities in computers will be growing in the future, you could hardly assure her yes, that's a safe bet.
You'd probably have to advise her that, sorry, in this field you'll increasingly be competing for jobs with people whose cost of living is a third of yours. That's not a good position to be in.
Absolutely. However, while this makes for good computer scientists, it also makes for underqualified software engineers. Knowing how to design a good algorithm doesn't guarantee that one knows how to design, document, and test a production system. A lot of undergraduates don't even do unit testing until they hit the job market. And you can forget about knowing the difference between waterfall vs. incremental development.
Don't get me wrong: I'm not dismissing algorithm development at all. I'm saying that one has to be both a strong computer scientist and a strong software engineer to compete in today's job market. And frankly, I just don't see a lot of that in our schools.
Finding God in a Dog
Riiiiiiiiiight.
sulli
RTFJ.
Sorry, that should have read:
U.S. Shuns Computer Science, Engineering Students
And I'm afraid it's just a rehash of an old JonKatz rant.
It's true. It's very true. I remember high school, I could take automechanics and electronics because those were considered "trades", and had no academic restrictions. But in the year I graduated - 1994 - my high school would not let you touch a computer outside of the LRC unless you had taken at least algebra. What sense does that make? I used Algebra in electronics and automechanics every day, but most people who are proficient at using and troubleshooting computers barely need to know how to do basic arithmetic.
Now the latest thing in schools is to "push the arts", under the assumption that arts encourage academic excellence. What these people don't get is challenging students encourages academic excellence. Providing opportunity encourages academics.
The current education system is learning oriented. It's a production line that shuffles children around with little regard as to whether they can or do achieve. The education kids were given 40 years ago is equivalent to what sophmores in college are getting today.
The Encyclopedia Galactica:
Entry #25734
Topic: Management
Description:
1. Clueless users selected by even more clueless users to demand products that the most clueless users believe will make money.
2. People who have sold their soul in exchange for money, they have been cursed by a demonic possession that leaves them only able to spout meaningless phrases like 'out of the box' and 'maximizing potential'. They lack ethics, empathy, and the basic intelligence required to be of any use to a functioning civilization. Paradoxically, finding no other use for these wasted dead ends in the evolutionary ladder, primitive cultures often select these same people to run the civilization, usually into the ground. Like the nobility of the same primitive cultures, they are eventually purged as the civilization matures. The label 'management' has been deemed by almost all respectable theologists to be the second most likely canidate for the mark of the beast, surpassed only be the label 'laywer'. Also refered to as 'the scum of the earth' by the forces of good, the forces of the working man, and the forces of the useful.
3. The first ones up against the wall when the revolution comes.*
*Future versions indicate that this will at some point need to be changed to 'the first ones up against the wall when the revolution came'. Afterwards the galactic conference declared 'management' to be a sin against god, logic, nature, and the laws of reason. To declare yourself a 'manager' was deemed a sin against humanity and to subject someone to being 'managed' was declared one of only three crimes in the universe were the death penalty was applicable (by the insignificance method). Since then, calling a person 'management' is considered to be the worst insult in known reality and has on several occasions led to horrible and extremely destructive wars.
Note: Phrases such as 'Their bellies are full but their spirits are empty.'(Star Trek) and 'They measured their worth by the gold in their coffers instead of the value of their spirits.'(Theif 2: The Metal Age) repeated over and over whenever one comes in contact with these abominations are considered to be the only known ways to keep oneself pure of contamination.
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
Oh please:
"Kazmierczak acknowledged that AeA members are all business owners, not employees, but says this had no effect on the report's findings. "Yes, we do represent the interests of businesses," said Kazmierczak. "However, we believe our report is a fair and balanced look at the entire scope and context of the offshore-outsourcing issue.
Riiight. So the fact that the report was written by a bunch of business owners who are probably outsourcing wouldn't make me suspicious just one bit.
Uh huh... yeah.. and I'm Bill Gates. Last I checked unemployment in the US, the country with the most skilled workers on this planet, still have pretty high unemployment (especially in tech).
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." - Martin Luther King, Jr.
This holds true for any field. If you hate doing something, chances are you're not going to be very good at it. If you love it, you at least have the motivation to become good if you're not already.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
Maybe now the CS department in my high school won't be headed by all the asshole gold diggers who can't really program. If you can't do, you teach is a very true for my school district. They bused my two hours a day to another school for a year to learn shit that I would've taught myself in 3 months if I just had the spare computer lying around. It was run by a former football scholarshipee (nothing against football or sport scholarships, but this guy had _no_ interest in computers before) that was a dick in general. Later I nearly taught the web design course at my school, instead it was taught by someone who order videos of someone else coding. Just screen capture.
They pushed computers as the way to become a millionaire, just like CNA's, welding, ad infinitum. High demand/placement + 2 year degree ? end all for jobs. A good education starts with interest in the field, NOT with the lust for a job.
Is there anything better than clicking through Microsoft ads on Slashdot?
"Wired News has a story about how American companies are outsourcing not because of cheap labor but because of the American school system not being up to snuff. In a report by the AeA, they contend that American schools don't teach enough math and science anymore."
No kidding. If you only knew how stupid some of the people are that are going through the motions, getting their degree. The sad part is some of my professors slack off so they can pass... Only one held everybody to a high standard.
Going through college, I often wonder how some of the people that are graduating can actually find jobs and be productive. If I were to interview them for a engineering or IT job, I'd just laugh at them (especially the people coming from ITT Tech... no flaming intended).
One of the major themes of many universitys' coursework in tech related majors is group work. They are starting to emphasize soft skills so much that hard skills or knowledge for that matter are lost. Much worse, groupwork in education encourages only 1 to 2 members of a 5 person team to actually complete the assigned tasks. Because of this, even though math and science are being taught, 50% of the team can slide by without doing anything. How many people do you know said they were part of some major project but couldn't write or even explain a single line of code? just my 2 cents anyway
Hooray for the individual consultant who has the know-how/guts/$300 to get incorperated in the US and start selling themselves by the hour or the day as a service.
That's what I did two years ago when I finished a 4 year stint as a Java/GUI developer, and I'll never go back to office work. Hooray for a tech-naive future! Plenty of prosepcts for me to sell to and train.
Of course, touch-of-sarcasim aside, i think it's bad that more people don't have an interest in tech. Bad for economy, country, et. al. in the long run, but the short-term does look bright for the small self employed businuesses.
There were many really cool jobs out there during the dotcom boom. But people mistakenly thought that the cool jobs were had by the programmers.
For the record, I never for a moment thought that the guy who got to be the Pets.com sock-puppet operator was a programmer.
GMD
watch this
they contend that American schools don't teach enough math and science anymore.
Why else do you think the US is ranked like number 24, yes, TWENTY-FOUR in the world for math skills. It's because in other nations, completing calculus in high school is required. Here we can barely get high-school graduates who can speak proper english much less balance a checkbook.
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
In my Dept this year marks the first time that there are more first-years in our Biomedical Computing program than straight CompSci. It's not clear whether there will be better job prospects for them*, although the press (and funding!) bioinformatics has been getting lately may be a factor. Supposedly a lot of the students think that they'll have more opportunity to help people in BioMed, and as a result the program has way more women than CompSci. The Dept believes that all future growth will be in interdisciplinary programs, so that's probably where a lot of the missing students mentioned in the article are ending up.
* Most of the development in Canada that could be done remotely was already being outsourced to US firms, so offshoring isn't effecting the industry up here very much.
I have to throw the B.S. flag on this point. My current employer is outsourcing to India - NOT because of American education but EXACTLY because they can get 10 programmers for the price of 1. We are not hiring local UNIX Admins for their mathematical or engineering talent - only if they can "do the job" and say "yes" when told to do something. I can't count how many times I've had a DBA ask me why he can't use his whole 8GB filesystem only to find some num-nutz "Senior" Admin build a 8000 MB filesystem because they don't know binary math. But - hey - it was NEVER part of their interview...
(Yes, it's my Yahoo id)
At UTDallas every freshman says they are studying Computer Science or Electrical Engineering. By sophomore year its more like this:
I was a Computer Science major, but then I hate programming, only playing Counterstrike. Now I am a Business major. But wait I hate accounting. Now I am a (insert easy major) major.
It's easy to tell the real CS majors (When do we learn Perl?) from the wannabes (Why would I take UNIX if it's not required?).
bit trollent
This is good news indeed. Now the industry will be filled with people who work because they love the work. It reminds of a post I read in an article on Slashdot a while back, one reader said something similiar to "you either love what you do or be forced to love what you do".
Btw, I graduated and went straight into web development. So most of what I learned in school is now rarely applied to my work. It was great course though. I learned a lot about CPUs, Hardware programming and the fact that finding a female student in Computer Engineering in my school was like winning the state lottery. We had rumors that a girl enrolled in the Comp. Eng. but we never saw proof of it.
./ == dotslash? I smell a lawsuit coming on...
Here we go. All the ranting about not having a job or having a shite job they had to take because they couldn't get the job they "deserve" -- START!
Now, to the article...
What exactly was the point of this article? Off-shoring has nothing to do with why CS enrollment is down. It's the money.
I've been doing "IT stuff" for years and have come to realize that IT related fields simply do not pay what they used to. The era of the $60,000/yr, 22 yr old administrator/programmer/engineer is over. If you want make money in IT, you've got to know your shit (shit = more than just your job). You've got to -- oh my -- work hard and move around. That's not very appealing to many college students who are just starting to experience the realities of adult life (I'm not bashing you college students -- life is tough!).
One can still make good money in IT, but the field is starting to reflect more traditional white-collar fields. You have to build experience and a resume. You have to be willing to move to a different state or even a different country (I work in Japan) and work jobs that are not exactly what you want. This definitely scares some people away. Lots of folks do not like the idea of moving to Denver when they've lived in Florida their entire life.
I'm starting to ramble. Must get more coffee and get this work day started.
3cx.org - A truly bad website.
>
> Oh yeah?? When we evolve into pure energy beings you guys are SCREWED!
I'm a senior in computer engineering and I'm not too worried. This isn't like the textile industry where robots are poised to take my place. There will always be a need for someone to write firmware code, assembly or other tasks because computers aren't going to go out of style anytime soon.
Yeah, the market may be bad today, a year from today or even 5 years from today, but don't jump ship too soon. Assuming you had a BS in CE, a good employer of a non-CE, but computing-type job should see your BS and realize you can do more things than you were taught. I already have an AS in Civil Engineering, that shows I know other forms of engineering and transfers over the core classes so I don't have to overlap my classes. My dad got his BS in EE, but worked with chemicals for 15 years till his company was bought out but the new company went under. He now fixes electronic sensor machines for the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality doing what he is educated for with a generous salary.
I guess the moral of the story is get the computer degree you are trying to get and in the long run it'll be okay.
American companies are outsourcing not because of cheap labor but because of the American school system not being up to snuff.
In a report by the AeA, they contend that American schools don't teach enough math and science anymore."
And why should the youngsters be interested in taking math & science if the kinds of jobs that use them are being sent overseas? Less highschoolers opting for math/science classes means you need less teachers in those areas and could probably lead to even less math & science being taught.
No, the kids may as well concentrate on getting into Lawschool and you don't need either math or science for that.
Teacher: Johnny, what do you want to do when you grow up?
Johnny: I want to be a software engineer.
Teacher: Are you willing to move to India?
Johnny: India?! I don't think so, why?
Teacher: Well, Johnny, if you're serious about being a software engineer, you'll have to move to India to find work.
Johnny: (after a couple of minutes of intense thought) I think I'll be a fireman instead.
You can't eat money. When the economy collapses from the horrdenous mismanagemnt it had endured, the people who are going to eat are the ones who work. The people whose only skill is telling other people to work will end up starving.
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
Fields like computer science teaches students a real-life application of mathematical ratios, such as 1:50. Or especially at places like tech schools - 1:100.
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
oh sweet irony...
My days of not taking you seriously are certainly coming to a middle...
If the job situation continues to deteriorate, the effects can be more than just getting rid of the dead wood. The field of Aerospace Engineering was nearly destroyed by the massive cutbacks in military and NASA spending during the 1970s. Everyone read stories in the newspaper about highly-skilled engineers driving cabs and losing their houses. The follow-on effects wiped out many academic programs. Most of the best students went to other fields where the job prospects were not so dismal. NASA now has a severe demographic problem with its workforce. Many of its best people have died or retired, or will do so in the near future.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
That's alright. A company of all techies will still get stuff done. A company of all management will starve while trying to tell each other to do the work.
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
Try this: learn to speak and write English correctly. The folks in India produce good code for less money while, at the same time, speaking and writing better English than most Americans. I am not trying to be funny here. The truth is that it's very sad. On the upside, though, I can tell you that if you can communicate well, both verbally and in the written word, AND you are technically proficient, there is work for you. I am living proof. You CAN do it. I was a starving journalist when I decided to dive into systems administration. I made IT Manager in three years at a nice little firm of about 250 employees, and it pays just fine. No weekends or nights for me, either. It is staggering to see the oceans of techies who can't spell, refuse to use a spellchecker, and wet themselves at the thought of speaking to a room full of execs.
It's only funny until someone gets hurt. Then, it's hilarious.
It's true, Education majors are some of the only people that get to skate out of a science credit. So you end up with a bunch of non-techie teachers.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
I agree with the general sentiment so far - that this is good for the industry. But think about what this means long-term.
Even if you are interested in Computer Science or Engineering, you are fighting an uphill battle trying to do that for a living in the United States, because you are so expensive compared to overseas labor. We are therefore going to see a brain drain in the long term, resulting in a condition wherein we no longer posess the skills necessary to support our civilization - all because we insist upon placing unmaintainable burdens on our economy, such as artificially controlled markets by a business oligarchy (vote Bush!) and the suffocating support of aging baby boomers by a public geriocracy(vote Kerry!).
who are those slashdot people? they swept over like Mongol-Tartars.
When the drop in enrolments first started to appear, it was shored up by running industry training courses, like MS and CISCO. This is all well and good, but these are training courses, not University subjects: they don't teach students to think and question. I am not having a go at this type of training, but saying that running it at a university level is inappropriate.
I totally agree with the comments about the reduction being those who were only in it for the money. One of the units I teach contains, wait for it... actual science! This scares the crap out of some stuednts and they even ask "Why do we have to do this? When do we get to play with the toys?". They have no interest in learning how it works, they just want to be trained in how to do it. As an educator, it makes you fairly disheartened. Fortunately, there are still those students who are keen to learn and show an interest and ask questions, and with numbers reducing, these should be on the increase.
The one good thing about numbers dropping off is that, as people have commented here, the ones we get in now should be more interested in learning, and we can get rid of the trend towards running training, and get back to educating people to be thinkers.
"They looked deep into my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined"
It's been my experience with higher education that they are just like corporate business. Instead of share prices being the overall objective, it's the enrollment number and retention rate. Since computer science and information systems were the big programs roughly 5 years ago, they were dumbed down to accomodate more enrollment and to keep the lesser skilled and less serious students enrolled. This is just a case of the higher of administration simply looking a bottom line numbers and not on the quality and integrity of education that is being offered.
Of course, this is simply a narrow view from my experience with a couple of universities, but I gather that this is the trend with all universities across the nation.
Engineering disciplines are simply volatile. History proves this. The only difference now is that it seems the peak and trough on the graph might be a big bigger this time around.
Vote in November. You won't regret it.
From the article:
. machine s/burg.gif
"About the only job these profit-hungry, blood-sucking corporations aren't going to be able to outsource is the kind that requires you to physically be there in order to serve up those burgers and fries to customers." -Bob
sorry bob, they've thought of that:
http://wlc.csumb.edu/student.pages/vending
"Is this just useless, or is it expensive as well?"
?
That's not an insult. It's true. If you want to learn a specific trade, then you go to a trade school, like ITT tech. I'm being very serious here.
Why would you pay insane amounts in college tuition to learn from uber-intelligent professors about specific technologies when you could do that at a trade school? You go to those universities to learn theory, that's what you're paying for. Because being taught that stuff and learning that stuff is NOT something you can get at a trade school.
Your analogy regarding physics and mech eng is a poor one.
They don't have a dept for software engineering because that's more of a job title than it is an areas of study or science (at least as of now). They do, however, offer classes on software engineering.
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." - Martin Luther King, Jr.
As much as US costs are inflated by protectionism, it is still quite a rich country. It is not government funding missing, but rigorous teachers, interested pupils and demanding parents. Ah, and a more general social pressure.
Face it, the US goes downhill, slowly but surely.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
Well whats even funnier, is that our current administration lists burger flipper as a manufacturing job and clearly its obvious that software engineering and computer science is menial... yeah... menial. I hear Mcdonalds is hiring...
SFSU's President just informed the head of their engineering program they're planning on shutting down the college of engineering entirely.
And right before spring break to minimize the protest.
The "I'm not going to have a job unless it's in India" thought has been blown completely out of poportion. I have noticed that students especially have become irrationally afraid of the job prospects out there, and I think it likely has to do with the articles that are being written and the environment that they are in.
The reality is that the job situation is fine. If you are a good programmer, you likely have not had trouble finding work, have not taken a pay cut (even during the downturn), have not lost a job due to outsourcing, and are still comfortably employed with no end in sight.
That's if you are a good programmer. Many people on slashdot have written very eloquently about what it means to be a good programmer and all the qualities that make you one. I won't go into it now.
The truth is that we can't hire enough good programmers. They have been incredibly hard to find over the past few years because of all the dead wood in the industry. Too many people that shouldn't be in the industry at all have been clogging up the hiring system. Why doesn't a journalist write about what a struggle it is to find a good programmer?
Just 1 example: I spent more than 1 year (2002-2003) trying to find a solid Java programmer with some J2EE that actually could "really" program and I found 2 out of hundreds of applicants. Those 2 I only got because we bought another company and I was able to snatch the 2 best programmers into my group.
So if you are a student and you love programming, don't listen to those idiots sitting around you in class lamenting about how you won't have a job when you graduate. You will have a job. Be a good programmer, and be passionate about what you are doing and you will have a job. For now, apply for some internships, there are lots of good companies (ibm and microsoft for starters) that have great internships for someone just like you. Once you see what it's like "out there", you will feel much more comfortable. If you don't want to work for someone else, do some open-source work, it looks really good and shows you can get things done.
I share the same hope as many of the other posters that the quality of graduates will improve. It would save me a lot of time and improve the quality of my day if I didn't have to look at a pseudo-programmer's resume.
[Disclaimer: my opinion is based solely on my experiences living and working in Silicon Valley; I don't know the situation in other countries]
We could certainly use some more lawyers.
Being good at theory means:
* You're good at abstract thinking.
* You love CS.
* You're not distracted by silly things like girls
The people with strong theory backgrounds will be able to grok the changes in languages and protocols that are bound to happen.
Wired News has a story about how American companies are outsourcing not because of cheap labor but because of the American school system not being up to snuff. In a report by the AeA, they contend that American schools don't teach enough math and science anymore.
And how much math and science is needed in manufacturing at the labor end (vs design) (China) or all of the call centers/ medical support industries (India)?
The US educational system may bite, but this is sophistry; this is a reaction to the bad press outsourcing is getting. Most of the jobs don't demand engineering/medical-level math and science.
In a report by the AeA, they contend that American schools don't teach enough math and science anymore."
The AEA is all for offshoring. It represents business interests. So it makes sense that they would give this excuse for offshoring...
AEA: "We're not doing it 'cause we're greedy, honest! We just can't find qualified employees in the US anymore."
Casual Observer: "Errr... Ummm, what about all those engineers over there in the unemployment line?"
AEA: "Oh...yeah... well, um, those aren't the kind of engineers we need these days..."
Casual Observer: "Of course, you're looking for the ones who are willing to work for $7/hour, 16 hours per day with no complaints"
What's the old phrase? 'Get in, drug up, drop out.' Its the new summer o love - only instead of each other its our computers that we have a passion for.
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
The current SAT's have 1.5 Verbal sections and .5 Math sections. I say this b/c about half of the math part is written and the 'process' counts more than the answer (in other words, you can get the right answer and still have the wrong answer, like the verbal section).
.5 Math sections.
Now, some stupid board wants to add a 'writing skills' section to the test (aka, another English section), making it 2.5 English sections to the
That 'writing skills' section is the reason I was not National Merit, as I am not very good at English/Verbal, but got an 800 on the Math section.
So now that we have so much English on the test, a Math person doesn't do as well on the test and thus doesn't get the scholarships or into the best schools. Before you could do ok on one section and well on another and not have to worry about which school you get into. There has been a systematic killing of Math skills by a dumb group of people on a board somewhere.
Of course, this could always be a side effect of placing too much faith in one stupid test.
-CPM
---You're all I need, When the water runs deep, You're all I need, Now I cry my soul to sleep -- Collective Soul, Needs
For the corporations that had to pay through their noses, and were generally abused by their technical staff, during dotcom this must be a far more pleasant situation to be in.
Unfortunately there has historically been a problem getting the youth motivated to join into high tech. The exception to this was during dotcom when high tech looked like a dreamland of guaranteed employment at obscene starting salaries. The offshoring threat will likely make things worse (ie. less kids go into tech). If the industry bosses play to hard-ball, then they won't have anyone to employ at all.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Class of 2002 means you graduated in the summer of 2002?
"but because of the American school system not being up to snuff. In a report by the AeA, they contend that American schools don't teach enough math and science anymore."
If that's true, then the US finds itself a competitor. Losing means economic problems. Maybe we'll reach a point where funding finally flies in the schools' way? Maybe we'll see more computers in the classrooms?
At least I hope so. I was lucky. My high school had just recieved a grant to buy new computers, and at the time, they were top of the line. I was disheartened when the teacher told me they had to last at least 5 years. Ick. The sad thing is, I wasn't even at a public high school.
"Derp de derp."
It's fashionable to complain about how bad the US K-12 education system is. In some areas the complaints are justified, however, I've noticed in recent years that highschools seem to be teaching a lot more highlevel math & science courses than they did in the '70s when i was in HS.
I know of local schools which teach classes in C++/Java and Object Oriented programming as well - you were lucky to find a school with a single computer in it in the '70s.
I recently visited a regional science fair and was amazed at some of the projects being presented there by highschool students. A couple neural net projects, one on how to make better fiber optics... Anyway, I couldn't help thinking that these kids who are into technology are now cursed. They'll either have to move to India to find work that they like or they'll have to give up on their dreams and become lawyers, mechanics, dentists, etc (oh, they'll make a good living in those fields, but it probably won't be what they really like to do)
There is a definite de-emphasis on math and science in American schools. In the name of bleeding-heart liberalism, everyone now has to take multiple hours of world culture classes, which, for those of us in technical (read: the difficult ones) majors, those takes up a lot of time that could otherwise be spent on real work, like programming, math and science homework. I don't oppose the idea of requiring American history, government and the like at American schools, but classes like "world music" shouldn't be general education requirements.
Leave the geeks to their machines, let the rest of us rule them from management.
That attitude of hubris helped pop the dot-com bubble in the first place. The geeks you so derisively malign helped infuse the world economy with *LOTS* of money of which a number of managers at successful companies used to lavish on themselves and their cronies rather than reward said geeks for their services and re-invest the proceeds in the companies they manage to help them survive and grow.
How many wildly successful internet-only business are there left?
eBay / PayPal
Google
Amazon
Those are the only ones that come readily to my mind.
Managers with that attitude are a dime a dozen....
Great managers are the ones that treat the staff as people and not as tools, utensils, and ultimately a drag on the bottom line to be disposed of the moment they are no longer useful. In return, such managers get a loyal workforce that respect them in return--even to the point of sticking with the company through lean times or other hardship.
The poster's attitude may work in the retail and service industries where the profits are slim and employee turnover is high but it *still* isn't right!
Big rant here...
A large part of the problem is that constructivists have taken over the educational system, especially higher education. These are folks who believe that no one person's viewpoint is more valid than another's (all are equally valid and valuable), and that our current obsession with science is in conflict with the notion of being obsessed with, or highly valuing, any one perpsective or "story" more than any other. Fingerpainting should be valued as highly as performing calculus. The result: you are absolved from teaching (i.e., imposing your value system upon the student). If you can't do you teach, and if you can't teach you justify it with constructivist philosophies.
A better solution is to search for the most effective teaching technologies, such as programmed instruction, and use them to create a highly educated populace that can get us out of this mess. Then again, is there anything more threatening than an informed, educated populace?
The Death Penalty: Killing people to show others that killing people is wrong.
Hey guys: I have a news flash for you!
It's damn hard to find a decent, skilled employee/contractor.
Everybody figures they "are qualified", but when push comes to shove, finding somebody to trust, rely on, who will get the job done, who will perform at their honest best, who will put out high quality work and take personal pride in the deliverable?
Damn, damn hard to find.
Be that person, and make sure those you work with know that you are that. Play the game. It will take a while, but once you find your groove, you'll find people tripping over themselves to give you paying projects!
When the right people know that they can give you a project and have it done, and "don't have to worry about it", you will get lots and lots of well-paying work.
Be worthy of trust. Be willing to work your ass off. Develop strong interpersonal skills, and focus on making things work. Make sure those you work with benefit from your work.
It will happen.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
I'm VERY glad to see this. When I graduated from ASU they still taught some fairly sophisticated low level stuff.
Now it's 'Java this' and 'Java that'. They eliminated the C/C++ low end core classes. When students get to the assembly language classes they fail in droves.
I'd rather see them fail early on, before they've invested 1.5 years of their life when they are better suited to something like Broadcasting and Communications.
So you want to be a writer? Well, in a couple of years, your going to be using that paper to roll doobies in your van down by the river!
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
Well I would say it works the other way.
CS is almost what SE should be, at the expense of a real CS program. There should be two programs, and CS should actually teach CS.
(one of my problems in picking a school is trying to find one that didn't teach SE under the guise of CS, I want to go into CS not SE)
I live in a giant bucket.
When I graduated in 2000, 100% of my friends had steady jobs. After the crash, 90% had lost their jobs and some had gotten new jobs.
1/2 = 50%
2/3 = 67%
3/4 = 75%
4/5 = 80%
5/6 = 83%
6/7 = 86%
7/8 = 88%
8/9 = 89%
Therefore you must have at least ten friends, at least nine of whom lost their jobs.
But no geek has ten friends; in fact, most geeks don't have any friends at all.
[Well, maybe Rosie, but I don't know if she counts...]
I am glad to see this as my CS department was filled with people who were dreaming of big money. Instead it will be filled with the dorks and geeks we all love. Those people who dream of talking about the latest CPUs and video cards, who love to program at 2:00am, and who will load up a quake deathmatch instead of going to a trendy nightspot. These things move in cycles and I am happy it is on the downtrend.
I wrote:
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
That is SO MUCH crap, you mindles sheeple randroid.....
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>&g t;
Oops! I meant to say "mindlesS"!
Here is the rest of my post:
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
THere are NEVER more jobs than people. THere never have been. The entire history of the Americas is the story of flooding the supply of labor so that the workers will get less money. Perhaps you have heard of slavery? And all the waves of mass immigration? All about lowering the price of labor.
Hey, moronic Randroid....WE WANT labor prices to be high! That's A GOOD THING, you pre-programmed sheeple. Do you ever hear about business owners complaining that profits are TOO HIGH? Of course not. And our wages ARE our profits.
Outsourcing is just the latest wave in the series of labor-market manipulations by the rich. And it aint great that treasonous little sheeple like you are in it with us all? You are a traitor to your fellow citizen. And if I have MY way, we will get a constitution defining economic treason, and traitors like you will be punished accordingly....
Hey, mods...KARMA TO BURN!
Proposed 28th Constitutional Amendment: Economic Treason (outlaws outsourcing, corporate immigration, etc.)
eat shiat and bark at the moon
You can do both you know. Get a liberal arts degree with an emphasis on computer science. Some people look at this as the easy way out, however it's just another aspect of running a business - being able to clearly explain what it is you developed to someone who hasn't got a clue.
"...because of the American school system not being up to snuff. In a report by the AeA, they contend that American schools don't teach enough math and science anymore."
This is obvious bull, to me personally. I got my degree in 1984, when they *did* teach enough math and science, and my degree is in PHYSICS. But they don't even respond to my resume submissions.
The reason people are outsourceing is strictly because it is the latest fad. Someone could offer me (with 20 years of experience) $60,000 a year and I would jump at it. I'm absolutely certain (again from personal experience with working with employees at, for instance BFL in Bangalore) that at 60,000 I would be far more cost effective than the outsourced solution. I would actually be a lot more effective than that, but I mean assuming I was 10% as productive as I actually am.
It's not about education and it's not really about dollars. The real problem is that employers do not have any idea *how* to hire capable engineers, and they feel that outsourcing is a cheaper solution given the uncertainty. What companies in general should be doing is figuring out how to hire better. I would suggest strict trail periods of 3 months or something, where the prospect is assumed fired until proven otherwise. They real problem is they need to move people in and OUT faster to make room for the capable engineers.
Yikes, first a "non-geek" espousing the merits of management, and then a geek dismissing the merits of the liberal arts.
I'm all trolled out!
I am currently attending RIT for a Masters in Comp Sci. Last May I recieved a Bacholers in Software Engineering from RIT. For the past several years, RIT has been trying to deal with it's rettention problem ... right now, the "grand idea" is to reduce the acdemic program. This would involve reducing the maximum number of co-ops and reduce total number of required credit hours.
... and this article is proof of that. Why would I want to hire someone who has less expereince coming out of college ... when I could hire someone overseas for less who knows at least as much. Its a damn shame. Most classes I took were vauable - at least the ones within my major. Its pretty damn obvious that they wont cut math/science/lib arts ... so the only thing that will suffer is the core courses. what a shame.
... its just a bad Idea. If they want to solve the retition issue, they outta look at revoking the dry-campus policy.
This is a horrible idea
Pitty on ol al simone and the administration
/* Lobster Stick To Magnet!*/
If somebody wants to slap together VB apps,
then maybe I could agree with you.
I sure didn't want to do that, and I didn't
want to screw around with LISP either.
Where it the place for highly-intelligent people
who want to be part of a team designing large and
complex software like:
Solaris C library, Linux kernel, Mozilla, Excel,
MacOS X display PDF engine, Oracle, google's
back-end database, IBM's Java JIT engine, VmWare,
vxWorks ports, Cisco router internals...
Sorry, but ITT tech isn't the place. It doesn't
offer a real degree with any standards. It has a
reputation for being a place for the non-so-bright.
I really do see your comment as an age-old insult
that isn't at all fair to those with an engineering
mindset and intelligence. I think you know it too.
Since software engineering isn't commonly offered
as a degree, people go into computer science.
Then of course they complain about all the
impractical and out-of-touch bullshit they get
stuck learning. They get LISP, but nothing about
optimizing data structures for cache layout and
avoiding TLB misses. In computer science, a binary
tree is faster than a multi-way tree. In software
engineering, dealing with real hardware, this is
not usually the case.
There ought to be something besides trade shops
like ITT tech and the mental masturbation of CS.
Until that appears, be kind to the engineering
types stuck in CS.
compsci was trendy for a while, but now the wannabes will major in Speaking Hindi or whatever is hot. leaves more room for folks who want to play with computers not because marc andressen drives a porsche but because they have some talent and enjoy it
Typical attitude. "Oh, liberal arts, that'll be useful."
Well, I have a degree in a fairly specific liberal arts field. And I've worked consistantly as a programmer for five years. Most of my CS friends do not work in the field anymore. They either burnt out or never got a chance to burn in the first place.
Part of the reason for my continued employment is that liberal arts degree. Before I took my first rhetoric class, I didn't understand the importance of politics, networking, attitude or even how to work in groups. Most of the CS courses I took were exercises in elitism...generally, one or two students would do the assignment while the others made the TA do it for them, or devised ways to cheat. A lot of people dreamed of making a lot of money and getting great internships with arms manufacturers, etc, or of getting in with some video game studio and just playing for the rest of their lives.
There was very little really useful work going on. I mean, half of everything was in Pascal. They taught C++ like C and never explained the importance of streams. There was a class in building a web page at 300!
I had planned on transferring into that department, but I said fuck it. I took more rhetoric, and as electives, differential equations and network programming. The rest of it I gleamed from Oreilly books (which are just wonderful).
And you know? My writing skills are better than most programmers. Even if my other plans fall through, I could always write a really bitchin' primer on visual inheritance. Which at my school would be used in doctoral classes.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
However, if he's serious, he'll actually make more money painting cars than he ever would in CS. I knew an auto body shop manager who told me auto body people in my area (AZ) frequently make $100k with overtime. No CS person in this area would make that kind of money unless they had gone into middle or upper management.
This has been an ongoing trend in the US for a long time now. For about 30 years, US citizens have been more and more reluctant to give the "hard" sciences a try.
Take a look at
this to get an idea of what I'm talking about.
A special quote from table 2 is: "Except for biological and social sciences, the number of science and engineering Ph.D. graduates was lower in 2002 than it was in 1992". Obviously we're doing something right as scientests in general if everyone else seems to think we don't need any help!
I say, this trend of decreasing enrollment signifies the re-acceptance of computer science as an actual science by the general public. I think most of the problems with not-so-motivated peers which have been voiced here come from the perception of computer science during the 90s as something other than "real" science.
You guys think its bad that people cheat and make it to their sixth year of CS without being able to do string comparisons or understand working directories?
My roomate in college was in a senior level Electrical Engineering class when someone tried to argue with the professor about why the result of this equation:
(3 * 2) ^ 5
was 96, and not the correct answer of 7776. (I'm simplifying the equation substantially, but the basic gist is the same).
Turns out the man had made it to his fourth year of EE without understanding order of operations.
I currently have no clever signature witicism to add here.
Look around your workplace (or recall the one you had when you got laid off).
How many of your coworkers are self-taught enthusiasts, compared to the number who studied "Computer Science"?
How much math and science does your job require? How much of that were you taught in school, and how much did you pick up on your own?
If the schools are not teaching enough math and science, there could still be quite a few qualified candidates for technical jobs.
I'm honestly not trying to be condescending.
They get LISP, but nothing about optimizing data structures for cache layout and avoiding TLB misses. In computer science, a binary tree is faster than a multi-way tree. In software engineering, dealing with real hardware, this is not usually the case.
This will happen if you only take the first class in CS and that's it. We had lisp for one semester and the point of it was to learn about programming, which I think it did well. We did learn about caching and TLBs later on in operating systems (which was done in C++, not LISP). Nowadays teh data structures classes are done in Java. Lisp is still reserved for the first 2 introductory classes (the absolute first one being optional).
HOnestly, I've never attended ITT so I dont' know the quality of their education. Yes, you're right in that it would be cool if you could learn more about developing large projects.
My point is that you can't knock "higher tier" schools for teaching theory. "Software engineering", you have to admit, is more about code application than code theory. I was simply saying that code application and the practicalities of it can be taught anywhere, whereas the higher-end schools are better suited for teachign theory.
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." - Martin Luther King, Jr.
I use calculus, statistics and group theory at work. They were anything but a waste of time.
Even if you never use such things, mastery of undergraduate calculus shows that you can think, and shows that you understand the sometimes veering approach mathematics takes to solving problems. If I ever interview you, I want to see evidence of these qualities. I don't give a shit if you think it's useful or not. It is useful, though the reasons may not be immediately apparent to you.
...laura
Actually it depends on what school you go to.
I went to Berkeley and all we learned was theory and CS (not SE) unless you took a class that was specifically called Software Engineering.
I had another friend who attended the "CS" program at Harvey Mudd and from the sounds of it (he told me what he learned) a good portion of it was actually software engineering rather than cs. I think he still leraned some cs though (but it definitely sounded more SE oriented because he was throwing around all these enterprise buzzwords).
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." - Martin Luther King, Jr.
This is only mildly related to the article, but it made me think of it.
I skipped CS for aerospace engineering, deciding I'd keep computers/programming as an interesting hobby. Now I'm contemplating taking some random CS/SE classes to get some kind of formal working knowledge. I'd like to contribute to open-source projects, but I don't really know my stuff (besides some Perl and such).
So should I skip the CS/SE courses and head for the O'Reilly books? Or what?
By the way, this also may have some bearing on the article. I've seen a few posts in this discussion (and others) from people who love their programming, but who decided to keep it a hobby instead of ruin it with business and politics. So perhaps there are lots of "doing it for the love" people opting out, who knows.
WeRelate.org - wiki-based genealogy
I grew up in Illinois, next door to your state, and we had more than our share of community colleges and "direction" schools as we called them. Tuition at all of our public schools was compairable, I went to U of I. because it was the best one I could get into. Are you telling me that USI is substantially cheaper than Purdue or Indiana University? Purdue in particular has excelent engineering programs.
Unfortunatly I agree with the parent, during my time at UIUC I saw the CS program (which I was not in, I minored in CS and majored in TAM) get a lot easier at the freshaman level, and now all the kids that were switching to business majors the year I took the intro CS class, were passing, and they are going to start taking advanced classes were they will severly slow the learning of those who deserved to be there, or have to switch majors in their 3rd or 4rth year...
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
I'm in my second year as a computer engineer. We've all come to realize that we're probably not going to learn anything. The only thing we can do with proficiency is figure out how to do a problem well enough since the teachers can't teach. It's frustrating, but it's better than being a history major.
Even if you never use such things, mastery of undergraduate calculus shows that you can think,
Maybe, but it's hardly the only thing that shows you can think.
If I ever interview you, I want to see evidence of these qualities. I don't give a shit if you think it's useful or not. It is useful, though the reasons may not be immediately apparent to you.
Remind me never to apply for a job where you work. You are obviously somebody who has a big batch of pre-determined notions, from which you will not deviate, even if it means trying to put a square peg into a round hole.
Why do I have this image in my head of you, with a big-ass hammer, hammering on a square wooden peg, while somebody in the background yells "Hit it harder, hit it harder!"
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
(Here I get to plug my own site, sort of)
Does CAD Degrade Drawing Quality? compiles a few weeks' worth of reader comments about computers, engineering and current events. The original source of the comments (reprinted with permission) are from Ralph Grabowski's upFront.eZine, which is a weekly newsletter all about the CAD industry.
Haveing trouble paying the bills I see.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
I'd rate this post as one of the most stupidest posts I've read on slashdhot.
Why do you think people invest in stocks? Maybe to make money? You can raise net income by raising the revenue but there's a limit to it. So to maximize the net income, you also need to cut expenses, including labor costs. If the profit suffers, stock prices suffers as well and the rich aren't only ones stuffering. Good example would be the average Joes who found out that the value retirement accounts halved or even worse after the bust.
I don't want to remain a poor defense worker like you that bitch on slashdot all day because you are too close minded to do anything else. I've started a small side business, and even though the odds are against me (9 out of 10 small businesses fail within the first year, 9 of 10 remaining fail within 5 years). But even if I do fail, I can at least say I did something about it.
Take Esther Diller for example. She was a single mother when she was laid off in late 2000. Instead of giving up, she started her own mortgage brokerage firm in less than a year. She's doing good know, and even has a staff of ten people. That's right, she CREATED jobs!
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
ghettology and beer 101 to worry about making a living or god forbid, bettering themselves.
They would rather walk around in a stupor with their pants hanging off their asses and baseball hats on sideways, listening to cRAP like morons.
This country is going to implode. The brain drain has been on for 40 years. The begining of the end was the 60's with the dope and the anti-establishment shit.
With all the offshoring underway, this country will FAIL as a country within 25 years or less, I suspect much less. America will become a third world country and will be invaded by a foreign power as the economy collapses.
I see America becoming the mirror image of the former Soviet Union..
Let he that hath eyes, see...
I think that you'll have a hard time finding an IT job since most of them require 4 year CS degree and all the CS programs I've been in requires several semesters of Calculus.
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
A knowledge of algorithms is constantly useful because you are aware of solutions less informed people wouldn't even think of. For example, I've cast a couple of problems as "the stagecoach problem", a kind of shortest path problem for which a very fast and elegant solution exists. It's behaviour almost looks like artificial intelligence.
I've also made use of Voronoi diagrams (a solution to the nearest neighbour problem), which has numerous applications, one of which is fast 2-dimensional searching.
Knowledge of least-L1-norm algorithms has helped me develop robust software where the "obvious" solution would fail miserably.
I didn't use knowledge of algorithms to create new algorithms (as you say, most of that work has been done), but to find solutions for applications that wouldn't even occur to someone without such a background.
this is certainly true with me. I have spent everyday of my life (slight exaggeration - but not by much lol)on computers. Building, programming, and repairing and now I am finding myself unsure of just what it is that i want to do with the rest of my life. All of these reports in bus. 2.0, wired, here on slashdot etc... have just got me to scared to even attempt it. Where there was once an opinion of wealth and respect, there will soon be an image of cheap labor. Id rather turn to some other sort of engineering that will still allow me to work with technology and other fun "geeky" things but with far more security than to continue on my current path towards an uncertain future
We seldom regret saying too little but often regret saying too much.
The reason high-tech jobs are being outsourced is because there are fewer high-tech skills being taught domestically. Universities at the undergraduate level have become what "high school" used to be -- a piece of paper that says you've got the minimum skills and education necessary to participate in the economy.
:) Even now there is lots of work. It makes me wonder where as a society we are headed, though - Many of the people I have worked with were not born here, and this is more and more the case as I move up my career and get to more difficult and advanced projects.
I have an EE degree. Mechanical and Electrical Engineering at any Canadian University anyway are much more difficult than any other undergraduate program on campus - to the point where it is foolish. I imagine the situation is similar in the US. Part of this is because you can't dumb down engineering - there are professional review boards that make sure that doesn't happen. Engineering has actually changed very little - same math people learned 50 or 100 years ago - but if all you want is a degree, you'd have to be insane to literally beat yourself stupid for 4 or 5 years.
Most of the people in the program I took got NAILED by the math. I had a rough time, but I did OK, mainly because I can teach myself things - Profs don't help much if there's 100 people in your class, they can't. Enrollment went from 180+ my first year to a graduating class of about 40, same as it's always been.
One interesting thing though is once I understood the math, it was like some light went on in my head, and it wasn't that hard anymore. I struggled with basic mathematics early on, and I really don't know why. Why is math drilled into people's heads as "hard"? I know learning STUPID USELESS DRILLS in grade school is something that the education profession should be UTTERLY ASHAMED of. Why do students not learn about set theory and relationships early on? We have these wonderful machines for drawing math - math is all about pretty pictures, really - teach students THAT instead.
On a practical measure, why should a student go through hell.. (sleeping on floors so you'd wake up for 8:30 classes, 2-4 labs per week, my last year I had 75+ pages of assignments due EVERY week plus labs!) - when you could just go do arts instead, then study law, and have a good time? There is no guarantee of a good job any more if you slug it though.
It's good for me in engineering now - I have had no problem finding work as an embedded systems / hardware guy, not many people can program with only an oscilloscope to debug.
What's going to happen in 50 years, when all these other countries realize maybe they don't need to pander to a nation of marketdroids and attorneys?
Interestingly enough - engineering is one of the most democratic and fair programs - when you do a page of calculus to solve a kinematics problem, it's either right or wrong. Unfortunately, if it's wrong, there isn't much to work on.
Oh well. I know I'm busy.
..don't panic
"American school system not being up to snuff. In a report by the AeA, they contend that American schools don't teach enough math and science anymore.
I'm an American math and science teacher. I have found that the basic American student is trying to avoid thinking less and less. I've seen many students drop out of Algebra II and Pre-Calculus and take consumer math because "it's too hard". American parents are too busy making too many excuses for their children also. Students don't want to take a structured programming class because it would require them to find and correct their own mistakes and think too much. I have a hell of a time getting them to do that in my HTML class.
I know there's all kinds of self taught programmers out there (myself included) because your school didn't have a staff member knowledgeable enough. I know there's a lot of schools out there that are way behind the technology.
With that said, the US is going to do nothing but fall behind unless more students find the desire to think.
Mod me down, but I'll never hire a biologist or a biotechnologist in a place were evolution is not part of the curriculum.
DNA in your Linux: DNALinux
As a Ph.D. student in Computer Engineering, I can attest to the fact that schools today lack a requisite in math and sci. As an undergrad I took more math as I knew I was going to go for an M.S. in Physics. In physics, I took even more math to stay on top of the courses. Now in my Ph.D., it scares me to see EEs and CEs at the M.S. and Ph.D. level that do not know matrix algebra, differential equations or numerical analysis.
Listen up, if you are going to go into any engineering major or science major, take more math. It can only help you. (even if you do not use it, you will learn to look at problems in a different light).
They might get 'stuff' done, but it probably WONT be 'good quality stuff', nor will it be 'stuff that people want to pay for'.
As much as we (as engineers) like to chide and ridicule the 'sales end' of a business, plus everything in between (such as product management), they're TOTALLY necessary if you want to earn money from the coding you do.
Incidentally I went back through your most recent posts and the longest one I could find (out of the top 12-15) was four sentences. Do you ever say anything worth expounding on?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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Only one other student in my class knew anything about Linux/BSD/UNIX or anything outside of Windows. You know whats worse? Most of those other students are now in their MBA classes after their BCS. They will be leading IT technicians, the likes of us.
I remember in the second year, the blabbing away of Von Newman architectures, inputs and outputs etc, without any real examples at all. Next class, learning ADA and the students copying structures from each other or googling around to find a piece of code that does the job. Genuine interest in technology was unheard of, except for a small (3) group of Quake enthusiasts. I was so bored.
Tough luck that I couldnt do more than 2 years of college for personal reasons, and am now in the workforce, while theyre in their MBA classes, once in a while emailing me to ask how to get rid of Gator, and help them with their assignment to describe what FreeBSD is.
I sure as hell wouldnt put much value on college grads if I were hiring. I'd test them myself with complex and multiple interviews. Its the only way.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
This is definately the case. I am a combined degree Computer Engineering student and I am now going to be attending law school following the completion of my MS in Comp Eng
In my case it is a combination of current trends along with my realization that I really don't want to be a traditional engineer anymore. The real problem is that there aren't that many interesting problems to solve in the field. The majority of the work for graduating engineers is life-less Database Applications or some other horribly boring nonsense. Even traditional hardcore engineering isn't that attractive to me anymore. The nature of the work is no longer dynamic, and I feel as though I stopped learning some time over a year ago. Everything is just a permutation of something I have already seen/mastered.
I also agree with the statement that many of our graduating EE/CE people don't know what they are doing. I certainly saw enough of that through TA and tutoring.
It is really unfortunate, but it seems like an entire generation of very talented folks got into Computer Science/Engineering and EE but ended up finding out that at the end it really isn't as challenging in the everyday job. As a result, people like me that are at the top of their class and have lots of experience are looking for other options to avoid the horribleness of the employment situations.
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which, when expressed fully, is
There are plenty of people with all sorts of skills in the U.S. but companies aren't willing to pay for them.
This is not that producer/consumer with circular buffer that compsci profs are inordinately fond of using? That just screws up more people. They're always wandering into c.p.t. asking for help. It's usually too late by that time. They are hopelessly confused beyond redemption.
Someone with all of the above skills can command a six figure salary in basically any population center nationwide. I have experience with the basic auto body and paint, I'm OK at them, and with AC - I can recharge and reclaim and retrofit, but I'm pretty shabby on diagnosis so far - still I know everything you need to know about AC to work in an auto body shop.
I actually got into this stuff because my car needs body work, A/C work, alignment, and so on, and while I fix it I can be learning useful skills with which I can make money. I plan to get my A/C certificate soon, and I'm going to take the alignment course in the Fall assuming everything works out. If I know about that stuff, I can get a job making good money in a body shop without even doing that much body work. I hope :)
I was making 60k/year when the dot bomb dropped, which means I was basically a mid level technical employee. Now I am well below the poverty line. But, I'm still happy, mostly because I'm learning, and I love to learn. I will however be happier when I have more money, without which "civilized" (read: car, computer, internet access, clean running water, etc) life is a real pain in the backside.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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Instead of everyone whining about how they can't find an IT position, find a problem that you can solve with your IT skills and create the job for yourself. It's hard for an employer to outsource a position (or give it to an unqualified candidate) if that position hasn't been created, yet.
It comes back to a great number of people wanting things handed to them on a silver platter and it's that mindset that caused these problems in the first place.
Cabrillo College in Soquel, CA has or had a quite competent CS program, especially for a two year college. Unfortunately just to take C you had to take Math 4, discrete mathematics. As someone whose eyes glaze over when just trying to utilize algebra (I have no idea why I can write programs in assembly language better than anyone else who was in my class - and a couple of them were exceptionally bright kids - yet I cannot retain algebraic mathematics) that basically put me way, WAY out of the ball game at that school. I'm not sure why they were demanding so much math, since A> computers are good for more than just mathematics and B> it's possible to understand the ideas of grouping, order of operations, functions, inputs, and outputs without taking higher math. I know this, because I do, and I haven't.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Why would anyone go into the humanities, get a PhD in history and figure they could get a job as a museum curator
Dear Sir:
Thank you for your latest submission to the Institute, labeled "211-D, layer seven, next to the clothesline post. Hominid skull." We have given this specimen a careful and detailed examination, and regret to inform you that we disagree with your theory that it represents "conclusive proof of the presence of Early Man in Charleston County two million years ago." Rather, it appears that what you have found is the head of a Barbie doll, of the variety one of our staff, who has small children, believes to be the "Malibu Barbie". It is evident that you have given a great deal of thought to the analysis of this specimen, and you may be quite certain that those of us who are familiar with your prior work in the field were loathe to come to contradiction with your findings. However, we do feel that there are a number of physical attributes of the specimen which might have tipped you off to it's modern origin:
See Smithsonian Barbie for the rest of this.
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Sorry, it's a bit OT... I'm currently in my 3rd year of CS studies, and have very little commercial experience. It seems most employers require at least 2 years of experience, except for those offering graduate programs (the places are very limited). Over the past few years I've been involved in a few open source projects (started some, and contributed to others), and I wonder whether I can use that experience in my job hunting? Will that count as actual experience? Otherwise it'd be pretty hard for me to prove that e.g. I know Java, Perl, etc.
As business processes become business services (i.e. business processes transformed into web services), entire companies will become virtualized... Nearly every single component of a company will be outsource-able... Not only that, most of these business services will be automated rather than done by people (e.g. customer support will almost be self-service). Yes, there will still be people doing customer support, but it will be a skeleton crew. In short, the tech boom in India is another bubble because what they are doing now will be automated in the future. It might go to China or the Philipines first, but ultimately it will be automated. The folks in India better move up the food chain pretty quick. Otherwise, they will be lefft behind.
you could hardly assure her yes
Parent is implying a girl would be asking about a career in computers or is otherwise interested in computers.
We all know this is false or it is the sign of the End Times!!
Run Away!!!!
-- taking over the world, we are.
Don't worry, come this time next year you can higher me and my computer science degree...
Well, as many others have said- I'm still going to major in computer science when I go to college. I love programming, and to be honest, I think that outsourcing just weeds out the people that don't really have a passion for computer science- those that if hired may take jobs away, but don't really "deserve" to have those jobs. Just my opinion, but I think that that's the way it is.
- Code Dark
WE WANT labor prices to be high!
Speak for yourself. Actually, don't speak at all until you learn basic economics. Hint: increased productivity is *good*.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
Exactly what I was going to say. People are always going to be smashing up their cars, recession or not. A good mechanic who also has a decent business education isn't going to go hungry.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
The Computer Science and Engineering departments are abandoning their students. CSC enrollment is up something like 15% this year, while the school's entire enrollment is down about the same proportion.
Meanwhile, they laid off three professors in engineering and computer science to help pay for four new english professors. The college already has over 50 english professors, and now under 20 computer science and engineering professors - and most of the engineering professors are just physics and chemistry professors who signed up an extra class.
To make it worse, there's at least three CSC professors who are just teaching one or two 100-level intro courses that hardly anybody takes so they get their paycheck.
I'm in my third year, and it'll take a minimum of 2 more for me to finish my CSC major, and that's if they actually start to offer 401 again (highest *REQUIRED* class in the major, hasn't been offered in four semesters).
You better watch out with this "money" talk. Pretty soon you'll have a bunch of people telling you don't need all that stuff to be happy, and all you really need is a bamboo hut with a straw roof to sleep in between your 18-hour days at Megacorp, Inc. which you volunteer at, because you should have such a passion for your work that you don't need to get paid for it, and if you complain that people at McDonald's are getting paid more than you, even though you spent 6 years and $100k getting two degrees, then you don't really have a passion for tech and should be working somewhere else.
How hard was it to get an A/C certificate anyway? Did you have to attend a tech school?
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Wow, imagine that-- students making rational decisions. So of course policy makers should be worried.
Let's see, you can:
a) Work your ass off for 4-5 years in, what is usually, a very difficult academic program. Then you can, if you are super lucky, find an engineering job where your employers will work you to death. You will live under the cloud of being reminded that your salary is 5X higher than those equally talented people from 3rd world countries, any one of which could be brought in on a moments notice to occupy your chair (h1b, L1), should you stumble. Of course, since there is an near infinite supply of technical labor available to US companies, you will have zero salary mobility. Well, ok I'm exagerating, you won't have *zero* salary mobility-- you'll have some *nagative* salary mobility, which is what is currently happening to most of the engineers I know.
As you get older, if you are stupid enought to not switch careers, your peers will not get older with you. You will constantly be surrounded by 25-30 year old 3rd world engineers, as management continuously rotates in "fresh blood". Better not even think about having a family and working sane hours. All of your peers will be virtual slaves (h1b and L1 visa holders) who are forced to work up to 80 hours/week without any extra compensation for the overtime. That's because non-resident "guest" workers wouldn't dare complain about any request made of them from management-- if they did, they would be on the first boat back to Katmandu!
Then if you manage to survive to your mid-thirties as a practicing engineer, it's time to start thinking about a new career. Except for a handful of superstars, there is no such thing as a 40+ year old software engineer in the United States. You are regarded as a fossil by age 40. Just when your friends in other fields such as academia, law, medicine, business, are reaching their peak earnings and career potential, your career will be winding down. If you are lucky, you can maybe make the jump to management. However, you'll be at a competitive disadvantage against those who started earlier on the business track. In fact, those who skip the engineering altogether and go straight to business school are much more likely to get jobs managing engineers than engineers rising through the ranks. That's because US companies don't not require engineering degrees for the vast majority of their engineering management positions.
b) You can go to medical/dental/law/business/plumbing school. You will not have to perpetually compete with 25 year olds from China. That's because all of these "professions" are protected by guild systems. How many doctors hop off a boat from Bangalore to immedidately start practicing medicine in the US? Precisely 0.0. That's because it's illegal to practice medicine, law, or plumbing in the US without the appropriate guild credentials and licensing. That's because these professions are protected by powerful political lobbies that would never allow their golden egg laying geese to be killed.
In these professions you will have a *career*. There will be a recognizable career trajectory that can actually last past the age of 40! You can spend time with your family, have people work for you, have time to date.
Tough choice.
And I suppose you are going to use that as an excuse to not to save/invest? I suppose you are the type who believes that you can retire on social security alone.
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
Subject: Wired: feedback: re: Outsourcing report blames schools
From: "A. Lizard"
The problem isn't a lack of trained and educated people as recent reports from the IEEE showing increased unemployment demonstrate.
The problem is a lack of trained and educated people willing to work for minimum wage.
Your repeating industry propaganda uncritically serves nobody except your advertisers. We expect better from Wired News.
When I tried to send this to Wired News via their contact form, the above is part of 1 of the 12 bounce messages I sent. Perhaps Wired News needs some trained and educated people to run their own computer systems. Before people start asking questions about the competence of Wired News to address technological issues. Of course, one doesn't have to have competent reporters willing to do research if their news source is recycled corporate press releases.
The article itself is just pro-outsourcing spin control. The essential industry complaint is that nobody in the USA is stupid enough to put 4 years into getting a degree that will entitle its owner to a minimum wage gig. If US companies actually want kids to study high tech, they will provide a reasonable assurance that middle-class jobs will be available for kids who study technology when they graduate from college. That's all they have to do. Instead, they are pushing college kids out of technology fields by doing the opposite. The kind of bullshit reassurances they're getting from people like Bill Gates, whose encouraging words can be translated to "Go to school and get your degree, we'll cherry-pick the best 5% of you and the rest of you have wasted tens of thousands of dollars and hours in vain pursuit of a degree which will entitle you to flip burgers" are not going to be bought by anyone smart enough to get a tech degree to begin with.
However, the best attack on outsourcing is that it is indeed a high-risk strategy. All we generally hear about from the mass media and business magazines are the "good news" stories about how wonderful it is and how it's a competitive necessity. Here are some stories about outsourcing gone bad. Some of the companies discussed in the collection of articles this links to. . . are no longer with us and there's no question that their decision to outsource was responsible. It is apparent that outsourcing is being pushed without due diligence and often without regard for long-term consequences even to the companies whose investors are supposed to profit from this.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Unfortunately the parent post rings true. Science education in the public schools in the US tends to suck, especially when parents in some areas are fighting to have biblical doctrines taught in science class or want real science taken out because it conflicts with Biblical information. Many of the teachers I had did not even have a BS in their field. If you did not solve the equation/problem *exactly as written in the instruction book* then you were wrong.
Also, the public school system seems to focus more on social engineering than actual education these days, especially middle school. In Florida there were 5th graders taking almost algebra one and 9th graders taking algebra two. They had experienced about one actual year of education over the course of three years time, and this was before Columbine. Personally I got lucky and went to a public high school above and beyond the rest, but in many cases our poor schools are causing droughts of people trained or even interested in technology, science, or anything related. Our schools should be a focus for reform as quickly as possible if we want to reverse this trend.
As long as there is a Second Amendment, there will always be a First Amendment.
I study at the University of Edinburgh, and the entire Informatics system runs on a customized version of RedHat. They teach Java instead of C (okay Java sucks, but for a lot of tasks everything else sucks more) but the electronic submission still happens from the good old command line (they teach a bit about how to work on your assignments from home, but generally the focus is on using a Linux machine there).
;)
That and the Inf labs are 24 hour, and the machines are fairly specced up with DRI on the X server... hmm. Obviously that's just for that Java3D Fractals assignment we had to do
Good uni this, and the four year course is also a plus (although that's an opinion of mine few agree with for some reason). Just wish the first year wasn't a total pisstake; the only assignment we've had so far which wasn't a dumb "fill in the gaps in the skeleton code" exercise was an Instant Runoff Voting system, although that might have something to do with the fact that you could count the number of people who have actually written a single line of code before in that class on one hand... they're smart people though, just about everyone had much better A-Level results than me (I think these are the UK equivalent of SATs, although confusingly enough SATs in the UK are a different set of exams altogether, they're for little kids)
If they say it isn't about the money...then it is.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I am a first year computer engineering student in Canada and I found it a very difficult decision to make.
I dont think that Comp. Eng. is going to be offshored nearly as much as Comp. Sci jobs will be, which is one of the main reasons why I chose comp eng. I was reading up some statistics from the US government about average salleries and the such, and despite the "offshoring" theory, Computer Engineering remains one of the fastest growing engineering job sectors in america. They also start with the highest pay of all engineering degrees.
I am not sure what those stats really mean, but I couldnt really picture myself doing anything else, and I think that if you are truly good at what you do, you will get a very good paying job. Same goes for comp. sci. in my opinion. Although the sallaries may be lower, and theres more graduates than comp. eng, if you are truly good at it, then chances are you will get a decent North American job.
I mean, you cant really offshore EVERYBODY can you?
There is nothing wrong with generating a little mystique. Some of the geeks that I work with, bless their hearts, wear Business Casual ensambles that only a mother could love. When dressing 'professionally' causes coworkers to laugh at you, maybe black leather isn't such a bad idea...
===--===
Just for the record - as one of those people that plans to get a liberal arts degree then go to law school - law school isn't a picnic either.
I know some of you computer science and math people like to ride your high horses and pretend you're so much better than other majors, but you're full of shit. (Note: To those of you who don't do this, I'm not talking to you, so don't flame me...)
I'm an Economics major, I took calculus and calculus based physics, and I plan to take differential equations. Hell, I lost my 4.0 because I got an A- in Cal II (which was one of the better grades in my class and I even took it as an elective). So you can't tell me I took the easy way out... I'm not majoring in computer science (or math or EE or whatever) because, personally, I don't think it's as interesting and I don't want to do that for a living. I guarentee that my math and science skills are as good or better than most of the CS and related students are. Most of the people in my E&M class are failing and/or taking the class for the 2nd or 3rd time - and I'm the only one in there that isn't required to take the class... So please, don't generalize about the people getting "arts degrees."
In the name of fairness, why don't you go take the LSAT, score in the 90th+ percentile (because that's what it takes to get into a tier one law school), then go look at Havard's curriculum for law school (where you will be doing A LOT of pro-bono work and A LOT of case review, and taking quite a few classes...) and then tell me that law school is a cake walk?
Oh, and please, give me the names of the lawyers you know that are competent and work less than 60+ hours a week. Because all the ones I know wish they had the 40 hour (maybe 50 if there's a big project due) work week you probably have...
I think you (and many other computer scientists and related persons) cover up for your utter lack of English, history, art, and other "lesser" skills by touting math and science as the end all be all.
It isn't, so shut up about it. I know more than one EE major that can't pass his government class or is having trouble with English class, so I wouldn't say that going for an arts degree is the easy way out. You can't dumb down Beowulf or Paradise Lost either.
Not everyone wants to do what you do. Why are my life goals any less difficult or less commendable than yours just because I want to be a lawyer?
The A/C cert at my school requires (IIRC) 1 unit of experience class (basically 1/3 as many hours as an actual class, I forget how many hours you are expected to put in) after doing one 3 unit class in Auto HVAC, in which you do heating, cooling, and air conditioning, including diagnosis, conversion, evacuation, and charging. It is of course all applicable to every other kind of A/C system, including refrigerators and water coolers, because it all works the same way. The only difference is what the evaporator looks like, whether gas or liquid flows by/through it.
But legally, all you need is that $15 certificate from ASE, and all the equipment (thousands of dollars.) Because in order to service A/C on a vehicle (which as previously indicated comes up when fixing plenty of other stuff) you must have a reclamation/recycling unit. If you have multiple locations, each location can have a reclaim only, and you can send refrigerant off to be processed. People will of course take the stuff off your hands for nothing, or you can pay a few bucks to have the stuff turned around for you. With R-12 it's worth it to do so, because the stuff is so expensive.
Oh I forgot to mention, you also need the Auto 20 technical skills class at my school, another 3 units in which you learn to identify and use tools (believe me, anyone can learn something in this class) including precision measurement, broken bolt extraction, eyeball measurement...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
is that you can't just take computer science and come out knowing how to program. Maybe some universities are better than others. If you're not programming on your own time and putting out real demonstrations you're wasting your time with comp sci. I've been very unimpressed with the program at my Uni so I'm cutting out the middle man and switching to getting a secondary education teaching degree in math instead. A degree is a degree when looking for a programming job. It's experience that means anything. And I'd rather teach programming.
I don't need a piece of paper to tell me I know how to program. Certainly not a $16,000 piece of paper. I could buy a car, and the books and teach myself (like I've been doing for 16 years) for that kind of money and do just as well or better.
The students who excel in programming in reality don't need the university. There are those who teach themselves and those who need to be taught. Those who need to be taught will fail in programming because you never stop learning. You can't be a follower and be successful in that field. And if you're the kind of person who can teach yourself, you don't very well need to spend thousands of dollars for someone to teach you.
And in the case of my physics classes I'm paying them quite a bit of money so I can teach myself. Literally. One day a week I'm expected to show up in class and the teacher isn't there. It's just a TA who doesn't say anything. You're just supposed to sit there and work a stupid little workbook of the likes I havn't seen since elementary school. Which is really annoying. And needless to say, I've not been attending. I don't play stupid little games.
The problem isn't that there isn't enough math and physics being offered. It's that it's not being taught.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
I think IT workers have to take anything that a trade association of 3000 companies says with a grain of salt. "We want more trained workers, trained at their, or someone else's, expense" is a constant, never changing mantra of these associations. There is ALWAYS a shortage of trained people in their eyes, there are ALWAYS a huge amount of high skilled jobs that are going unfilled (unfilled at the wages THEY want to offer). The ITAA was apoplectic in the late 1990s about the shortage of trained people there were for careers that would be around forever. And this is the line they continued to play for the past few years, saying people need to come in on H1-B visas with skills Americans don't have and so forth. Meanwhile, I know people here on H1-B visas who told me they never touched a computer before they stepped foot in the US.
So take all of this with a grain of salt. I would trust information from other IT people then some of the doo-doo that comes out of the AEA and ITAA. Check out Washtech.org or TechsUnite. If anything, they help IT workers communicate with one another about various things.
"Wired News has a story about how American companies are outsourcing not because of cheap labor but because of the American school system not being up to snuff. In a report by the AeA, they contend that American schools don't teach enough math and science anymore."
That sounds about right. Even going to a 'technical ' college, there's a strong basis on stuff that doesn't have a whole lot to do with CS. And don't get me started about High School.
I mean, really, has McGuyver (sp) ever gotten out of a situation because he knew proper grammar?
I guess my comment was snide, but there is in fact a lot of money in servicing these new cars. And auto body? Yeh, it pays more than CS. Sad in a way, but also, there is the fact that ***ANY*** good craftsman should be paid well.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
The problem with these jobs is that when you can find the work, it pays well (enough). Unfortunately when you can't find work at all, it pays $0. Regardless of how little you care about the pay, when you aren't working at all, you'll suffer.
However the article goes on to propose better math and science preparation at the secondary level, not the post secondary level. This seems to imply a supply issue at post secondary entry, not a quality issue within the post secondary system.
The article also fails to mention that the stronger math and science prerequisist are included in the EE degree which is where most technically prepared undergradutates are funneled.
Maybe this argument would be bettered framed if viewed from an issue of what constitutes a "computer science" degree. Is it an EE degree, with a CS minor, or a CS degree which can be a broad collection of academic abuses?
What's in a name?
Give me a perm. job and less contract freakin' jobs. Short term BS! No one here is sending their workforce overseas so I could careless about that...they are just all contracting out!!
Now I'm considering going back to school to learn about a trade, like working on cars and such..because it sucks not having a work and all you can look forward to is another damn short term BS contract job.
Blaming schools is nothing more than a cop out. It is all about the money. You can argue that Americans earn too much. That may be true and time will make any necessary adjustments. We have much higher costs than many other countries. We can no longer dump our waste into our rivers - at least not as easily as before. We are not allowed to force our prisoners to work which I would like to change. Though not as strong as Europe we have many environmental and worker's rights laws which simply make us a high cost nation. Add to that a very expensive and over-priced higher education system and I guess we are screwed! When somebody shells out 100k for an engineering degree they just "might" expect a reasonable salary and career. Why spend all that money and go through the effort for poor job prospects, no respect and a mid-life career change? I should know: B.S. Univ. of CA in Engineering, P.E. license, M.S. in C.S. I am a part time C.S. instructor but class size is dropping 20% a semester so I am probably about finished with that as well. Just why go through the effort and expense of engineering / C.S. to have a less than satisfying career...if any at all? Drink your way through college and become a lawyer, I say. Then you can sue your way to riches, right? They seem to be the only ones "winning" right now. Remember, accountants are next. Virtually any job that requires computational competence is destined to be sent outside of the U.S. That is why "smart" kids do not pursue education and careers in math and science. Do we need engineers in the United States? Apparently not!
In the name of fairness, why don't you go take the LSAT, score in the 90th+ percentile (because that's what it takes to get into a tier one law school), then go look at Havard's curriculum for law school (where you will be doing A LOT of pro-bono work and A LOT of case review, and taking quite a few classes...) and then tell me that law school is a cake walk? ...just to shut people like you up. I took enough history courses with my engineering degree to get a minor if I so desired. Even ones that weren't required. I would have LOVED to have become a historian - unfortunately, the pay is miserable.
Not all EE's are illiterate, and this one in particular can legalese with with best of them. So don't paint us all with the same brush - and while I have no problem reading and interpreting Canadian law - I had to take a law course to qualify for the engineering association, FWIW, as well.
All engineers in this country are required to take many economics, arts, and english courses - humanities - so they are well rounded. Arts students IMHO do not have the burden of mathematics and science placed upon them that would make THEM as well rounded.
There are exceptions that prove BOTH rules. The other fact is lawyers do not produce new products in a society. They are a result of people being greedy and utterly miserable to one another. The state of the legal profession in Canada is not as bad as the USA - the concept of "nominal" damages still exists.
Who's the one painting who with the big brush? Nowhere did I state my skills were superior. I stated that EE and ME are the most difficult UNDERGRADUATE degrees to take. If you do an informal survey on campus, you will find most students agree with me. Law is a GRADUATE calling.
Secondly, I stated that I believe math is NOT difficult, and that it is mearly taught incorrectly.
Perhaps you (the lawyer) are the one who should learn to read more critically. Or, are you compensating for something?
..don't panic
As someone who is hiring in the bay area (J2EE folks), we're having problems finding good, qualified candidates.
The problems we see are:
1. Gross overstatement of skills on the resume
2. Bad written or verbal communication skills
3. Bad attitudes (won't function well in a team)
So, I concur that there's a dearth of good, experienced, qualified candidates. Chumps are a dime a dozen.
How does crap like this get modded up? We're still below unemployment levels I was told were theorical minimums in economics classes in the early 90s. The unemploment rate has remained so low for the last decade that most unemployment theory has had to be rewritten. Worse yet, I hve to hear fro myou whiners when the economy really cycles down as it will inevatbly does. We live in blessed times at least economically. Give the credit to the people.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
Yes, we -think- everything is going offshore, oh no! Lets quickly start dumping our program support, then we can make sure to force it offshore even faster!
In a report by the AeA, they contend that American schools don't teach enough math and science anymore.
In my opinion, schools have been placing too much emphasis on liberal social issues. For example, children are being taught gay issues on school time that could instead be spent teaching them how to succeed in life. (I won't say whether or not I am gay. It's none of your business.) I simply think that this subject is completely off topic in the academic environment.
Schools need to get their act together. English class (or whatever language is spoken in your part of the world) should be about spelling, grammar, punctuation, proper use of a dictionary, etc. Currently, English class is an excuse to read and write about liberal social issues.
The way math is taught should be overhauled, because too many students are turned off from it and grow up barely able to balance a checkbook. In fact, basic accounting, a subject that could be considered math, should probably be taught, because children are increasingly growing up very irresponsible financially, and getting into a lot of debt before they get their first "real" job.
Sciences should also be a focus. Physics, chemistry, biology, space sciences, geology, and many other sciences should be taught. Keep kids in school for an additional hour if you need to. It'll keep them off of drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, sex, and other problems.
An area that is currently lacking in public schools is business classes. You don't have to teach anything complicated. Just basic people skills, how to believe in yourself, how to get results. This will go extremely far in most children's futures.
And MOST IMPORTANTLY, schools should offer art classes, auto shop, printing shop, wood shop, metal shop, sewing, acting, music, computer programming, sports, drama, computer animation, and any other "elective" that someone could dream of. (This is not an exhaustive list, only the first items that came to my mind.) And the BEST equipment and instructions, and plenty of time, should be provided for students. These are the subjects that let kids' imaginations grow. These are the subjects that get students interested in school and keep them interested in the boring academic crap. All you need to tell a kid who is an animation fanatic is that "all those other classes are what make you really good at animation." Even if they have to cut funding to the aforementioned boring stuff, and have 80 students in each English class, the auto shop should be better than Jesse James' wildest dreams. And *everyone*, not just property owners, should pay equally for educational taxes. The burden on property owners will be less, thereby causing rental prices to drop, while the revenue for schools will climb.
Billions upon billions of dollars are allocated for the currently useless schools, and the administrators probably jack most of it. This money should be used for constructive purposes. If you disagree, then wait until Mexico gets its act together and people start sneaking the other way across the border.
The liberals amongst you are probably horrified at this point.
But where are THEIR hard numbers? Pot, kettle, black. It's like they're saying, oh, they haven't even proven there's a problem -- but here's what's causing it.
2. Please also keep in mind that they are talking about the outsourcing of ALL tech jobs, including engineering, and not just computer science. Within computer science, jobs ARE being outsourced to save money. It's undeniable.
I object to that article, and to the next reply.
Interestingly enough, we are in process of wrapping up a project for an Indian (as in India) store. The owner told me that he couldn't find anyone in the local Indian community with skills to do the website for him.
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
Next time you have to wait for your bullet train because some high schooler couldn't take the pressure of his or her exams, think about what all that extra schooling can do.
I agree, most Americans could use more schooling, but not the way it's practiced throughout Asia, with tests as early as middle school that can essentially determine the rest of your life.
Also, much of the extra schooling is geared towards test prep, IE here's the fact, now memorize it for the test. Next. For geography this is great, but can stifle innovation. I think it was an article in the Economist a few years back that talked about how Asian schools produce higher marks on science and math tests, but the vast majority of Nobel Prizes for Math and Science go to (North) Americans and Europeans, where there may be less in class time, but independent thinking is encouraged in the classroom.
Oh, Japanese McDonalds do rock the socks off of American McDonalds, same can be said for Chinese McDonalds.
I know we're wandering off topic, here, but moderators, go have a look at the figure on top of p 26 in http://www.tinaja.com/glib/elesimp.pdf before you mod me down. Isn't this sort of like Maxwell's demon? Is this even possible? If so, why aren't these things everywhere?
mt
I agree that the schools here in the US don't teach enough math and science (atleast the college I attend, University of Illinois at Chicago). As a Computer Science major, I have to take 36 (out of 128 total) hours of social science and humanities classes. These classes include: Sociology, Pysch, Poli Sci, Geography, etc.... Most engineering majors have to take less than half this amount (and instead take more math/science).
Whats the point of taking so many social science/humanities classes, when all I do is study the night before the exam, or start the papers 6 hours before theyre due? I've even stopped buying the books to these classes, cause its a waste!
These classes take away more valuable math/science classes. I think I'd be better off if I took Physics instead of Poli Sci 101, or if I took an Advanced math class instead of Geography 100.
I for one look forward to the day when I can articulate the practical and philosophical limitations of the Church-Turing thesis in a single non-recursive function and show the code-monkeys that the hypercomputation of eros transcends techne.
Education??
How many programers do you see writing calculus learned from college on the job?
Its about cheap labor.
For those who got burned hiring bad programers in the 90's ? Tough, but demand accelerated supplys.
How many jr level programer jobs in 97-2001 required CS degree's? I worked at a McDonalds then for a few weeks and 2 were studying to become MCSES! One also had a c++ programing book.
But if education were really the case then why can't even Harvard grads or Berkely grads find any jobs? Most of them take phone support jobs because companies do not hire Americans.
http://saveie6.com/
I'm generally in agreement with your post, but only 24% of the wealthy population got wealthy through hard work/taking risks/living below their means? That doesn't say much for the wealthy, IMHO. I'd really be interested in the breakdown for the remaining 76% of the wealthy!
Quite frankly, despite my repeated attempts to remain optimistic about my work - this is one of the things that always brings me down again.... I really want to believe that hard work and a job done the best you can do eventually brings reward. But it looks like more often than not, the people who have/control the majority of the money got there just by being in the "right place at the right time" (inheritances, for example - or getting lucky in a huge stock rally and selling out at the right time). Others got there by using/abusing everyone they could along the way.
Not a day goes by in my current job (trying to make a small on-site PC and Mac support/service business work) that I don't give it my all. (It's what I really love to do.) But usually, I end up doing work for rather thankless folks who have more money than I'll ever really dream of having - and it's rare that I'm under the impression they attained their wealth through their sheer hard work and sacrifice.
The theory that the free market will always move us in the right direction to respond to any challenge only works in the very limited case where our circumstances permit us to respond to any particular challenge. Now the circumstances were well matched to the challenges in the US economy in the past.
But to assume that it will always be the case is the fundamental error. For an extreme case, consider the 'challenge' of a huge meteor hitting the Earth and causing massive disruption of global weather patterns, and subsequently, global economic activity. Obviously, the 'free-market' mechanism will fail to meet such a challenge. The challenge happens too quickly for the system to respond.
Now here's the point: in an age of ever-increasing technology, we are experiencing rapid challenges and disruptions to our economic status quo. The ability of our domestic economy to respond to these challenges is dependent upon our educational infrastructure, which in turn is dependent upon broader cultural factors such as the ability of families and institutions to provide an effective educational environment for our children.
These broader factors have much greater inertia and change on much longer timescales. The problem gets worse as the technological bar goes higher. Learning Computer Science take years. Learning Molecular Biology takes DECADES (I speak from experience in both fields). So US workers could easily reach a position where the majority will be unable to compete in the modern technological economy.
Just as many nations currently hamstrung by war, poverty and corruption are basically 'screwed', the United States population could end up screwed in the future. All it would take is the continued blind adherence to the ideology of the 'free market' as the solution to all of our economic problems.
That, and maybe the arrogance and ultimate expense of empire building.
mhack
Building a better ribosome since 1997
India got a good start at this. Mohandas Gandhi was a lawyer, after all, but today no one will sue or prosecute genocidal terrorists like Bal Thackeray. Perhaps India can outsource their legal work to the U.S. and defang Thackeray the way we did David Duke.
How about any one of the top 10 algorithms? My fave is the Fast Multipole Method.
So just most managers are incompetent?
Computer Science has more to do with mathematics than MIS. MIS students can't program worth a damn. 4 year degrees are supposed to take 4 years to complete....
And people wonder why we're losing jobs to Indians. Look, I have a CS degree. I'm also a recruiter. I know both sides.
The sad fact of the matter is that CS grads are not qualified for most positions and won't get more than a glance by most recruiters. Voila, in the real world, money is the bottom line, and I'm not going to make money off of a pimple faced geek who thinks that configuring Enlightenment to run transparent windows on a Linux box is the epitome of coolness.
You want to get a job when you graduate? Prepare earlier. Get an internship. Do some real research. If you're looking to get a certification, save your money. Certs mean NOTHING without experience (although Oracle and Cisco certs can get your foot in the door). Learn how to write resumes and prepare for interviews. If you do all that, you might have a chance at landing a job.
Even still, you'll be bringing a knife to a gunfight. I know PhDs who have gotten grants from NASA to develop algorithms who can't find work right now. Sooner or later, geeks will learn that the only reason they're employed is to facilitate business. Instead of getting that MS in CS, get an MBA. Pay to get trained by some of the corporations that produce the software that most companies use. SAP. Peoplesoft. Oracle. Webmethods. Lawson. JDEdwards. Manugistics. You've already spent thousands on a piece of paper that says you labored through a bunch of classes. Spend a few grand more and position yourself to make A LOT of money so that you can spend time doing what you like.
Very few people get to write software from scratch nowadays. You'll be much happier in the long run if you get a job that pays well and is well respected than one that you think you'll like but gets you treated like a spare.
Your life is what you make of it, but the world is what it is. Successful people make it work to their advantage.
As for me, I'm working a day job making a nice living (and if you resent recruiters, you have no idea how risky the job is), and do some remote consulting from home on the weekends. Going back to school with a fat wallet in the fall to get an MBA/JD. I'll be much happier working 45 hours a week at 300 bucks an hour as a financial planner/estate planner while coding on the side than working 45 hours a week for someone else to maintain their code.
they outsource for profit. it's totally dependant on cheap labor.
This is obvious.
Of course companies want to increase their profit. That is the stated or implied motivation behind all corporate activity. And that's how it should be.
Any smokescreen about schools not teaching the right things is total crap. If a company can get cheaper labour then it will do so.
I also agree with the supply and demand comments made elsewhere. Too many graduates who signed up during the dotcom craze, not enough jobs (or at least not enough offering the dotcom wages the grads were expecting).
- Murphy's Corollary: - It is impossible to make things foolproof because fools are so ingenious.
The skills any geek worth his/her salt should be studying, imho...
1) reloading cartridge ammunition
2) manual labor-intensive and technology-poor farming and manufacturing techniques (bootstrap baby, bootstrap...)
3) pioneer-style medical care
The real irony is that a nation of overweight cows sitting in front of the magic box can't even see it coming. When the feces hits the ventilation system, no degree will mean as much as simply being ready to deal with the new 'economy'...and like it or not you can't eat money, degrees, nice resumes, or fancy algorithms...its called hubberts peak, and I believe we just hit it...mod me as off topic, but think about it...
you think it's easy, but you're wrong...
I'm a computer science student who has always struggled with math but I'm sticking to it just because I love to fail and eventually get things right. I'll tell you though, nearly 9/10 people I talk to who have switched majors from mine have said it was because of the math!
9 out of 10 small businesses fail within the first year, 9 of 10 remaining fail within 5 years
Myth.
she started her own mortgage brokerage firm in less than a year. She's doing good know, and even has a staff of ten people. That's right, she CREATED jobs!
Good for her. Did she get a preferred (read: near-automatically approved) guaranteed business loan as a female business owner? Almost certainly. Are such loans available to the rest of us? No.
So how does Joe Unemployed start his mortgage brokerage firm (since he ain't findin' no job anytime soon)? Fill out an application at the bank? lol
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
I didn't think the above post was complicated enough to need the director's commentary, or author's footnotes, or whatever the hell you call it on the web. THE COMMENTS BEHIND THE COMMENTS DUN DUN DUN BEEP BOOP BEEP BOOP BOOP BOOP BEEP this just in, it's not a reoll, or flamebait. I am a student at Yuba College in Marysville, CA. I am at once a huge fan of the institution for the many fine classes that they offer and the many talented and/or intelligent people teaching them. It is a serious shame that California's economy is in the shambles it is in today (yay rah boom and bust!) especially since it is having such a detrimental effect on our school system(s). I probably shouldn't have said "Crappy" but in terms of it suiting me, it most certainly is. Since I'm exceptionally self-centered (but in a generous way, mind you, read my comments regularly to see what I mean) I basically focus on how shit affects me.
I'm probably going to switch to being a liberal arts major and see if I can pick up some certificates in auto body and paint instead of that degree, though it would be a pretty cool degree to have on my wall if I ever make it big. "Yeah I got a college education, and look how applicable it is." Then again I could end up owning a chain of body shops or something, you never know. But the fact is that in the CS program at Yuba you have to take a certain number of units from a certain portion of the catalogue and since you typically cannot repeat a class you have successfully passed you will end up taking shit like COBOL, Pascal, etc. Now I realize that there are fine uses for these ancillary languages (except maybe Pascal) and that learning multiple languages is good for you. But look, I've taken assembler, I'd like to take specific classes on C, Java, and maybe C++ and then once I've got some time and experience with some assorted languages I'd like to take some theory classes to teach me the finer points so I'm not just bludgeoning.
Now, I am from Santa Cruz, and while I have never been a UCSC student I have known many of them, and have had a chance to see what a real CS program looks like. At the same time I have been a Cabrillo student and have had a chance to see what an almost-real CS program looks like. Doubtless one could get a fine education in computer science at Yuba College through it but in the process I would be forced to do things which I frankly do not want to get involved doing in the pursuit of money. As I have implied elsewhere, I'd rather paint cars - and I expect I'd signifcantly more money doing so.
Life is too short to do things you don't want to do that aren't required to make you happy, within certain limitations like not excessively harming others in the pursuit, etc. (Falling over and dying will cause you to consume oxygen as you decay, you can't make everyone happy.
Now back to the CS program at Yuba. I suspect that there are enough people teaching in it to where a motivated student could get a good education, but you couldn't tell by the course catalog. I've found that instructors will typically take the time to explain anything to you if you are able to absorb it, don't annoy them too much, and appear genuinely interested. So you could learn a lot about data structures while taking one of these nauseating classes - but I'm not going to play musical languages to find out which one.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'm constantly (negatively) amazed by the recent trend of the implementation of "non-discriminating" policies by a lot of universities by lowering entrance requirements, making courses easier, etc.
Not having an entrance bias based on height, colour, sex, etc. is reasonable. However, universities should discriminate on intelligence.
WHAT IS WRONG WITH ELITISM???
People who back away from mathematics should have NOTHING to do with Computer Science. The current system is giving them too much false hope, and as a result their career, and our reputation, is hurt.
Less people is a good thing, because it probably means higher quality. I'll say, on top of this, all universities should restore a "gifted" class of sorts, where the best people will receive special, accelerated educations.
You know, it's gotta have as bright a future as IT these days...
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
"In a report by the AeA, they contend that American schools don't teach enough math and science anymore."
This I find interesting. I am a freshman CS and Software Engineering double major at my undergraduate college of choice. My curriculum has so much math that there is a Math Minor built in, and enough beyond the Minor that I could easily get another major in Math. As for science, it's diverse enough that I don't have any built in minors. But there is a lot of it in there.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Or, the people capable of doing IT realize that they can make more money in a factory doing work that only requires a high school degree; so they go work there instead and the guy that was there gets pushed out because he was slightly less competent.
What?
Well said, my point exactly, but better (and shorter) said. There is PLENTY of money waiting in ones' neighborhoods. Learn to sell and network and you could be really good at tech, cars, or any other specific special skill, and the money can roll in. I think the secret to making the individial thing work, is learning to sell. Think of it as a career change. I do tech, but I think of myself as a salesperson, and the tech is my deliverable. Learn to sell first and formost. A good bookstore and a bit of digging though the 10 shitty books for the 1 good gem on the shelf is well worth it. That's exactly how I got started, and several of my friends too. SELL BABY!
This started with a story about college kids abandoning CS and engineering because fresh grads aren't getting jobs. There's nothing new about this. Enrollments have always tracked the market demand. There's not much demand now; companies aren't hiring. Yeah yeah, study something you love. There are lots of interesting things to do but few that companies are willing to pay well for. It's not about skills. It's not about broken schools. Somehow, every offshoring discussion turns into thread upon thread about skills and brokens schools. It's about money $$$. There are vast pools of educated low paid people in countries with low cost of living. Technology business is shifting to those countries. It's NOT because they are smarter or more highly skilled. It's because they are an order of magnitude cheaper. As these high paid jobs leave the US and poor people enter the US in droves, the US standard of living is going down faster than the Chinese or Indian standard of living is rising. Watch energy prices. That's a good barometer for the weakening dollar. The decline in the value of the dollar is a world vote of no confidence in the US economy. So, native US citizens are still saddled with the same debt, mortgages and cost of living but having to settle for menial wage jobs. This plus the decline in the dollar and ultimately, government entitlements will mean most formerly middle class persons will burn through their savings becoming working poor. America will descend to the level of a second then a third world country. Things are liable to get real ugly. You can think of the engineering schools as sort of a canary in a coal mine.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
I took it already. Even went went to business school...
We do NOT want high productivity for ourselves. We want high productivity from the people who WORK FOR US. I hope you see the difference!
eat shiat and bark at the moon
i had a discussion with one of my professors recently about this very topic...he seemed to believe that there are plenty of hidden costs involved with making someone overseas understand complicated concepts...not to mention a possible language barrier.
Yeah, you are actually getting your money's worth. I feel like I've just wasted months of time and thousands of dollars. From my point of view, you're the lucky bastard.
...most 'modern' school systems do not teach their students how to THINK. The emphasis is always placed on getting the 'correct answer', to the point of spoon feeding the students a rote method of solving a problem. To some degree, I've heard that this happens over in Asia as well, where the answer is the most important thing.
Here in the US, most K - 12 teachers are grossly underpaid (or incompetent), we have parents who don't want to be bothered with their kids, while TV and Nintendo are the baby-sitters.
As a child, I always wanted to go into art. Coming from an Asian background, my parents 'convinced' me (more like forced) me into studying engineering. I went into EE and struggled most of the way through. In my junior year, I was able to finally figure things out, and went on to graduating in the top 15% of my class. I am grateful for all those hours spent in the lab, working til 5AM most nights, taking 19 hours of courses my senior year in college (with three design courses), and otherwise living the geek life.
Engineering helped me learn two important things I apply to my life on a daily basis: 1) problem-solving techniques and 2) perseverance.
I'm now working in IT, completing my masters in computer animation, while freelancing as a cartoonist for EE Times (and much happier for it!)
The PC Weenies: 11 Years of Online Tech 'Too
It kinda does show that there are many wealthy people who are no different than the rest of us. I just picked the savers group because that's one sure (but slow) way to get rich. Almost anyone can follow their steps and suceed.
As for the stock, few got lucky and got out before the bust, but there are many people who lost out big. Everyone I knew personally who day traded lost big, but I guess you can't win big without taking big risks.
As for your business, best of luck to you. I'm currently runnng a web authoring/hosting side business myself right now. Sure, the odds are against us, but even if we fail, we can honestly say that we attempted to make our own destiny, instead of just rolling over and whining. Besides, Colonel Sanders were in his 60's, broke after his businesses failed, when he made millions from his famus "recipe".
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
Sorry, I just read Shivetya's post for the fourth time and realized that I had missed the second sentance the previous three times. Boy do I feel stupid. But nevertheless, what I said in my post still stands except the parts where I told you to RTFP.
Sounds like just like me, quit after 70 credits. What pushed me over the edge? Last job I had I was sitting next to CS graduates, making the same $9.25/hr ($19,000/yr before tax) I was...
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
a fine rebuttal.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
He had an idea for a product. Pitched it to the company he worked for, they didnt like it. What he'd have done in the older days was to start a company with one or two friends, and spend a year or two writing it himself. Instead, he contacted a company in India, and got into a partnership with them. This resulted in the company allotting a team of 7 programmers to work on his product, which cost him about what two people's salaries and office space would have cost him here. The product was ready in 3 months, and he spent most of that time marketing it, getting feedback from potential customers, and finetuning the product with his team in India.
What stops any out of work programmer, or anyone not happy with his job, from doing this? Getting jobs done cheaply works for him too, not just for his boss...
The Dirty Work Group
as someone who has been through both the "asian" system and the american system (12 years grade school in sri lanka, and 3 years college in the US), i can say that there are major differences in teh two systems.
in Sri Lanka (most other asian countries are like this i think) you stay in one class and your teachers come to you. the emphasis is on memorisation and rote learning. the text books are mandated by the government and may or may not be accurate. god help you if you dare to question the teachers, or what is taught you. while this system is good for some, it did NOT work for people like me who tend to question what the teacher says.
College in the US was a refreshing change for me. i loved that i could challenge the lecturer's facts and study in my own style rather than the rote learning i was used to. however, my earlier schooling in good stead as i was thoroughly drilled in some of the concepts that the US teaches at a college level. for those who think that the comparison between grade school and uniis unfair, i can assure you that the system of rote learning goes on into the local uni too. in fact my father was stunned/shocked to learn that they are still using the same note in the engineering faculty that he used when he graduated in the 60's
i think that the US has concentrated TOO much on randomised learning in grade school, taking to one extreme what the asians have taken to the other. which is why asian students tend to excel in your system - either they or their parents have spent time in the other system and therefore push the students into some form of extra rote learning. the ideal would be a mix of the two.
the advantages here are that those people who grew up in rote learning make good workers (code monkeys) and those in the randomised system make good "ideas people." it is simply a fact that the rote learning method tends to stifle creativity and lateral thinking. this means that people like me who have not been academically successful, can get into creative fields like conceptualisation and have a group of people who are focused on the work to bring our concepts to fruition
Suchethalearn from yesterday, plan for tomorrow, party tonight
or one out of three ain't bad
I'm reminded of similar situations throughout history, when empires got lazy and decided to 'outsource' the 'dirty work' to others and simply make money off them..
It's a common thing that they do before they fall..
What is happening here is that given a green light to, by Washington, the corporate interests are becoming too greedy. They don't want to allocate too much of 'their' profits to the *people who actually create the wealth*. Instead, they want to play the middleman. The problem with this scenario is that the skills leave the US. Eventually, the loss becomes irreplaceable, because the loss of low and middle tier jobs leads to the loss of upper tier jobs as well. But they wont admit that because they are just in it for the short term profit.. Its a symptom of the way corporations are structured.
History teaches us that in situations like this, it's only a matter of time before the producers and consumers of tech products and services look to eliminate the middlemen.. - basically, US.
Can the US remain a first tier nation, if it only has second tier technology? - NO
Anyway, thats my cut on this...
I can see your argument in regards to the suicide thing, but wouldn't failing a test bring shame on somebody worthy of suicide?
On an unrelated note, you mention you're proud to be an America, and that you've also lived 3 years abroad. Funny how those of us that have lived abroad (myself 1 year in Sweden, 5 months in China, 9 months in Japan, soon to be 10 months in England for grad school) are very proud to be American. I love living abroad, seeing how things are done differently and often times better. I cannot condone all of America's foreign policy, but I often wonder how many Americans that do nothing but talk down America have ever lived abroad. Just a thought. -1 Offtopic, -1 Troll, this is why I stockpile Karma.
People should study engineering because they like to solve problems wtih technology, because they want to develop better ways of doing things, and because they are interested in why and how things work. They should not study engineering because someone suggests it is a sure path to high wages, responsibility, and prestige. We live during a time when technology and innovation in the US have been stifled by corporate bureaucracy, where economic growth means driving the competition into bankruptcy/merger rather than offering something new or revolutionary, and where financial resources are directed towards marketing, sales, advertising, and hyperbole rather than research, education, new ideas, improved ways of doing things or an expansion of knowledge.
Large american companies rarely ever attempt to provide anything new or different but instead concentrate on undermining their competition (if they even have any), obtaining goverment protection and favors for their market share, and generally securing a steady and growing revenue stream. There is unlikely to be much opportunity for creative, bright technical people in those sorts of enterprises. More importantly, there is a huge surplus of technically-trained people worldwide thanks to foreign educational programs that emphasize technical training over other areas. Meanwhile there is an equally large shortage of intelligent people with an education in something other than technology. There will always be a need for technically-educated people but there are a lot of people who have pursued technical educations who are lacking in any sort of aptitude whatsoever for technical work. A more even balance worldwide between technical and non-technical educations might be better for everyone in the long term.
Universities should require every one of their graduates to complete college-level coursework in math, physics, chemistry, and biology but they should not be graduating significant portions of their student body with coursework devoted almost entirely to those things. Declining engineering and computer science enrollments shows that college students are finally recognizing that their opportunities are more likely to lie elsewhere now.
"Wired News has a story about how American companies are outsourcing not because of cheap labor but because of the American school system not being up to snuff. In a report by the AeA, they contend that American schools don't teach enough math and science anymore."
The fact is that most students in Engineering or CS will have the opportunity only to use a small fraction of the math and science they took in college during their career.
"Caching and TLBs need to be covered in your data structures and algorithms classes. Here you should learn ways to avoid touching memory that isn't already in the cache on your local CPU. Performance today is all about avoiding cache misses; the old measures of computational work (math ops especially) are quite useless. This really changes the way you analyse an algorithm; locality is key. Pure computer science doesn't deal with this. At best, memory access is seen as being free. At worst, the fictional Turing machine is used. Pure computer science deals with simplified hardware models and highly mathematical studies of the very nature of computability. "
I'm curious. Did you attend a school that taught "pure computer science"? As far as Berkeley goes, we didnt' just deal with "simplified hardware models and highly mathematical studies". We learned how to do real caching and TLB lookups because we wrote our own OS.. "wrote" meaning "coded". It was all in C++.
So I'm not sure what you're really speaking of when you depict "pure cs" in schools as those that never do any coding projects.
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." - Martin Luther King, Jr.
I think you're wrong on both counts. Companies like to hire new graduates and retain them because they're cheap and their ignorance can be very useful.
First of all, they are easier to indoctrinate in your company's why of doing things because they haven't formed preferences at other companies.
In addition, if a manager gets a "great" idea that in reality is doomed to failure, inexperienced people are less likely to see the flaws. This makes it easier to create the illusion that success is just around the corner and get promoted before the shit hits the fan.
Accountants don't produce new products either, but they sign the cheques. The problem as I see it is about proirity, and many of those that make the decisions often make very odd decisions - so production departments get ignored while others are fattened up until companies die.
I've met lawyers who are very knowlegeable about physics and maths - I've yet to meet an accountant that truly understands simple algebra (even one that thought he was some kind of genius liked to show how clever he was by dividing by zero). This is a bad thing, since accountants tend to end up running companies and aren't tend to do destructive testing on departments that make money until they work out how - which of course stops them making money.
I'm trying to stay the course, I really am. But I attend a college where enrollment in CS classes has dropped a little more than 20%. For the past three semesters classes in graphics programming have been cancelled for lack of enrollment, less than 6 registered students per semester. No oportunity ofr independant study is even offered and if I want the credits for the 200-level classes I have to get accepted at the University down the street, take 300 and 400-level classes and transfer those credits backward! I can't even get the degree I signed up for!
My
Until it becomes a discipline like Mechanical Engineering I'd expect it to fluctuate as it does.
Call me biased with an M.E. degree and then worked on a second bachelor's in CS I will say something that is also lacking today:
Credible Educators
The best Instructors easily make over 100k--at least they did when I worked for NeXT and Apple.
Continually re-educate or become obsolete
Personally, I think that the idea that companies are outsourcing because the college education isn't _up to snuff_ is ridiculous. There is a reason that you get a degree from an _accredited_ school. If you pass, then you should know enough to get in the door and get trained on specifics. Do companies expect us to know everything coming out of college? I thought that was the point of the entry-level positions?! If companies don't feel that BA/BS in computer science is teaching enough they should be complaining to who ever the big whigs are that come up with the guidelines.
I don't have a problem with outsourcing to those countries because I see it as helping those who are less fortunate than myself. Yes, I've been searching for work for the last 4 months since graduation and nothing, but I'll survive, eventhough it would be nice to have a job. If my hardship means that several people (and their families) have a better life than poverty, so be it. I know that not everyone's situation is the same as mine when it comes to this issue, and I sympathize. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion but I don't necessarily see this as totally bad.
On a closing note, I wanted to respond to one of the first comments on this story. If you are just doing computer science for the money I don't think you are in the major for the right reasons. I did it because it was interesting and I was good at it. If you wanted to make money you should probably consider something else like Business. Eventually you may make the money you wanted, but despise the job.
"Hard work never killed anyone." -- Some Dead Guy
I've loved computers since I was a kid and my dad ran a BBS out of the dining room back in The Day(tm). I've been around them for the majority of my life, and I knew from an early age that I wanted to work with computers for a living.
When it came time for me to start college, this whole damned outsourcing trend began and got steadily worse. If I had stayed in college and graduated, I'd have a shiny new diploma, little to no job prospects, and a huge debt looming over my head. Not a good way to start a professional life.
So I enlisted.
I can now get all the job experience I want, along with a free education. And I can stay in the service while waiting for this trend to finally level off.
There are other reasons, of course, but they really don't pertain to the topic.
Semper Fi.
The only reason I keep my Windows partition is so I can mount it like the bitch that it is.
I attend the University of Pennsylvania (go Quakers.) and I was beginning to seriously consider realizing my old passing and going for a Computer Science degree with Mathematics and (maybe) Linguistics on the side. I'm not interested in software engineering as much as I am in the more theoretical side of Computer Science. Am I setting myself up for failure in the long run? I figure I could enter the academy if jobs/research opportunites really do all magically transport to India (not to shun academia, mind you). Here is a link to our Computer Science department.
I get this question every now and then and once was subjected to a psycopathic rampage over it...
I refuse to join the IT workforce.
I have considerable technical skill that I use on a regulare basis.
This leaves people to ask why I won't join the IT workforce.
(One lady actually accused me of being a fraud over it however I believe her rampage has more to do with whom I called my friends than anything else)
The reasons I give are as folows:
1. I don't have quite as much technical skill as I appear to have and I certenly don't have as much as those whom I'd have to compete with for work.
2. Nobody seams to take Brainbench sereously and I let my certificates expire.
3. I can't stand stupid n00b questions. I like kids but they don't insist the computer is possesed by a demon when they forget to plug it in.
4. Even tech support people suck when I try to help. I don't think normal tech support has half as much problems as I do at getting people to work with me. In short yeah stupid n00bs but also Baka Me. I think I don't communicate clearly enough.
5. Cat piss in desk drive. No I'm not joking this actually happend and a repair shop owner told me the story of what happend.
(I make my own repairs.. I just buy the parts from him)
6. There are some repairs I couldn't do on MY computer. How am I to repair other peoples systems if I can't fix my own well maintained box?
7. Hate Microsoft Products..... Burn Burn Burn...
8. Windows confuses me. Let me expain. I learnned command line I know command line I don't know GUI. GUIs usually don't confuse me but they do make me into a n00b. Windows confuses me.
9. I run a small business. I sleep all day. This is fun.
10. I will not now, never did, never will sign a Non-Disclosure agreement. It's an offence against God (and I mean root not any deitys) and Man (Not man pages but the ugly bags of mostly water that we are).
And the work I usually see is the work I do.
I don't need to fight with you peoples for work I'm fine.
I don't actually exist.
Hell I can't get into the damned department at my local U (University of Washington), a 3.6 GPA minimum is required, some students don't get in with a 3.8 or even a 4.0! It is crazy, CS is one of the hardest fields to get into around here.
.
:)
Wait. . .
*looks at where he is at in the country*
Doh.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
Except for a very few jobs in scientific establishments and some types of research departments, most working software engineers are not required to know a lot of science in their working career. Mathematics, at least in some of its forms and in general mathematical aptitude is more useful. But how many of us make use of 2-4 semesters of calculus as programmers? How many of us even get to use our linear algebra? How many of us even get to write frameworks or libraries? There is a growing assumption that frameworks and libraries only come out of standards bodies or big and/or successful companies. If it is "a standard" it is blessed regardless of whether it is worth a damn or not.
The reason the jobs are leaving is that:
a) business has no idea what good software is about or how to depdendably produce it;
b) neither do almost all computer science departments, foreign and domestic;
c) whatever it is can be done or not done as well for less $$$ in the long term;
d) no one outside academia and all too few research departments is willing or interested in pushing the envelope;
e) bread and butter programming as it has always been done can be done most anywhere.
I've been working in software organizations for over 20 years at companies like HP and Sun. Math and Science are not as important as good logic and tenacity! Most of the outsourced work to other countries is not complicated work... sustaining and testing is more about attitude than hard core math and science. That is what's mostly being outsourced.
Nowadays, it's back to business degrees and Liberal Arts, somebody to manage the deconstruction of the national economy, and someone to write articles that it's all gonna be all right. At a time like this, it's too God damn bad that there's nobody with even a prayer of getting into the White House that has the vision to get this nation some wood again.
Does the private sector have the vision and the money? Not unless I see Bill Fucking Gates decide that life just won't be complete unless his kids stand on Mars.
Luke, help me take this mask off
Sure, outsourcing is not to save money. It's to gain access to better educated engineers. Yup. And, I have a bridge to sell you, too.
OK, I'm in hardware, not software, so my experience may not be 100% typical for Slashdot readers. And in my field, it isn't India, but rather China and Taiwan where all the jobs are going.
I work for a Fortune 100 corporation, whose celebrity CEO is a huge and very public advocate of offshore oursourcing. And, she's notorious for laying off people by the thousands.
The last project I did (before quitting my division in disgust and completely changing job functions) was a design that I was instructed to outsource to China. I needed a staff of about 12 engineers. I was given only four and told to make do, without schedule or scope slip, and to use a Chinese outsource vendor in lieu of a more complete engineering staff. The corporation told me which exactly vendor to use. I had essentially no degrees of freedom.
To cut a long story short, the program was a disaster. Almost every single task that the outsource vendor did, had to be re-done in house to get it done right. The outsource vendor was incompetent, dishonest, and outright unethical. Oh, and in case you're wondering: the outsource house was one of the big name-brand Chinese houses, not some fly by night operation.
My tiny team pulled out all the stops, made unbeleivable efforts, sacrificing their private lives, and somehow managed to pull it off, with minimal schedule and scope slippage. They succeeded not because of the help they were getting from the outsource vendor, but rather despite the "help" they were getting.
After the product was launched, it came time for management speechifying and self-congratulation, and what happened? Our mid-level managers declared the outsource model to be a huge success, thereby meeting their objectives and collecting their bonusses!
My team dispursed to the four winds in dusgust, some leaving the company, some transferring to other job functions, but none ever willing to go through another similar program again.
So, while this comment is admittedly based on a sample size of one, it's a pretty representative one -- big, famous silicon valley corporation using a well known, large name-brand outsource vendor to replace two-thirds of an R&D team.
And in this instance, there is absolutely NO WAY it was done to gain access to better-educated engineers. The quality of the outsource engineers was pathetic. It was done to save money, plain and simple. I happen to beleive this case is typical of what's going on throughout the high tech industry. I know of many other examples that are just as clear cut, although once again I stress that I'm talking about Hardware/China, rather than Software/India.
One more observation. The company DID save money, so in that sense, it WAS successful (for some narrow definition of the word). But only because of the behavior it elicited from the engineers on my team. I'd call it a triumph for short-term cost-saving without regard for long-term consequences. We bust our butts to help the company out of their bad management decision. Could this model produce such a "success" a second time? No way! You can only abuse people this way once. Businesses are trying to make this sort of practice S.O.P., but it won't work. Sooner or later, they'll have abused and burned out all of their best people, and then youy REALLY will have to depend on the Chinese outsource house. Then, we'll see how successful the model really is.
What I'm wondering is: why aren't computer programmers organizing their programming shops to have some more collective bargaining power to prevent offshoring? Sure, we should have done it during the dot-com boom, but it's not too late.
The guy on the auto factory assembly line who sprays the new car smell on the upholstery has a better chance of keeping his job stateside than a C++ programmer with 20 years of experience. Why is that? Unions. Why don't we have one?
Evan Prodromou | evan@prodromou.name | http://evan.prodromou.name/
First, its great that people are dropping out of technology-based majors imo. These are probably the people who got into technology because they saw the huge amounts of money being raked in during the 1990s and wanted to jump on the bandwagon. Now if only the CEOs who jumped on that bandwagon and now want to outsource for cheap labor to save their dwindling paychecks did the same maybe we could get somewhere as a society instead of living every day fearing that our jobs will be sent to India.
Maybe that was a little pessimistic and unfair, but you get my point. Its culling the weak, and its good for an industry to get rid of people without the desire to do the job.
I come from the technological hotbed of Nevada (sarcasm), and up until last week I don't think anybody even knew my university existed (maybe there's something to be said for university athletics, but that's another story for another time). I constantly hear from employers the same type of story, that being "There isn't enough of a workforce to set up an office in Nevada". Yet every year people graduating from my university leave the area to try and find entry level hack jobs in some silicon valley sweatshop. Now granted, a lot of those people don't know a keyboard from a hole in their ass, and probably only got into CS because of the boom of the 1990s. This is where I'm hoping maybe this decline of CS students will be good. Teh professors can focus on teaching people who are worth their salt, instead of freeloaders who want big money for being half-assed web developers with a shiny degree.
This could also backfire, of course, in that if fewer people graduate with CS and engineering degrees, then that gives business more excuse to outsource due to "lack of a workforce". Just remember all the people who can't hack it in CS and Engineering usually end up in the business school where they learn that outsourcing is good.
Honestly, I don't know what the right answer is. I see tons of great minds with great talkent working crappy jobs, so I don't tend to buy the "we outsource because American students aren't talented enough" story. Sure, my public school education was crap, but maybe if employers tended to look past shiny degrees to see if people were really worth their salt instead of just saying "oh, the degree's good enough for me" then it would help.
But then again, that was a lot of rambling and vague ideas. I hope some of it made sense, it seems to work for me.
"But that's just my opinion, I could be wrong" - Dennis Miller
In my life, I have RARELY experienced a better product from a company that advertises. Higher quality products are generally produced by specialists who don't need to attract customers - their reputation does it for them.
apparently in the past 5 years, the number of math majors at berkeley has gone from 200-odd to over 400.
doesn't seem to fit into the whole "us students abandoning math/science" idea.
First what degrees are these people moving to??? Are they migrating away from engineering to be math majors or art majors?
Second even with outsourcing there is still a buyers market for engineering right now due to all the baby boomers retiring. I heard that the outsourcing of engineering is due lack of replacements.
Thirdly, most engineers and computer programers should be prepared to enter a WORLD market and be willing and able to adapt as necessary.
P.S. one of the biggest threats of competition is engineers from India trained over here at colleges in the US. At my college most of the undergrad program is americans, and most of the grad program is INDIAN. Wild huh.
Party at O'zorgnax's Pub! Buy me a Slurmtini aye?
That's a crass way of putting it.
Ideally, you should dazzle them with brilliance and baffle them with bullshit.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
I'm Irish - live in Ireland, educated in Ireland...
Apparently our overall ed. system is quite good by world standards, but I really hope the US doesn't get rid of the one good thing about their highschool system - individual project work - which requires initiaitive.
Ok, Korea, Japan and Finland have the toughest education systems in the world, but this does not mean they are churning out well-rounded individuals. Have you met some of these people.
They are machines! We are part of Europe, and there are often surveys about the various different member states. Suicide is highest in Finland. Student suicide is also very high in Japan and Korea. I don't believe you can teach someone to be creative or innivative. You have to do that yourself. It can be fostered by individual course/project work. You all seem to forget that these countries question themselves about they're ED. systems: Are we being to tough on children.
I think a big problem is we change things that were bad to something better, but in so doing (because of lack of foresight) we also end up changing some things that should not have been changed.
Vive le Socialism..
"Despite our best efforts, our kids really have a hard time understanding why they might need advanced math or science in their adult lives."
I've seen this as an IT employee and seen similar experiences with a friend who is a chemical engineer - people don't care enough about science and math, especially the advanced areas so vital to a lot of our technologies.
My two cents is that it's a combination of anti-intellectualism (oh that stuff is for geeks) and people focusing on less foundational elements of the economy (they'd rather a marketing job at an electronics company than the people that design the actual goods).
So, perhaps we can focus more on education - but are we going to beat the disinterest? There's the real problem.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
After dropping out from college in 1990, I wound up with a computer job, then a better computer job, then an even better computer job, then, in 2000, a computer job with a startup that was so market-responsive that they realized that keeping programmers on staff was diverting money from their marketing budget, so they laid most of us off in mid-2001. By late 2001, nobody was hiring. In early 2002 I fled to Denver, took a job selling motorcycles, and got married. My spouse has convinced me that I should quit work and go to school full time; after all, you can't get hired anymore without a CS degree.
Now it looks like the job's not going to be there anymore, degree or no. And you know what? I don't want the job anymore. I can't see myself being sixty years old and still trying to wrangle code into submission in the face of a customer's false requirements and artificial deadline. Oh, I wouldn't mind settling down as a system or database admin, but if I never wrote another line of C++, I'd be happy.
So I want a job I can still do when I'm old, one where an analytical mind, good writing and oral presentation skills, and halfway-decent social skills are in demand. And since I'm sick and tired of typing IANAL on Slashdot, once I graduate, I'm taking my BS in CS and applying to law school. I'm already an anal-retentive twit; why not get paid for it?
Working with computers has taught me how to design and manipulate complex systems of rules. What is the law but a complex set of rules to be navigated? What is a contract but a specification document?
When you're in court, the scariest thing you can see at the opposition table is a calm old lawyer who looks like he's been sleeping well lately. I'm not twenty years old anymore, too stupid to value a good night's sleep. I'd rather be seventy and looking forward to half a day at the office than fifty and wondering how the hell I can get out of a career that burned me out two decades ago.
I hope for your sake you didn't bother reading this. I respect programming, I really do. I can remember a day when I got a big woody at the chance to code something. Not anymore. Tastes change; passions change. And sometimes the way you find meaning in your work, well, that's got to change, too.
This is not my sandwich.
I studied CS and there was a runnning joke that all the Arts stundents would end up inn McD's.
Actually, they all seem to go on to better things. I think it isimportant to expand your mind in college first. That way you confront the possibility of ending up in a place like McD's much early and you end up making an informed career choice. You are wrong to knock the arts.
If you really believe philosophy is redundant then your just a carcass. Nothing scientific ever happens without someone somewhere sayinh. "Hmmm, what if.."
We have been told the last 20 years that a college degree made us indispensible. As blue collar jobs went to mexico and taiwan, white collar jobs were supposed to be untouchable. Not so. This is the nature of the beast (capitalism). As long as someone else will do the same job cheaper, that job will move. Right now, high level managers are sitting smug, thinking their jobs cannot be outsourced... wait and see. You want job security? Find a job with face-to-face interaction. That cannot be done from India.
I went to a top 50 college and majored in 'Mathematical Computer Science' getting a Math minor along the way... I'm still at the job I interned at during college -- and it's not because I like it. There are people I graduated with (2 years ago) that are still unemployed and many more that settled for webby, sysadminy scripting jobs. Not to say anything bad about those jobs however they don't exactly take advantage of a mathematical background.
You can bitch all you want about these damn kids nowdays not getting their math and admittedly, there are CS programs that completely underexpose their students to math (to say nothing of non-applied math diciplines) but correlation != causation. The jobs aren't there for the appropriately trained.
LilMikey.com... I'll stop doing it when you sto
Some economists point fingers at the payroll tax that companies have to pay on their employee's salary. Because income tax has gone down over the past several years, payroll tax has come up, and is now equivalent to income tax. This of course makes it harder on corporations to hire people cause they gotta pay the huge tax on the CEO's paycheck, which could probably pay 3 or 4 salaries of typical worker drones.
help a poor college grad get a free Mac Mini
A company I worked at about six or seven years ago was vigorously lobbying the local universities' Computer Science departments to modify their curricula to teach practical skills, such as C++, Java, systems engineering, software configuration management concepts, concepts of transactions, databases, etc. Our point was that their graduates would be better served, get more bang for their tuition buck, and would have better chances at employment right after graduation if the curricula were more practical. The universities steadfastly refused, insisting instead to continue teaching CS students essentially nothing more than problem-solving with useless and/or home-grown languages.
I've come up with the perfect solution! Instead of better educating children in the US, I'm suggesting that we start a government program that will provide FREE Playstations to the children of countries who challenge our lead in technology. In the long run giving the kids free Playstations is only going to cost us about $200 US, and we can probably get a good deal that includes a bunch of games. That's much cheaper than providing a quality education. What we really need in conjunction is a program to identify the best and brightest in China and India so that we don't spend so much. We also might want to consider a program that sends them role-playing materials and anime dvds.
Why bring another wave of newbies into the mix? The jobs they'll be doing to gain experience are exactly the jobs that are getting offshored: help desk, programming, web development, etc.
I was lucky and have been lucky throughout my 20 years in IT. I started at a small office while in HS, worked my way through college, was confused as to what degree to pursue (I didn't know you could get paid for playing... er, working, with computers.), and started climbing the technical ladder 10 years ago.
Now I'm a network administrator, learning more every day, earning a comfortable (but unfortunately not opulent) salary, and finally, after all this time I'll get my MCSE in July. Maybe next year I'll finish those 6 hours to have my BS in CS and eventually become a manager.
Bring in a fresh wave of techies? No way. That's more, less expensive competition for the guys with skills and experience. I seriously doubt the retirement/departure rate of IT professionals can match the incoming numbers. In case you haven't noticed, the trend has been to do more with less, work smarter not harder, and for systems to be manageable by fewer people. I see no reason why this trend will change anytime soon.
Sure we need fresh recruits in some areas, but I feel they'll have to be specialized in the latest technology. If you're coming out of college without .NET coding skills, a great deal of Linux experience, or extensive IP experience, you're just another coder or toolie waiting to be outsourced.
I think these students are right to be pessimistic, and eventually things will reach a balance.
That's always been a thought. But when you're trying to build up a buisness, soaking people with large bills isn't really a good way to guarantee repeat customers.
Right now, we bill at $75/hr. with a $20 trip charge. Here in the midwest, that seems to be roughly average for on-site PC service. (Well, probably, we're about $10/hr. below many competitors, which is about where we want to be if we want the business of the people who call around for the "best quote".)
I do enough work for retired folks on fixed incomes and the like that I don't think charging more would be beneficial right now. (Sure, there are people I'd love to charge double the rate to, but we do have published rates....)
The US has college spaces for almost half of its college-age population (slowing down with recent recession). China, India and even Japan have a much smaller college system, less than 5% for the first two. So you see immense competition for the tiny number of spaces. Its like the 19th century in the USA when there were only MIT and the Ivies. So Asian colleges are going to look comparatively good with mostly elite students.
YMMV.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
Right. "Independent thinking" is encouraged in the classroom. Maybe you went to a private school, or you had one or two teachers that gave a damn, but for the most part, K-12's job is to keep you educated enough to buy into whatever marketing is thrown your way (be it commercial, political, whatever) and steer you clear of independent thinking. The job of public schools is to keep you in the "awkward" (child-like in maturity and responsibility, but in that perfect phase where the majority of people's one desire is to fit in) phase as long as possible. Doing this makes you the most susceptible to much of the marketing done today. "Buy this car and you'll fit in!", "Buy this T shirt that costs 30 bucks because a designer name is on it and you'll fit in!", and many others come to mind. Very little has to deal with independent thinking.
But you don't have to take my word for it
While I think in college many people's independent thinking is praised and nurtured, I do not see such practices done in the K-12 (the exceptions are of course the motivated teacher, but unfortunately they seem few and far between).
Hell, intelligence in general is shunned in the public schools in America. My girlfriend (from Sichuan, China) and I were watching TV one night, and she noticed every show about the school years was based mostly on social status. She asked me "Doesn't your academic standing determine how popular you are?"
I think the rigid testing of the Asian culture does have its drawbacks, but at least their culture praises academics at the parental, teacher, and peer social levels(Disclaimer: My girlfriend hasn't been in High School for many years and she did only attend one of many schools in China, but she did insist that this was common across China).
Any serious algorithm development effort needs:
Frankly, if you're using C to prove your algorithms, I'm either very scared, or you have some people using some incredible automatic theorem-provers. Still, I hope you're not rolling your own crypto. Attitudes like that have led to some incredibly silly security flaws.
Lea
...to hell in a handbasket.
Way to go gramps - you nailed that one!
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
I'm talking about the very real MARKET effect that a high-demand career field has on degree programs, salaries of professors, cost of equipment, and cost of textbooks.
Whoever told you that university degrees were for vocational training and/or came with an ROI?!
ALL through High School, that's ALL I heard coming from my parents, guidance counsellors, teachers, you name it. They were all very effective salesmen for the "Higher Education Industry". "Get your piece of paper" they said - "It's worth more than gold".
Frankly, my degree is not in Computer Science, it's in Art. (I haven't done any "Art" in years). I found, after college that I love computers. Been more or less steadily employed since then. Should people have a RIGHT to work in a field if they don't love it? Sure. But they tend not to be as effective or competent, without that element of passion.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Was this post moderated to +5 Insightful by homophobics anonymous, or what? Everyone is entitled to their viewpoints, but this post is simply flamebait making ridiculous, unsubstantiated assertions.
"For example, children are being taught gay issues on school time"
Give me a break.
I am paying them to teach me. I am not paying them so I could do something I could just as well do without paying them.
It's exactly the teachers job to feed me information in an intelligent manner so that I can understand it.
It is NOT the teachers job to just stand there while you read the book. While you try to figure out what the hell it's talking about. And while you work the problems.
If I'm expected to do all that then why in the world am I paying them?
And after this semester I won't be. I don't play stupid games. I'm there to be taught. Not to teach myself. I can teach myself for free on my own time.
At least while I work on my teaching degree it will all be immediatly applicable. And when I'm done I'll be able to do something few teachers are capable of: teaching.
Maybe you don't have a problem with teachers who don't teach. I do.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
I'd say that it's the school system itself, as it does not even provide any room for skilled students to advance without having to waste 110 hours on material that they already know. College is somewhat better as it provides students with the ability to perform a Prior Learning Assessment (usually not recommended as courses contain information that isn't taught outside of college.)
From my experience, not every parent is lazy. The majority of them tend to want their child to perform well (but sometimes overdrive them.) The few bad apples that demand that their students get scholarship class "A+"s instead of a mere "A" are the major problem.
Oh, and for any Americans/Canadians/Aussies/Kiwis/Brits/Germans who happen to be about 6ft (oh, say about 1.8M) tall, you will be an instant crush of the week for all of the girls (this I do know from experience).
Ah yes, it's amazing how even we (not necessarily referring to you CPM) ugly buggers are the dreamboats just because we're tall and white (or evidently black is now the cool color I hear). I still question my return to the States sometimes.
He presumably wore it every day because he could only afford one t-shirt.
I'd rather be lucky than good.
Agree right along with you. I had to go off on an early morning rant. Coffee was kicked in and I was lovin it. ;)
This is my signature.
In Philadelphia area, I've noticed that a lot of friends have begun job hopping again; so obviously there are jobs out there.
Clear, Dark Skies
How many of those math majors were born in the US? How many are here on student visas?
I those are the more relevant stats when asking whether or not Americans are abandoning math and science.
Clear, Dark Skies
That's alright. A company of all techies will still get stuff done. A company of all management will starve while trying to tell each other to do the work.
... [try] to tell each other to do ... work and make billions outsourcing all the work to India/Mexico/China and have all the time in the world to pretend to do real work and have fun
Hmm...no no...you got this wrong.
A company of all techies will get stuff done and get paid in peanuts. A company of all management will
Trust me on this...I moved from a techie role into a managerial role. The latter is more fun, less fulfilling, but more lucrative.
Are you suggesting we eat management?
What sauce would you recommend with them?
There are four boxes used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order.
Heck, I don't care, that means more work for me with less competition. Supply and demand == $^(More Positions).
I do enough work for retired folks on fixed incomes and the like that I don't think charging more would be beneficial right now. (Sure, there are people I'd love to charge double the rate to, but we do have published rates....)
Feh.
Just tell em you're tired of their (whatever it is that makes them a pain in the ass to work with) and don't have time to take care of them anymore.
Almost every time I've done that, they've changed whatever it was that was pissing me off. I've only had one customer go elsewhere, and honestly, none of the other techs in town want to deal with him either. He's already pissed everone else off.
$20.00 trip charge? For what? mileage outside of town? I hope that's not an in-town trip charge.
Just once, I'd like it if someone called me "Sir".
Without adding, "You're creating a scene."
Well, of course teenagers are going to shun it, many U.S. schools can't even provide an environment which fosters technological creativity and ambition.
For pete's sakes, I go to an all-boy "college prep" Catholic high school [ http://www.ignatius.edu ] and
the ONLY COMPUTER COURSE MY HIGH SCHOOL OFFERS IS "INTRO TO MS OFFICE."
Enough said.
With a lack of formal computer and tech education, comps are running win98 full of spyware; with my classmates being groomed to be ignorant, MS newbies for life !!!!!!!!
[There's only so much a rogue like me can do besides installing mozilla on all the comps in the labs and library]
I think that you'll have a hard time finding an IT job
Nope... I've been steadily employed in the IT field since 1997, and am happily working away now, designing & developing applications for a small ISV/ASP in North Carolina... no Bachelors degree.. hell, I don't even have an associate degree that's related to programming (yet), but yet my peers constantly acknowledge my technical acumen, and the boss formally named me lead architect on our latest project... Lack of Calculus ability has yet to hinder my ability to do my job.
<disclaimer> I do have an associate degree in General Education, and am currently working on my 2nd, 3rd, and 4th college degrees sort-of in concert. I'll finish an Associate Degree in Computer Programming this semester, have already started working on an Associate Degree in High Performance Computing (same school) and am taking transfer classes for when I transfer to a 4-year school to finish my half-finished Bachelors Degree in Computer Science. I'm not knocking the value of higher education, and I actually like math and am looking forward to Calculus. My point is that assuming somebody who doesn't know calculus can't think, is asinine; just like hammering a square peg into a round hole.</disclaimer>
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
(whoever modded me troll)
I'm serious. I do real work in MATLAB. I work in the automotive industry. We use a lot of MATLAB. I have never, ever seen Mathematica used. MATLAB is part of our electrical engineers standard software install, along with PSpice (circuit simulation) and Mentor (schematic capture). We don't even own Mathematica licenses.
So, you can call it trolling, but I was just being accurate.
---
Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
So I went and bitched to my department Chair (IEEE President Dr Chang), apparently i'm not the only person who's complained about that and other things in the cirriculum PS: To those of you who try dissing programming as "under" computer scientists - you're all a bunch of blow-hards. REAL Computer Scientists implement their own designs CONSTANTLY, go to ANY university. Programming _IS_ computer science, it is the application of computer science and is therefore one of the only manifestations of pure computer science.
If you cannot keep politics out of your moderation remove yourself from the Mod Lottery.. NOW!
1) My father was a teacher in the City of Buffalo, where schools crumble while politicians smile and blame it on the teachers. I got to see firsthand what passes for education in this country, and I got to watch a bunch of arrogant people, for decades, do and say anything they could not to take responsibility for what they were doing. They're still blaming the teachers. Now, they've started calling the schools "state schools" and blaming them because they can't get the means to operate. It's a crock. 2) I'm a moron with a Mensa card. In my freshman year of college, I was tutoring Calculus while I was taking it. I also happened to get the top grade on the final exam in the physics course that year, beating out a few upperclassmen in the process. 3) I went to a co-op college. That way, I got OJT--and, when I graduated, I had skills and experience. In fact, I chose my assignments carefully. While classmates were sitting in offices in California reading disk manuals, I was rewriting a Un*x Manual; I was writing a compiler. 4) I'm versatile by nature. My parents brought me up a Democrat, and we believe that you'd better have a variety of skills in case someone tries to shut the door on you. Since college, I've got work experience as a programmer, hardware technician, office support tech, network admin and web designer. I've also edited novels for fun and profit, and am, in fact, editing one now. The author tells me that it just missed finaling in a writing contest with a score of 206 out of a possible 210. She's extatic. She's never done that well before. None of it was any good--in fact, being a Democrat has harmed me in a field that is overflowing with Republicans. * I was never asked about my math or science background in any job interview. I've never used any of my math or physics training in any job I've worked. * In job interview after job interview, I was told, and I quote "co-op doesn't count." That compiler I wrote was never written, nor were any of those changes to the Un*x manual ever made. * After college, I ended up working for minimum wage in a hot dog stand. After about a year of that, I found a job programming in some guy's basement. Some weeks they made payroll and some weeks they didn't. Is there any recognition of the efforts that I put in? HELL NO! * His name is Andrew Caldwell, and he works for a THOROUGHLY REPUBLICAN headhunting agency called "Technical Solutions Group." During a recent phone conversation, he told me that they're, and again I quote, "firm believers" that a programmer's income level is the BEST indicator of his SKILL LEVEL!! Can you say "Old Boys' Club?" Can you say "deny opportunity to those who have been denied opportunity just because they have been denied opportunity?" Well, Mr. San Jose Mercury! Well, Mr. Wired News! I say you've got it all wrong! I say that the REAL problem is arrogant, self-absorbed so-called employers and an Old Boy Republican Scumbag Industry! And I've got over fifteen years of scratchin' and crawlin' to back me up. And I say that, until something is done to take these people (and I use the term loosely) down a notch, to pry their heads out of their collective rear ends, things are only going to get worse instead of better!
Though I've gone through calculus and have passed the courses up through planer integrals, I didn't do it just to jump through hoops for some stuck up interviewer. I did it because I thought that there was *indeed* some chance that I might actually *use the skills* someday.
That was over fifteen years ago, and all I've got to show for it was a lot of interviewers with egos as big as Laura's telling people how they have to jump through hoops.
God, I hate stuck up dorks who can't distinguish between integral calculus and programming skills!!
Because that's what you need to get a job. Most of the jobs around here require a degree, preferably in computer science. It may be stupid, but if you want a job that's just the way it is. Personally, I blame the fact that the high schools are so pathetic that a college degree is the only way to get a reasonable shot at hiring someone who is functionally literate.
No, the $20 trip charge is billed to a client the first time we arrive on site, no matter where they're located. (We're waived it maybe 2 times before, for people who happened to live just a mile or two from our office - but it's typically non-negotiable.)
That's to cover costs for wear and tear on the vehicle and gas/oil changes. Actually, last time I called a plumber out, I was billed a $45 trip charge, even though all the guy did was walk in and say "Nope, I can't fix your leaky faucet. You need a whole new one, and I don't have that model on my truck." So I fail to see why this is unreasonable?
I guess your customer base in Miami must be a little different than ours. I find that putting up with annoying people often gets me a long-term benefit in the way of referrals. (Again, this probably correlates with my original theory that some of the biggest jerks out there control the majority of the money - because they're owners of businesses and/or influential people in the business world.) If I tell someone I refuse to work with them anymore unless X or Y changes, they might change for me - but you can bet they're not clamoring to hand out my business cards to all of their associates, eithe.r
I am an undergrad in computer engineering and I think it is the curriculum to blame for students who are simply not motivated enough to excel in school. I think if we were learning about recent technologies instead of the same old stuff from 30 years ago, it would really make a difference in the attitudes of students. I know that we need to learn the basics first before diving into the new stuff, but why not breifly go over the old stuff and have more emphasis on new, cutting edge topics. Also, I am in my third year and I have taken EE courses thus far with the exception of algorithms and data structures. I get the feeling that the curriculum is geared more towards EE than CE.
and just state that I claim no political party allegiences, claiming no preference to our professional idiots (D) and theocrats (R) up on Capitol Hill. Now, the saddest part of your sob story is that you think your Democratic political party pride, these teacher union-prostate tapping persuasions, are the true way to educational enlightenment. After all is said and done, the losers get lazy like all unionists do, and get arrogant with the way they teach. They demand more than they're worth, just like your modern IT worker or system administrator. Outsourcing the education of our youngsters to hare-brained modern teaching methodologies and unaccountability, rather than stick with the old ways of teaching mathematics and English. It literally takes an underaged sexual relations scandal to get an incompetent pile of shit fired from a public school, heaven forbid they ever get tenure. And the motherfuckers have the nerve to form public sector unions and hold education hostage, to go on strike, for what amounts to more than a $40k/year salary in most areas, taking that nice cushy summer recess into account. Let us also not forget that your dreaded Buffalo-area politicans are pretty thoroughly running with the Democratic ticket. Pardon me while I don't shed a single tear for the woes of your parasitic father and everyone else that was too stupid to find their niche in industry or academia.
Mr. Youseff needs to get his facts straight.
In the city of Buffalo in the 1970's, the school board balanced the budget on the back of City of Buffalo teachers. In New York, we have something called the Taylor Law that provides, among other things, that government employees like teachers will not only not be paid but be fined a day's pay in addition for every day they go out on strike. In the '70's, the local school board took advantage of this by bargaining in bad faith and using the law, when the teachers responded with a strike, to cash in. Don't just take *my* word for it, though. The school board was convicted of doing this in court. Somehow, though, they were never ordered to make restitution for their crime--a "punishment" that's right up there with the Microsoft Travesty. In fact, so "oracular" and "professional" was the school board that they even took the *special step* of delaying the fines so that they were taken out of the teachers' Christmass paychecks.
The school board tried to do the same thing again in the early '90's, but, this time, the teachers took the battle to court instead of striking. In their arrogance, the school board let the case proceed even though they could have, by making certain legal compromises, have settled it. They lost the case. It did nothing to bring their swelled egos down to reasonable size. Not long afterward, there was an apology in the Buffalo News from the President of the school board--NOT for breaking the law and NOT for the all-too-commonplace-but-still-idiotic practice of trying to balance their budget on the backs of their workers, *but for letting the case continue when they could have stopped it.*
In the late '70's, Buffalo elected a man named James Earl Griffin to the mayor's office. He ran as an independant, and destroyed the Democratic Party in the city when he did. It has not yet recovered, though the controvertial Mr. Griffin, who rejoined the Democratic party but was referred to in the local papers as "a Democrat in name only" was eventually replaced. One of Mr. Griffin's favorite tactics was to take any increase in state aid for education and transfer a corresponding amount out of the city school budget for that year. Needless to say, the folks in Albany were not amused. Nor is the school system in such great shape after what amounted to a 12-year budget freeze. When I wrote "schools crumble," I was quoting The Buffalo News.
Of course, Mr. Youseff says that the teachers are arrogant. Yet, he can't come up with one true fact to support his claims--it's all based on a pack of lies.
BTW, is it arrogant of IT workers to ask the rates that they get paid (I charge about half the going rate as a freelance web designer), or is it arrogant of Mr. Youseff to claim that they're not worth it? Is Mr. Youseff the Lord God Final Arbitrator who sets all wage standards?
My father *did* "find his niche" as a teacher. He held that job for over 20 years and then retired. I would like to see Mr. Youseff stand up to my father in a test of wits or wisdom--my father has the intelligence to keep his mouth shut when he doesn't know what he's talking about.
City of Buffalo teachers don't average $40K/year (if Mr. Youseff is trying to tell me that going several weeks without pay is the same as continuing to work, then he needs to have his head examined), and they don't go out on strike--at least, they haven't in over 25 years. They don't push methodologies on their students, either--these are imposed by outside agencies. The teachers just try to roll with the punches--including a few sucker punches from people who have no clue about what they're throwing punches about--as best they can.
I don't really care if Mr. Youseff doesn't feel sorry for my father and the honest, hard-working people who shared his profession. I will **not,** however, allow my father's name to be liabled based on ignorance, half-truths and out-and-out lies, as Mr. Youseff is attempting to do in his response to my post. It would be a matter of debate if Mr. Youseff could come up with some facts that had ANY RESEMBLANCE TO THE TRUTH, but that seems to be too much for him.
pwned.