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Interest in CS as a Major Drops
Dasein writes "The Computer Research Association says that the popularity of CS as a major among freshman has dropped in the last four years. Why is obvious to anybody working in the field. They conclude by saying 'With a fall in degree production looming, it is difficult to see how CS can match expected future demand for IT workers without raising women's participation at the undergraduate level.'"
All it proves is that number of Freshman interested in studying CS at UCLA is dropping.
Instead of admitting that the quality of their CS courses are dropping, these guys are trying to show a general trend.
This is not news for nerds! This only news for the clueless masses (R)(TM)
Nazi Pope Emblem
There's still the entire population of India ready to take the jobs of western IT workers...
'Under' something... you bet... more of that would get CS majors interested again...
that's because all you need is a /. account, not a BSc. in comsci to be cool nowadays ;]
You can't handle the truth.
=)
"A witty saying proves nothing." ~Voltaire
"d'Oh!" ~Homer
Those of us who work "in the field" know that an outdoor job is vastly superior to hovering over a computer all day.
Sorry. My sense of humor has taken the day off, and I'm compelled to post shit like this.
Quoth the current administration: Outsourcing = good!
After all, those that have money don't need to earn more... and if you can pay someone else less to do the same job thats more profit for you.
Eventually there will be a '1 billion employed' by McDonalds.
The University of Guelph (Southern Ontario, Canada) normally has 200 students entering its Bachelor of Computing (honors) program every year. This year the entrance class had 66 students. My own program at Guelph-Humber (degree/diploma in computing/telecom) has a nominal class size of 60, but we've not had a full class in the 3 years we've been running. According to my prof, the only University in Canada whose compsci department hasn't suffered is Waterloo's.
------- "From bored to fanboy in 3.8 asian girls" ----------
Most of the girls that try our program leave because they just don't like it. They don't like to write code. More power to them, let them find what they want to do. Most of the freshman going in have no idea how much work will be expected of them in their junior and senior years and when they get a taste of that, they quit for easier majors in the liberal arts, social sciences or business school. It's more a problem of laziness than anything else.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
I always laugh at these picture makers who think they are solving the problems of computer science. A box here, an arrow there, voila they've discovered something that the Math majors have taken for granted since 1600.
Meanwhile, the actual implementation of real world problems are left to the CEs and EEs who are taking the jobs away from CS majors at an alarming rate. Well, alarming to the CS majors.
It's a little like the split between theoretical physicists and experimental physicists. One group sits in their ivory towers while the others are making a ton of money in the real world.
They conclude by saying 'With a fall in degree production looming, it is difficult to see how CS can match expected future demand for IT workers without raising women's participation at the undergraduate level.'"
By raising the price, it's basic economics. So this is a good thing for all you CS grads out there.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Besides, if there's a an employee shortage, salaries are more likely to stay high.
With the offshoring of certain types of work, I must wonder if the number of IT jobs in the U.S. is actually going to shrink---at least in relative numbers, rather than increase over then next decade. It'll all be interesting, I'm sure.
This is not my sandwich.
Why would somebody enroll in a major that is sending many jobs overseas? Compound this with the fact that CS/CE/EE majors spend a lot of time studying. So, why choose a major where you don't have fun in school AND you won't have a job. To think that women will somehow alleviate this problem is wrong.
A "freshman" CS major is as reliable as a freshman "pre-med" major.
(Although in the first case, the designation is usually picked to land a high-paying internship, where the second designation is picked to get laid.)
Unless you're looking at people enrolled in 3xx and 4xx level courses, this article doesn't mean much.
Speak for yourself, daylight whore.
I don't think that just because CS Degrees are in decline that it means there will be any less programmers on the field. Programming is context-oriented, and sure a CS degree can help a lot of people in programming, but at what cost?
Sometimes I feel that majors in the humanities, in communication, literature, critical thinking, psychology, philosophy, linguists, and financial planning are better qualified as developers, because they understand what is most often to be coded these days: interfaces to information, with the ability manipulate, display, and interact with said information. That information has context.
The closer a programmer is to context, the more likely they'll get it right the first time.
Not to say a CS degree isn't useful -- it is, obviously for the more hardcore programming and understanding of the bigger picture.
d. Taylor Singletary,
reality technician techra.el
TFSummary says that a drop in CS students will lead to a shortage of IT workers. Most CS students I know do not want to do IT. They want to code, either academically or commercially, but they do not want to do IT. IT is for IT majors (or Cisco/A+/MCSE certs), not for Computer Scientists
The previous sig has been removed due to
I don't know the stats but I would imagine that majors like Information Systems, MIS, BIS and similar ones to those would be syphoning off some of the computer science majors. Just because you want to work in IT doesn't mean you need Computer Science. Lets face it to work on internal tracking systems you hardly need to know complier design but some businss\IT integration classes may help. Many Universities now offer atleast one Info System type major and one CS type major. Combine the IS majors becoming more common with the perception that tech jobs are a bust now and its easy to see why CS enrollment is dropping.
Seriously. We bemoan the state of education, but I'd have to say, having the foresight to NOT choose IT is pretty insightful and intelligent. Of course, I say that as someone who's in IT. I love the work, the actual act of maintaining systems, working on networks, servers or programming. I've been doing it for 8 years now, after studying English in college and I've always loved the work. But to be frankly honest, I haven't liked many of the actual jobs. The hours are often absurd. The demands on your time, especially your free time, are very high. And you are often put into riduculously high pressure situations by ineffectual and incompetent leadership. So it's sad, in a way. I love the work. I love working with other developers and learning and growing as a professional. But sometimes I honestly hate the actual jobs and the companies I work for. That's a hard thing to find out, so if college students are figuring that out before they find themselves 40lbs. or more overweight, with blood pressure, etc. then bully to them.
What I find surprising is the spike in Biological Science. Since that includes medical professions, is everyone attempting to capitalize on the aging baby boomer population?
I'm a big tall mofo.
Anyone know why there was such a peak around 1981/82/83? I guess its the time of the IBM PC, Apple II and war games!
Something that's been bothering me a lot throughout my career as a computer programmer is the attitude of the "leading luminaries" to the fundamentals of life for programmers (and engineers in general but most intensely for programmers) -- most specifically reproduction. People like to joke a lot about "nerds getting a date" but when you compare what Western society did to the reproductive rates of its engineers, particularly since the advent of the microprocessor, to the reproductive supports provided Asian engineers -- especially Indian engineers -- you can easily see why engineering is being exported to Asia.
A critical exemplar of these of those "leading luminaries" is someone with whose work most digerati are undoubtedly familiar:
George Gilder
What I see as George Gilder's primary failure is his inability to connect his work on "Men and Marriage" (aka "Sexual Suicide") with work regarding the high tech industry. The major result of this failure is his lack of credibility regarding outsourcing and guest worker visas for high technology.
Basically it boils down to this:
During Gilder's watch, what has been the cost of reproduction of a young American engineer vs the cost of reproduction of a young engineer from India?
My experience, working side-by-side with young H-1b visa employees during the latter part of the 1990s was that there is virtually no comparison:
While both a young engineering from India and a young engineer from the US must focus on his studies, career -- living like a virtual monk -- while working in the male-saturated ghettos that surround the engineering profession, only the Indian engineer has a social support network and the social status, frequently called "sexism" in the US (including arranged marriages), that provides him with a wife of similar background (crucial to reproduction in a larger sense) and the security to raise children within a marriage to such a wife.
Something Gilder should have done was figure out what a comparable marriage and family would actually cost a young US engineer.
Indeed, the reproductive costs, as well as resulting fertility rates and mating quality among US engineers are statistics that needs to be studied carefully if we are to come to any sort of understanding of the outsourcing phenomenon.
The strategy of encouraging women to go into programming makes sense from a few angles:
1) Corporations tend to discard programmers as they age. This means a woman, about the time her biological clock is kicking in, can exit to a second career as mother. This fits with lowering the cost of reproduction for programmers. Indeed, many Japanese companies have had a policy for sometime of encouraging young women, rather than young men, to enter software careers precisely because they are open about their "agism" in hiring programmers and saw this "second career as mother" as an honorable way of dealing with their employees who were programmers.
2) Since engineering is a male-saturated profession, it females entering the profession will have a lot less difficult time meeting a viable marriage partner of comparable background than will males entering such a male-ghetto.
3) Although many men "go gay" during stays in prison, and many may be cajoled into doing so during their stays in the male-saturated ghettos of western engineering, it really isn't a good way to run technological civilization to base either your penal system or your technology creation on "turning out" your most problematic _or_ your most valuable members.
4) Universities are increasingly female. Indeed, the University of Illinois, origin of the a lot of the key technologies going into computing, networking, the Internet and the web specifically, has gone from a male-saturated engineering school when I was working there to a much more female environment. Much of this can be attributed to the fact that young men simply are dropping out of society at a much greater rate but whatever the cause the fact
Seastead this.
What a surprise! Like steel and automobiles and many things before it, we sold the farm and now we whine that no one is majoring in CS now that it's heading toward its fate as a minimum-wage profession. Boo hoo.
My advice to anyone heading to college: major in anything you want because a law degree doesn't care about your undergraduate degree. Burger flippers, Wal-Mart greeters and lawyers are the safest professions in the U.S. Oh, and you're not going to make much money at Mickey D's or Wal-Mart.
It's going to be fun to see the next few years when consumers stop consuming and the whole pyramid scheme collapses because everyone (including the government) is up to their eyeballs in debt.
Now go buy some CDs and stop downloading. We need to prop things up as long as we c
. . . as a major among incoming freshmen has dropped. . .
Oh thank God. It's about bloody time.
I don't suppose this means that the colleges can once again start teaching computer science to those who are actually interested in the subject and leave the application and HTML "programming" training to the private trade schools where it belongs?
Or would that effect their bottom line?
KFG
A lot of other areas now use CS extensively. I'm going into Bioinformatics for Genetics and coming from Biochemistry, but I have formal CS training from college. My guess would be that a significant number of students from other majors are taking CS courses (and not just introductory level ones).
Perhaps those coming out with a CS degree will be more focused on IT, so the shortage won't be as high as the study's authors conclude.
Where is the future in CS? In the natural sciences schools or engineering? If I had to do it over again I'd pick EE over CS for sure. I can write a device driver and I have an American Studies degree for pete's sake. And if I wanted to manage technical people (and I do if I want more than three promotions), I'd pick MIS over CS.
-- i drop mine in braille so you blind cats can read me
Anyone who sets out to study CS with the intention of forging a career from IT wants their head examining.
threadeds blog
Alarmingly, the proportion of women who thought that they might major in CS has fallen to levels unseen since the early 1970s.
Why exactly is that alarming?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Why bother with a career in this field, when the trend to outsourcing it is obvious and has been for many years. Why in the world would anyone get into a field that is for all intents and purposes dying in this country. Just like manufacturing jobs in the 80's, these jobs are going overseas and they are not coming back.
...why should we care if the percentage of women in CS falls? Are they that determined to be a majority in every field?
That's just off the top of my head in a couple of minutes. I'm sure the reason the Computer Research Association found it "difficult to see" these reasons are that none of them are in the Computer Research Association's financial interest to promote as alternatives.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
All this talk about 'community' and 'free software', no wonder kids are looking elsewhere for a career.
Asking people to give away their talent for 'free' because 'free' software is better than proprietary is so misguided.
This attitude will do to programming what communism did for Eastern Europe.
I switched from CS to joint CS/Maths (and I might just end up doing applied maths) because CS was becoming less and less computer science and more and more software engineering.
There's plenty of work for those of us already (or still) in IT... and plenty of competition as well.
Unlike many who saw the bursting of the ".COM bubble" as the arrival of apocalypse... I saw it as simply a time to separate the wheat from the chaff. Seems to me there were a lot of people who were in IT in 1999-2000 who had no business being there. I can't tell you how many times I heard fresh grads say "You mean I have to actually PROGRAM?!"
Not trying to knock anyone here, but if someone is trying to enter a field simply because they think there's money in it, they won't be there very long. Maybe that's what's going on here now.
Just my $0.02...
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
That should be "As supply shrinks, wages will rise," not "As demand shrinks, wages will rise."
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
it is difficult to see how CS can match expected future demand for IT workers without raising women's participation at the undergraduate level
No - the obvious solution is that the demand will be met outside the US by recruitiung people who do have CS qualifications, and who demand lower wages.
I think young people are afraid of the marked flux. They saw the internet buble burst when they were in their high-school age. Allot of IT people had no jobs. Perhaps they choose job security.
I am getting a bachelors in CE. A lot of my friends are too. These days, just restricting yourself to one degree usually won't cut it. Sure, Business is a nice complement major to CS but with CE people will know that you actually know how to build stuff as apposed to just programming for it.
It may not be terribly obvious, but when you are programming for stuff other than software, its nice to know how materials in the real world actually work before simulating them (or something of that sort).
My 2 cents.
CS at NC State is "Crop Science" ;)
SCS is "Computer Science"
And yes, we do own a lot of cows.
Outsourcing. Be available 24/7. When you're 40, get packing. Dealing with PHBs. Yes, it's a wonderful opportunity in a Walmart world.
With a fall in degree production looming, it is difficult to see how CS can match expected future demand for IT workers without raising women's participation at the undergraduate level.
ahaha, yeah right. Sounds like CS professors are starting to feel the effects of outsourcing too. Well guys, next time try lobbying harder for the people you're about to send into the (nearly non-existant) job market.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
Not surprising, given the servers are full of stupid teenagers, cheaters, and... wait a minute, we're not talking about Counter-Strike here?
I'm a prof at a major midwestern U who does AI work (in chemistry, not C.S. department). I've seen this happening for some time now. You get these incredibly bright geeks who start out in CS and then either drop out or change their majors. Why? I'm convinced it is because the CS major has a lot of really irrelevant requirements that turn these people off. Statistics is one (but only one) example. The fact is that modern CS & programming is a wonderfully exciting area: to put thirty year old hurdles in front of younguns is counterproductive. So we shouldn't be surprised that the supply of CS majors dries up. They have alternatives.
We want peoply genuinely interested in the subject matter taking these courses, not people just in it for the money. I expect a drop in CS students will equal a rise in the general skill level of the graduates.
The enrollment of law school continues to climb... I recall seeing reading somewhere that the US graduates more lawyers (percentile wise) than any other first world country. It's no wonder that the litigation seems to be entirely out of control in the US...
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
"...it is difficult to see how CS can match expected future demand for IT workers without raising women's participation at the undergraduate level."
Um, wouldn't it work to just get male enrollment levels back up to where they used to be? What logic is there in saying "Less men are signing up, so the solution is to get more women interested." WTF? I mean, it's not like they're soldiers and they're dying and once they're gone they need to be replaced with women.
And no points for making easy jokes like "But getting more women into CS will attract men to the field! LOLOMGBBQ!!!11"
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Why would anyone study counterstrike? just use hax
with all the negative news regarding CS/IT jobs easily outsourcable to India and other countries for 1/3 the salary, the post-dot-com economy, and the recent survey showing that ugrad CS majors are earning fewer than ChemE and EE, what's the incentive?
When i entered college in Sept 2000, nearly half my peers declared a CS or EE major. By late 01 / early 02, 75% of those "declarations" were wiped clean and replaced the traditional fields - medical, legal, and finance.
Thier leaving CS faster then men. The field has no future in the US.
The new plan:
1) Be a biz major
2) Party for 4 years
3) Get an MBA
4) Outsource "code monkees"
5) Profit
At first glance I thought they meant CS as in Counter Strike, I've known many a friend take the Counter Strike major. Nothing like failing out of college due to a computer game.
Home of the midwest loser - www.say-10.net
Community College is your friend. I'm in the same boat in the CS program at my school. Luckily, my university is very liberal with letting you take courses at community colleges and transferring credits over to your degree plan. The added bonus is that they do not even count the grades towards your GPA!
The courses at community college tend to be much easier and liberally graded.
I'm taking my arts/history crap at community college this summer. I may very well take some other courses I am wary of there too.
The fewer programmers there are entering the workforce, the greater the demand will be for the existing ones. I, for one, think this is a good thing (tm).
I'm a student at another UC. The female percentages are very low as one would probably expect from geeks, but what is really scary is why some people take CS as a major. During a basic in-class poll in one of my classes the teacher asked about why people had joined CS as a major. The top two responses were that either their parents had told them there was money in tech, or that they were gamers. Very few actually were hardcore programmers or people who had been with technology with for a long time. Some of the in fact had never used a computer beyond word processing when they joined. This worried me a lot personally, and it made me realize how important it is for software developers to present themselves to children in a fun manner, so that perhaps more people will take interest in the subject.
Most people working in IT probably won't benefit from computer science degrees. Moreover, someone really interested in IT, should probably transfer to their university's school of business and, if possible, enroll in whatever their equivalent of an "Information Technology" degree is. Such programs usually have a number of IT classes, e.g. databases & networking (both with a much more applied slant then you would get in a typical CS class on the same topic), but also provide students with enough knowledge of business that they'll be able to more effectively interact with the high ups in the company when it comes to such things as policy making and infrastructure planning. Alternatively, there are also some two year programs that strictly focus on IT skills.
Why? Well any CS program worth its salt doesn't focus on teaching people how to admin Windows Server 2003, or Oracle administration. Rather, it focuses on teaching people about theories computation, algorithms, and, on the more applied side, best practices in software engineering. This kind of training will make some one a better programmer or software engineer, but it wouldn't necessarily be even that the relevant to the individual deciding which routers to buy or even the one installing set routers
<rant> Okay, so maybe I am little bit peeved when people ask me how to do such and such in Microsoft Word or Windows XP, and the looks they give me when I tell them I don't know. It's like they think it's so inexplicable that I don't know since some of the core classes for CS majors *must* be esoteric document formatting in Microsoft Word, and Windows XP - Why sometimes it can't connect to the network printer. </rant>
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I think many of you are forgetting that students are slowly moving towards a Software Engineering curriculum:
:)
MIT EE&CS students
385 in 2002
240 in 2003
200 in 2004
Rutgers
CS Dept enrollment thousands less than peak of 6,500
CMU CS Dept.
3,200 applicants in 2001
2,000 applicants in 2004
U CA at Berkley CS Majors
240 in Spring 2003
226 in Spring 2004
Stanford CS undergrad majors
171 in 2000-2001
118 in 2003-2004
The demand for Computer Science majors is decreasing, while the demand for Software Engineers is increasing (US Bureau of Labor Statistics says Software Engineering jobs will be among the 10 fastest growing occupations through 2012)
Software development is changing; embrace the changes
-Rochester Institute of Technology Software Engineering major
At first glance I read "...a full degree in production looming...". I thought basket weaving had gone industrial.
This can be good news for those of us who are serious computer scientists, as opposed to those who want to learn a little programming and make money quickly.
What keeps me going is my inertia.
I think of IT as vocational work. Why would a CS major work in an IT department? I thought they usaully create products and use their brains.
As the U.S. economy continues to be assraped by the Republicans, the jobs those people would fill after graduation are going to 3rd world countries.
Even the radio commercials for those MCSE mills have changed... they used to brag about "starting salaries for MCSEs are in the $70K range!"-- now, probably fearful of getting sued for false advertising by someone who took their course and can't find work even with an MCSE, they have a very clear disclaimer that says they don't guarantee that you'll find a job or get the salary the ad claims you will.
Peter: "Lois, you know it's illegal for women to drive! A woman driving... hehehe that's adorable."
"hey, could you pass me a paper towel? er.. I mean... DEPLOY ABSORBTION PANEL!"
Sometimes I feel that majors in the humanities, in communication, literature, critical thinking, psychology, philosophy, linguists, and financial planning are better qualified as developers, because they understand what is most often to be coded these days: interfaces to information, with the ability manipulate, display, and interact with said information. That information has context.
Yeah, right.
While psychology, lingustics and financial planning are serious subjects and teach skills useful to programmers, they don't teach programming.
Communication, literature, "critical thinking", and almost all philosophy courses are pure fluff.
Give me an engineering graduate - civil, mechanical, electrical, chemical; I don't really care - any day. At least they understand maths and have learned that there is such a thing as a wrong answer. The concept of a wrong answer is anathema to most humanities students.
I'm sooo glad my job doesn't involve hiring programmers anymore.
I'm willing to admit that their are some non-idiots that graduate from the typical CS program if you are willing to admit that most of the people who graduate from the typical EE program are carrying you guys on their shoulders.
http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/itaa.real.html
There is not, nor have there ever been, a shortage of engineering or programming personnel in the USA.
What there is a shortage of, is *cheap* labor in these disciplines. Industry wants the supply to go up, so that the price will go down in the face of steady or declining demand.
Future demand in this country will be flat or declining, as outsourcing takes it's toll. Is it any surprise that freshmen are opting for more promising fields of study???
Now maybe the majority of CS majors will actually be people who like and think it's fun instead of people looking for a quick way to cash in. I used to know a ton of people who didn't know a thing about computers and they decided on CS as a major because they thought they could make big bucks. It's good to know this trend might be changing.
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. --Will
Talking about outsourcing, here's an interesting article from The Register:
g _savings_sometimes/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/04/19/offshorin
It got rejected as a story, probably something to do with the fact that VA Software, slashdot's owner supports outsourcing.
At my school, CS majors pretty much have the equivalent of two or more full time jobs worth of homework per week. One semester we averaged 120 hours/week in the lab. Add to this going to class, homework for non-CS classes, a job, such things as sleep (even in small quantities) and you're left with very little time to have fun or engage in social activities. I don't know about other schools, but 95% of what we cover here is practical; all the time comes not from memorizing theory but from building actual applications.
Of course, we'll be making more than pretty much everyone else when we graduate, but getting there sure as hell isn't much fun. People hear horror stories (which are to a large extent true) and people either don't declare the major to begin with or drop out. Nobody wants to spend the prime years of their life literally living in the computer lab. Is this sort of situation typical? I get the impression that at most of the schools with decent CS curriculums, you've simply got to fit more than 4 year's worth of material into 4 years in order to be competitive once you graduate. Thoughts?
Proper project structure, data structures, access methods, commenting, documentation, security mindedness, and release planning aren't something that just happen. They get screwed up enough by people trained to think that way. The only way I can describe most code I've seen from non-CS people is hackish and ugly. Sure, it may result in something that works properly the first time written, but asking for a single small change may well result in reimplementing the better chunk of it.
In my opinion, it's best to get a project lead that has sufficient skills to wrangle proper specifications out of the people who need the application. Then they can hand out portions to programmers who are good at writing clean code, and everybody wins.
If not now, when?
I have a CS degree, but since I graduated, a new major started...comp. Engr (CE). Then they decided to move EE into CE (or vice versa). Then they decided to merge CS with the EE college. So now there's EE, and CE, but not CS. So CS as a major is declining because they don't exist.
I attended a fascinating lecture from the Dean of an IT college. In a nutshell, the lecture said that Pure CS or Computer Science majors were dropping, but they were being replaced by blended majors. These blended majors are CS mixed with another discipline, for example, Bioinformatics is Biology mixed with CS/IT. Computiational Physics is CS mixed with Physics.
In essense, IT is becoming a required part of other disciplines. IT is maturing and has merged with other disciplines to create new hybrid disciplines.
This is a general trend. Many new research initiatives are the product of a multi-discipline approach.
and it's been pointed out many times that most of these people losing interest are people shouldn't be in CS anyway. The people who are "leaving" are simply the crowd following the next get rich quick career.
The people who are left are the ones who actually like Computer Science and actually know what it is. What angers me is that there are a lot of programs out there at community colleges and such and call themselves Computer Science programs when they only teach you C/C++ syntax.
"Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes." -Edsger Dijkstra
People are clearly losing interest in CS because CS:Source is out and the hardware capable of playing it has reached afforable levels.
My 3D Texturing Skinning work (under construction)
I work as a BOFH at a university's CS department. We too are suffering from the overall decline in interest in the subject.
The problem is that the whole concept of CS is becoming increasing irrelevent as IT is such a diverse field. If you study chemistry, you graduate as a chemist, a mathematics graduate is also entitled to call himself a mathematician. But what about computer science? How many job ads have you seen that are calling for computer scientists? A degree that specialises in programming, networking etc would be far more valuable as the student would not be labelled a 'jack of all trades' which is exactly what we are turning out now.
Personally even though I don't have a degree I'm in a far better position with regards to my employment prospects than most of our graduates. My experience, together with a CCNA and MCSE (don't laugh, an MCSE backed up with experience is still valuable), puts me in greater stead than someone who has only studied a wide range of concepts and quite frankly, has mastered none of them.
All the employers we liase with talk about is a candidate's experience and not what pieces of paper they may possess. The job advertisements I now see reflect this too, very few seem to call for CS degrees and the ones that do only see it as a benefit, rather than a requirement of employment.
For all intensive porpoises your a bunch of rediculous loosers
I think the reason for the drop in interest in CompSci as a major is that many of the incoming students are disappointed and a little shocked that CS doesn't stand for Counter-Strike.
"Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs. We have a protractor."
Can someone explain where this 'future demand' is? the way I see it, the need for IT workers is going to drop rapidly - the Internet is well established, the 'dot com' boom is over, out-sourcing is growing and faster computers mean high-level memory managed programming is becoming the norm. Im not counting on this industry to pay my bills.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
I mean it's not like everyone is telling women that CS is a men's-only club and they aren't allowed to join. If women get that impression, that's their own friggen damn fault, not the fault of how the subject is being presented. It's not entirely inconceivable that the low female representation in the field has caused something of a catch-22 for women... feeling like they don't fit in because there aren't many women, and there not being many women because they simply don't fit in. Sorry... it's a fact of life. Live with it!
More power to any woman that can get past such psychological barriers and pursue a career in the field, but I really think everyone should just shut the hell up about worrying about equality of genders in all fields and just let _PEOPLE_ do whatever they want. If a field happens to be mostly male, why the heck should it even matter when in a *VAST* majority of the cases, there's no deliberate sexual discrimination occurring, and in the isolated incidences where sexual discrimination is occuring, a) any attempts to control said discrimination would likely fail since such discrimination is already illegal anyways, and if they are getting away with it now, they will only continue to; and b) even if the efforts _were_ successful (which I doubt), it's still unlikely to be common enough to make a significant statistical difference to female enrollment anyways.
If people want women to be equal to men, then they need to stop bitching about how "unfair" things are when they really aren't. How many people do you see complaining that there aren't enough male cheerleaders, or male nurses?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Of course, this assumes that university education has anything to do with computer science skills. Which the university would like you to think, of course. ;-/
Traditional U expects you to show up in overcrowded classrooms, get most of your education on your own from the books, then pay tons of money for the priviledge and kiss their ring, too. Meanwhile the typical IT tech institute treats students as paying customers, realizes they won't come back if they don't learn, and falls all over themselves to make sure they do.
There's a reason the number of IT training institutes has skyrocketed. There are many paths to CS expertise, but it's in big U's financial interest to sell people idea that they're the only route.
Education is in business, one business is all to make money for the Regents and the industry that is Education. It is no suprise then that Education overproduces and the student gets pooched in the process. One thing I learned a long time ago before getting my BS in CS/Math and a MS in SportsMed is never, ever, *EVER* believe what education tells you. I was fortunate, I came out of school in the early 90s and during the tech ride. I feel the pain for those in the late 90s that got sold a bill of goods on how there would be 100K per year jobs for web programmers. Those folks are now flipping burgers for the most part. If you want a job that pays, go into biotech or nanotech, or humaniod robotics. That will be the next boom for 20-30 years. Get used to the idea of the average human worker being replaced, particularly in IT/Tech. And of course, good luck.
--- Old Time NeXThead
You could major in physics after which you'd be ready to take on almost any job (law and medicine excluded, and assuming that you know basic hygiene and have adequate social skills). Proven ability for analytical thinking, ability to learn fast and willingness to re-learn things all the time are an enormous advantage.
I dropped my CS Major and switched to CS Specialist
:-(
I'm sorry.
- shazow
Holy crap!
I can major in Counter-Strike?!
XD
Shiny. Let's be bad guys.
it is difficult to see how CS can match expected future demand for IT workers
Easy. Managers will just start doing what any self-respecting geek would do when he needs something--order out.
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
Alarmingly, the proportion of women who thought that they might major in CS has fallen to levels unseen since the early 1970s.
Wow, the job market is crappy, student interest is dropping...even among women. OMG!!! News at 11! I also like the agenda of how it will be difficult to see how CS can match expected future demand for IT workers without raising women's participation at the undergraduate level
What I find annoying is how more women are attending college than men, more women graudate than men, and yet all they can talk about are the two areas where women have yet to surpase men: math and science. Comon girls, show you actually believe in equality, not just the advancement of women. Show some concern that the average disparity in enrollment between the sexes is around 10%, or that there are very few men in nursing programs or going into the field of public education.
My first year Intro to CS instructor put it this way:
"Computer Science is to programming as mechanical engineering is to operating a drill press"
Too many people think of a BS in Comp Sci as a degree in programming.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
I knew so many people who were intelligent kids and just wanted to get rich so they were in CS.
I just wanted to program because it was something I did my entire life, but I couldn't get into CS because my grades in other studies weren't good. The problem is that if I was in CS, my grades would have been awesome, but the college I went to messed my placement up.
Seeing as I'm also having trouble finding a job programming, I don't see it as a bad thing for people rethinking they want to get into CS. The influx of kids into computer science with no prior computer programming before college was mind boggling in the mid 90s.
God spoke to me.
Hi there. I graduated with a degree in Comp. Sci. a couple of years ago. Like many other people, I started CS because I liked computers and I was pretty darn good with them. I participated in different computer clubs, learned how to program and do other fun things at an early age. Given that and the fact that IT provided stable and well-paid careers in the past, it was a no brainer! But had IT sucked in terms of pay, I would have never gotten into it to begin with. You heard me correctly. If I had to choose a major in 2002, Comp. Sci. would not be on my list.
See, I was poor all my life. I could not major in Liberal Arts or English because I had to support myself and think of supporting my parents and relatives in the future. I had to choose something that I liked and that paid good. This is a fucking no-brainer and I know that 90% of you would do the same thing. Would you study your ass off to find out that your jobs are moving to India and that you get shit for pay? I highly doubt that.
Comp. Sci. was a perfect major for me. I thought of going to a medical school, but my parents could not afford that. I thought of doing science, but then I saw what most of research specialist brought in terms of income and I said "fuck that." Business and Economics were okay; however, I did not like them as much as I liked Computer Science and that is why I majored in it. After four years of pain, I got out of college with no job, a butt load of loans and no chances to find a good job. It took me a while to find one and I went through a lot of pain to get where I am right now. Not everybody can do that.
Anybody with more than two brain cells saw that IT got fucking smashed and that it was harder to get jobs in the field. With that in mind, who wants to take a risk? How many people would like to study one of the hardest fields and then end up without a job and a load of student loans? It is not pretty; take my word for it. For some people it does not make sense to get into a field if they can't earn good money. This is just a rational thought because there are individuals, believe it or not, who want to be financially secure. Why would I pay to go to college if four years down the road I am going to be unemployed?
Of course, there are people who can afford doing what they like regardless of financial benefits. I know a person who pissed through four years of Ivy League education majoring in some useless crap that can't get a her a job that pays more than $25K/year. She can afford loving what she does for living (whenever she has a job) only because her daddy supports her. In theory, she does not even have to work to be well-off. For me, it was not an option. It was either boom or bust. I had to choose a discipline that satisfied three criteria: a stable career and income while being interesting at the same time. If a career did not fit any of those three parameters, I'd pass. Would not you?
I assume that Comp. Sci. can no longer fit people in my situation; hence we have a drop in enrollment.
They're generally the ones crying about the state of US education, CS enrollment, etc... This is their theme song. It may or may not be true but they have a huge conflict of interest here. Kind of like the boy who cried wolf turning out to be a predator protection systems salesman.
It seems like every few weeks an article like this comes out and everyone is supposed to respond with panic? Why?
The American I.T. industry is off shoring every I.T. job it possibly can so why do these articles make it sound like a problem if fewer college students take up Computer Science as a major?
Are college professors and administrators worried about lack of funds for their department?
Are American I.T. companies worried about filling the lower quality I.T. jobs left in the country? The ones that aren't worth or that can't be outsourced?
Is this why these articles make references to getting more women into the field? So if corporate America can't save a few shekels by outsourcing a job they can save some money by giving it to a woman who they think they can pay less and push around more?
What do the rest of you think?
What future demand for IT workers?
My last job involved learning someone else's big system, and debugging it. I also wrote SQL queries that were several pages long. I personally think its easier to create your own system from scratch than it is to try and trace down thousands of access violations in someone else's code.
God spoke to me.
I for one welcome the drop in competition.
As for women in CS, nobody seems to want to admit that thier brains aren't "wired" for it in general. There are plenty of good ones out there to be sure, but increasing their numbers is a round peg/square hole problem.
The women that are good in the CS world know it, are good at it and gravitate to it automatically.
---- "Logoff! That cookie shit makes me nervous!" - A. Soprano
You have so much IT work being outsourced to people willing to work for a third of a U.S. salary. So the attraction of being making the big bucks is gone. Why compete, go to a Biotech or other path where the money is.
Many universities like UCLA have wanted to drop CS as a major saying programming is a trade not a profession. FWIW they want to drop CS and offer Computer Engineering only. I see people on lists complain all the time that most the people they work with don't have CS degrees or any degree. Maybe CS is a more of a trade than a profession.
This isn't the first article I've read on CS major dropping in popularity. It's a good thing there aren't as many jobs and it isn't going to get better. So now CS major's will be those who truly love CS and not doing it for the starting salary. In long run its a good thing.
I don't think it has as much to do with "communication" skills as it does with empathy, or the ability to appreciate the feelings of others and to respond appropriately. If you can't do that, you'll have a hard time in the dating game no matter how articulate you might be...
I agree. I am actually combining CS and Linguistics and find that it will actually provide many opportunities no matter if I enter graduate school or the work force. A CS degree on its own doesn't seem as meaningful these days.. but, it was never overly meaningful. I'm not suprised by the decline, as like one other person had said, a large number of people in the CS program 4-5 years ago were looking for money. Most of them that I knew never actually followed through and graduated with a CS degree. The influx of idiots actually drove me to get out of the CS program and I left school to do some work as a programmer for awhile. Once I got sick of programming, I decided to get myself a CS degree so that I could go in to more theoretical areas of computer software and solve more interesting problems.
I see people change their major away from CS all the time, because they decide they don't like to program. These are people that came in with no programming experience of course. Those people that came in with programming experience have generally stayed with it, because they knew exactly what they were getting in to, and didn't have lives to begin with.
"The field has been bloated with get-rich-quick degree-seekers for too long, the way engineering was in the 1980s."
And as long as the bottom falls out of IT, this excuse will persist.
2010:"Gosh darn it. Those "get rich quick" seekers are taking the job ment for me."
"I plan to stick around, so the odds are better for me to get a job instead of somebody taking it out of a love of money rather than a love of the work."
If "love of" was the panacea you thought it was? Then open-source would be the pinnacle of software development. I'll let you figure out the reality.
"Besides, if there's a an employee shortage, salaries are more likely to stay high."
Fooseball table here you come.
"With the offshoring of certain types of work, I must wonder if the number of IT jobs in the U.S. is actually going to shrink---at least in relative numbers, rather than increase over then next decade. It'll all be interesting, I'm sure. "
Well considering you all are trying your darndest to Wal-Mart your profession since Y2K. Why not?
You do realize there is nothing new here right? About the time any profession becomes unprofitable due to market saturation, trade schools start promoting the entry of lower castes into the ranks as the next major milestone in human development, who they seem to assume would be all too happy to get into debt to move "up" in the social ladder. This sort of thing is always promoted in the following order: foreign men, women, blacks, hispanics then gays. This trend is fairly evident in the military, in support roles in business, people are pressing for it in religious communities, who knows maybe the trend will start showing up with the CEO's and politicians.
As far as I'm concerned this is just business as usual in the USofA.
We have 3 kids now. :-)
I've gone to four seperate colleges and found all of thier classes lacking. I first went to CCA, a commuity college in Aurora, CO, and then moved to Metro State College of Denver, CU in Boulder, and finilly Colorado School of Mines. Each school's CS department was not very apealling in terms of what I wished to learn. I am predominatley self educated in the first place I felt that it was unfiar that I couldn't just skip certian classes in which I already knew the critera. I finaly gave up college and just put together a decent resume and got my foot in the door working for one of the local defence contractors in InfoSec. I'm getting paid $20,000 more for my skillset than my freinds who have graduated and earned a degree (I'm getting $70,000). I feel that I'm underpaid for my skillset but I know that if I went to college and only learned what they were teaching that I would not be where I am today through self education. Honestly I would rather not goto college. I feel that college cannot teach me what I need to know. Until the day that they get better classes where I feel that I can be properly challenged then I have no intentions of returning.
KNEEL BEFORE ZOD!!
If you can't do that, you'll have a hard time in the dating game no matter how articulate you might be...
Or what the original poster who posted that whole diatribe missed no matter what job you might be in.
If we took all the geeks and put them to work digging ditches, they STILL wouldn't get any girls (though they'd get a tan and after a month or two, lose some fat and gain some muscle). It's not that engineering makes people sterile or some bullshit like that, its simply that there are people who are maladjusted to society for whatever reason, and they end up in jobs where that doesn't matter. Whether its after-hours window washer who enjoys being alone on the side of a building for hours or the guy in the back room who designs planes, then leaves all the meetings to the boss, its still the same situation (only one gets paid more).
No number of "corporate concubines" will fix this problem. Find out why society is failing to produce well-adjusted people, then we'll talk.
The best programmers for any job will be the ones who are experienced both in programming and in the domain. So if somebody is smart enough and willing to work hard enough to double-major, I encourage them to do some other field of interest as well as CS.
The best code is written by CS grads, it's true, but I'm not sure it's because of the CS degree. All of the best programmers I know were top-notch programmers before entering college. College gave them experience, and knowledge, but they had developed their craft from a young age, like any other artist.
Programming really is an art form when done properly, and good programmers rely on an aesthetic sense to avoid "hackish and ugly" code. So if the non-CS people are producing it, it may be because of the reason they avoided CS in the first place. It's the same reason I avoided majoring in art: I'm just not any good at it and didn't expect them to train me well enough to make it worth my time and theirs.
I'd like to see more CS majors at least minor in some other field of interest. There will be those who wish to do CS for its own sake, usually academic: HCI research, automata theory, networking, etc. But for CS majors who want to program computers for a living, and that's a majority of them, I think that they should learn something besides computers. Science, history, business, English: anything that will give them some idea of what it is that the people who are tasking them want.
If necessary, you hire one of those guys to be project lead, and hire cheaper, less experienced programmers to just bang out the code, but I think it all works better if the entire team can both code and develop a real understanding of the requirements, because the spec is never going to quite cut it. A programmer's job isn't to work with computers; otherwise we'd just write a spec-to-software compiler. The programmer's job is to interface between the computer and the client. That works best only when the programmer speaks both languages.
I don't think it has as much to do with "communication" skills as it does with empathy, or the ability to appreciate the feelings of others and to respond appropriately. If you can't do that, you'll have a hard time in the dating game no matter how articulate you might be...
I can only talk from my own experience, i have seen women throw themselves at men who are dumb/criminals/liars/etc. all because they were good communicators and attractive. I have ssen women with nice guys too but they tend to be fairly social people too. No one has a right to loving relationship, your lucky if someone loves you, why should a women love you if you have terrible social skills ?
> Sometimes I feel that majors in the humanities, in communication, literature, critical thinking, psychology, philosophy, linguists, and financial planning are better qualified as developers, because they understand what is most often to be coded these days:
Yes, they may well better understand what is to BE coded, but most that I've seen are damn sure not qualified to actually DO the coding. Which is one reason we have all the crap software out there we have today.
Before you design for reuse, make sure to design it for use.
"Would you be willing to say that these people shouldn't have been in CS to begin with?"
You could say it, but the evidence is purely circumstantial, and mostly reeks of arrogance. Both towards others, as well as the posters over-blown sense of self-worth in the larger scheme of things.
Those guys are sociopaths. They have the ability to fake empathy, and use it for manipulative purposes. They often become politicians.
Those guys are sociopaths. They have the ability to fake empathy, and use it for manipulative purposes. They often become politicians.
Great how do I become one ?
Some thoughts from a 48 year old nerd, with a graduate degree in physics.
In Fig.1 you'll note that a the personal computer industry was expanding in the late seventies and early eighties the number of CS majors grew. When the PC industry reached its pre-web zenith the number of CS majors peaked. What caused the second peak in CS majors was the birth, and growth of the internet, especially the WWW.
The zenith in incoming freshmen CS majors was in 1999, just before the dotcom bust. The dotcom bust occurred in the Spring of 2000, thus the incoming freshmen of the Fall of 2000 responded to the reduced job market in CS. This should not be surprising. It is very common that incoming freshmen will tend to major in whatever major offers the best, or near best prospects for employment, in terms of jobs available, and $$$.
I would also note that Fig. 2 shows that the 'easier' the major the more students that major in that major. You'll note that the physical sciences consistently constitutes less than 5% of the majors of incoming freshmen. Why? In a word Math. The tougher the math requirements the fewer the students that major in in that discipline.
Over the last fifty years survey, after poll, after study has shown that college students consistently rank physics, math, and chemistry as the three toughest majors. Further, given that the finical rewards of majoring in these disciplines in not particularly great, students that are looking to maximize their profits from their college degree strongly tend to avoid the physical sciences, and mathematics.
You will also note that the BBA became very hot in the eighties, and peaked in 87 with 25% of incoming freshmen aiming for a BBA. That trend cooled somewhat in the ninities, but has held level for about the last dozen years at 15%.
Figure 3. is a simple reflection of the fact that nationwide the percentage of incoming freshmen that are female has been steadily rising for the past forty years.
I would also point out another phenomena. In the nineties it was difficult for some small, and medium sized universities to recruit graduate students into their physics programs. I've first hand knowledge of this as one of my best friends was a prof. at Stephen F. Austin State Univ. during this period. He's statements to me on this subject we reinforced by conversations that I had with other physicist at other universities here in Texas at fall, and spring physics conferences.
The problem with getting students to enroll into graduate programs in physics was simply that newly minted baccalaureates were offered $$$ by companies to take jobs in programing, and code design. It seems that there were/are an goodly number of corporations, and companies that believe that physics, and math majors make better programers than straight CS majors. This mainly true in the aerospace, and defense sectors, though other HIGH-tech companies share this bias.
Further, I'm personally friends with three high school graduates that were whizzes at coding that forewent college entirely. There skills were of such quality that they have been able to make *very* good livings for themselves without a college degree.
I personally suspect that many of the most talented young programers have followed this route. It is the youngsters that are not so talented, and are really just in it for the $$$ that have provided the bulk of the CS majors over the last twenty-five years. That is not to say that these folk are not competent, just that they are not generally 'coding gods.'
FWIW
STB
"Oh drat these computers, they're so naughty and so complex, I could pinch them." --Marvin the Martian
A drop in CS Majors does not necessarily mean there will be a drop in the supply of IT professionals.
Although I am a CS Major a lot of IT professionals i know are not.
They are people who despite being in a variety of majors have ended up being IT professionals.
Also if you ask any of your out sourced IT professionals (the consultants from INDIA etc) most of them are not CS majors. Most were some engineering (other than cs) majors who couldn't find employment in their own majors or were simply wanted to make more money and were trained by their company as IT ppl.
Maybe all this is for the best. Some members of the CS profession could use a healthy dose of humility.*
Lord knows this story certainly is bringing out all the arrogent jerks, that apparently too much brains, and not enough life experience creates.
*You never here this kind of talk from the McJob crowd.
The real problem is that an undergraduate CS degree is a fairly useless thing to have on it's own. People need to realize that IT (fixing networks) is not the same as software development. And people also need to realize that being good at CS is not good enough for software development - you sould be good at CS, *AND* good at whatever you're developing hte software for.
Does your software model chemical reactions? Then you should be someone who is good at chemistry who can also write software. Does your software lay out gates? Then you should be an electrical engineer who can also write sfotware. Does your software do people's taxes? Then you should be an accountant who also can write software.
Do you make sure the routers, print servers, and various computers all talk and play togetehr nicely, and that people's computers don't get infected with viruses? Then you're a network tech, and a CS degree was a waste of time. (Or you're a waste of a CS degree.)
The thing is, MOST people don't need a CS degree to be someone who is good at something else AND can write software. Many already know how to write software by the time the get to college, and those that don't would better spend their time becoming an expert in the field they're going to be writig software in than being an expert in software writing.
Might their software not be quite as fast as software written by a CS expert? Maybe not. But it will still probablybe overall better, as the person doing the programming will have a much ebtter understanding of what the program should do.
Anyway, if you're an IT worker (routers, printers, and no viruses) and you saw this article about CS majors and posted something about your job, you should be modded -1 Offtopic. This article isn't about you.
paintball
Of course, as your post demonstrates, English is definitely not on the top of Slashdotters' list.
What?
You americans have a funny way to capitalize, but not group headlines, words and statements together. :-)
:-)
I first read that as (Interest in CS) (as a Major Drops). OK, so a Major dropped. And this has exactly what to do with CS?
I then read it as (Interest in CS) as a (Major Drops), and started thinking, since I vaguely recalls "drops" is the name for bits of candy; Ok, there's some candy in the US(A) you can buy called "Major Drops", and for some reason there's a correlation between this candy and CS? Nuts.
I then read it as (Interest in) (CS as a Major Drops), and didn't know heads from tails.
Finally I realized this was all due to bad grammar, non-obvious grouping of words and the final interpretation must be:
(Interest in CS) (as) a (Major Drops).
Meaning it's merely an essay, about how interest in CS can get an anology with interest in "Major Drops" (whatever candy that is), or about "interest in CS" can be while a Major is falling from altitude (drops).
You americans...
This will make it easier to negotiate future wages for my already ridiculous salary. To all prospective students - STAY OUT OF CS!!!
Well, they could raise men's participation at the undergraduate level.
Or black people's.
Or people whose last name begins with 'R'.
There are lots of ways to raise participation at the undergraduate level that don't involve identity politics.
mod down this troll
Then I stopped and thought again, and my second reaction was "Fair enough; I don't see why any army ranks should be particularly interested in it."
Just thought you'd like to see how some of this reads from the other side of the Pond...
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
my CS class at JMU '93 graduated with only 24 (out of over 2000 graduates per year). Being so small we were told of stories of how they used to have over 200 graduates in the CS program back in the 80s (the original micro-computer boom time, when computers were popular).
years later, by '98 (the second computer boom-time thanks to the 'net) the CS classes were back up to over 200 / year.
now, they're dropping again.
i would put it that the reason is that there's no major "popularity" in Computers right now. they're just there, rather than being full of new and interesting things. the two peaks of CS student-hood were at times when there were tons of new things to do and discover. related to that was the idea that if one was into it at the time, one could get a guarenteed high-paying job fresh out of school.
the valley i was in was at a time of staticness. DOS hadn't changed in 5 years, windows was unheard of, "IBM-compatibility" was taking over the world, the mac was too expensive to become a hacker box, and most people getting into CS had never heard of "unix" before (much less VMS or the AS/400s where the real work was still being done). at the time, nothing looked like it would change. many in my class got into CS from other degree programs (physics in my case) because we discovered we were decent programmers first once exposed to real hardware.
today we're in another valley. the 90s saw a ton of good stuff and a ton of junk get made in a very short time, but right now there's little being done that a high school grad could recognize and go "hey, that's something i could be doing in 5 years". yeah, there's lots of stuff in XML -- but would a high school kid really know what it was or how it was useful to them?
its kinda like getting into open-source programming: having an itch to scratch, a peek of curiosity. the peaks of CS student-counts happen at times when there's so much going on that's obvious to anyone outside of the industry, enough to get kids to go "i wonder how they did that?" and get into the degree program to find out.
the valleys like now or like the late 80s to early 90s happen when what is going on in the industry is really only of interest to those within the industry.
we're back into a gadget world (digital cameras, mp3 players), and gadgets are known for being "black boxes" outside the industry. contrast that to the early micro- world where everybody had "BASIC", or the internet world where anybody could hack together a page of html, gifs, and perl scripts. you can't look at an iPod and go "i could make my own" the way you could some trendy web page or early 6502 game.
so really the downtimes comes down to being in a time where you can't see what you would do with a CS degree, compared to other times where it seemed obvious what you could do with one.
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
Since when is there a shortage of IT workers in America? You mean the guy that answers the technical support is in India? I never would have guessed...
Microsoft Sucks, F/OSS Rocks. I get mod points now right?
That's the thing, fresh college grads expect to make the crazy money right out of college, but the market simply cannot support that concept. I'm going to graduate in 2 weeks and I have no expectations about making a job in my field (computer engineering) at the average starting salary for grads ($52k). I expect to enter into a ladder-style career. Yeah, I may get a crap job that I'm overqualified for, but I can get the experience the job gives me, then I can shoot for the moon and get the great job later after I've spent some time in the working world.
On a more grand scale, this phenomena is why the US is outsourcing and it's not even bound to college grads either. Teenagers these days want to make the easy cash or not even try and jobs go unfulfilled. Employers can't afford to pay the kind of money these people want so they find someone who will work for the money, enter foreigners that have a lower cost of living. There's just no honor in the afterschool McDonalds job anymore.
Here at Penn State, we've got some other programs that are taking some of the students away from CS.
The biggest would be the up-and-coming Information Sciences and Technology program. IST is kind of a combination of the basics of CS with the basics of business. You can then branch into one of three options. The most CS-like option is Design & Development, where the focus is more on the software development process, and not so much on coding. There are also some classes that aim at more specific subjects, like network security and client-server applications.
Another popular program is the Management Information Systems program in the College of Business. It's a bit like the IST program, and even cross lists some of its classes in the IST department. I don't know a whole lot of the specifics about MIS, though. I'm in IST if you couldn't tell.
The problem was that CS people came out of school having tech skills, but that was about it. A software company would have CS people programming, but if executives or a client wanted to know exactly what they were doing, nobody was able to tell them. Management didn't know and the programmers weren't able to explain without going over everyone's head. Most companies now are looking for someone with tech skills they can use, but also with communications and business backgrounds to better fit in the enterprise.
I felt that it was pretty much straight across the board. Poor HR people, poor management, poor IT personal, poor sales people, poor marketting...
Ultimately though all responsibility does fall on management, and within almost all groups, there were usually a few people that really did know what they were doing would keep things working and moving forward. Because of the fact that management can't really survive that way, I agree with you that poor management is a much bigger issue.
Perhaps less students are interested in CS because it is now on the same level as auto mechanics and you can get the training at any vocational school....
Although this isn't really a legitimate way of attacking my statements, it is important to note that among my peers I've probably had the greatest number of highly attractive girlfriends/sex partners of any of them. Now I'll be attacked as an egomaniac or something but the point is to clarify much of the psychology of the current argument and debunk an appealing fallacy.
Indeed, it is probably my relative advantage here that has allowed me to not censor my own observations as possibly being simply the result of my own bitterness. I see the men I matured with -- good men both personally and professionally -- and dislike intensely what the corporate and governmental "alphas" did to them.
I'm not saying I didn't have my share of problems with women -- just about anyone these days does. I'm just saying the argument against my statements is very weak even as ad hominem arguments go.
Seastead this.
... a comment that I read in a public forum. It came from somebody who described himself as "a first year CS student, who will probably be a millionaire one day..." To me, that summarizes it all: all too many people were undertaking CS degrees, blinded, like this moron, by the glitz of the dot com newly-rich.
I for one am happy that people who were getting into CS for a fast route to make money are focusing their efforts elsewhere.
So i`m going to be a plumber. i`ll be the only one left in america, i`ll be rich.
Maybe if computer science as a major actually meant computer science and not math science more people would be computer science majors. I changed my major because I got tired of the math. Why do I need calculus for computer science? So I can help launch the space shuttle? Some schools want multiple years of calculus. They need to teach math thats actually applied to computers and not just make computer science into a mathfest.
"I knew so many people who were intelligent kids and just wanted to get rich so they were in CS."*
Hehe. Well you guys in a perfect "spite your nose" manouver, invented Open Source, and "for the love of it" made yourself redundant.
I think you all deserve all the grief you can get. Even ten years from now, when you all are using the same tired old "blame the immigrants" excuse that the "physical goods" workers were using in the '80's and '90's.
With all the new graphic engines you can see in games such as Doom 3 and Half Life 2, no wonder freshmen are losing interest in old school Counterstrike ...
I don't think it only applies to men in IT, or even just to men.
In my experience I have seen *men* throw themselves at *women* who are dumb/liars/cheats/etc. all because they were good communicators and attractive.
Unfortunately that's how the modern western world works.
IANAS (statistician) but in that first graph, the "Total" line looks a heck of a lot like an "Average" line instead. Wouldn't "Total" be accumulative between men and women?
Punctanym: alternate spelling of words using punctuation or numerals in place of some or all of its letters; see 'leet'
That stuff at the end about "oh, well, women are our only hope" was just a bunch of politically correct garbage.
If more women stayed home and raised the babies, that would free up more men to work in CS. Men are boycotting these uber-liberal colleges like Berkeley because they cannot stomache going into thousands of dollars worth of debt to support radical homosexual anti-american militants.
"Too many people think of a BS in Comp Sci as a degree in programming."
At most schools, as I have seen, this is in fact the case. Students partially get this view from the way the school has set up their programs.
For example, software developing classes are advanced CS and graduate courses, for example. So you have to take CS to get into these useful programming classes. The only place you learn serious programming (i.e. practical) is in CS classes. Programming is not well integrated into other courses (generally they focus on specific applications, a real danger IMO), or if it is, it's the 101 tutorial of how to use the base API. In other words, not enough to entice the would-be programmers and near-useless for people who have a specific field they want to focus on (ex. physics, economics, biotech, etc).
This sends the wrong message about computer science and programming in general, but schools pushed this trend and now they need to rethink it.
is that a lot of schools offer nothing in the way of accelerated programs. Some of us go to college with a very good understanding of programming fundamentals, data structures, algorithms and whatnot. It essentially becomes _strictly_ a mathematics curriculum because programming classes are painfully simple, algorithms and data structures, for the most part, can be looked up in a book (or online) and with any skill, implemented painlessly. Even though the only part of the Major I enjoyed was the mathematics, it quickly became boring and stressful because of the constant repetition of simple theorems, greatly prolonged calculus courses (c'mon, you can't condense Calc 1 and Calc 2 at least???), and attending lectures where professors constantly make very bad mistakes, forcing us to just learn much of the material on our own.
That said I left the major because I felt continuing that degree track was not worth the time or the money I was paying. I've already got a well paying job running beowulfs and designing parallel software for problems at the university. I decided that college was not a vocational training facility, but was intended to be a place to facilitate education so I switched to a more "broad" field and put my education in logic to use in the Philosophy department. You may say that it was laziness that prompted that decision but in actuality, I had much deeper personal and ethical reasons for this.
I am already well on the path to reclaiming my old hair color as the stress from constantly doing equations put a few greys in the mix, though it was mostly the tests that freaked me out. My training with proofs has really helped me grasp some of the logical concepts in philosophy and has helped to provide me good insight into induction.
The simple fact is that most people expect CS to be more job-oriented, that they will learn to code and have the skills to walk out and get a $70k a year job right off the bat. CS is still heavily academic but there are too many people in its midst that view it as a vocational training program. I made this mistake and many others, especially those that complain about the math requirements (I don't complain about the requirements, just the methods) are generally those that have this view of the major. Once people stop having this misconception, CS enrollment will likely decline, creating a smaller work force of gifted programmers, scientists and researchers instead of a large base of mostly future Sys admins. That's just my $0.02
ESTAFADORES => bosses, commercials, bank's brokers, lawyers, artists, musicians, TV-presenters, talkers, politicians, ...
BAD PAID: engineers, programmers, developers, students, scientists, ...
Current objectives: BAD!!!
One can estimate how many outsourced engineering positions there are by the revenues of the big 3 Outsourcing firms. This was $1.5 Billion last year; so I'd estimate that they have around 150,000 engineers.
The H1-B program is at 75,000 this year. That's about a third of all positions. Or one very significant chunk, with a LOT of pressure to increase it.
The bottom line is that there is tremendous value to working on-site, close to the customer. As long as this doesn't change, and H1-B's are kept down, the future looks good, IMHO.
Increase the H1/L1 visa limits and then the picture will change.
The best way to predict the future is to create it. - Peter Drucker.
Aww, boo hoo, CS majors no longer make 6 figures starting out.
Last I checked, the avg starting salary is still around 50K. Anecdotally, everyone I know at my top 10 CS school gets around 60, some get up to 80.
Would you rather be a liberal arts major and work for minimum wage at barnes and noble?
Would you rather be a doctor, and spend 10 years going into debt, so that maybe by the time you are 38 you will have as much accumulated wealth as the CS major, assuming you do well on the MCAT because otherwise you will be working for minimum wage at barnes and noble?
Would you rather be a business major, and learn nothing that can be of value to society in college, and have the same salary as the CS major, assuming you have connections in the business world and a type A personality, otherwise you will be working for minimum wage at barnes and noble?
CS is still one of the highest paying majors there is, so if you like it, do it, and quit complaining.
Among my friends from undergrad, I note that the ones who are very intelligent and communicate reasonably well got good jobs (similar to what I was offered). People who were not so good typically got jobs that are not so rewarding, financially or intellectually. The only exceptional cases I know of are one friend who has quite unpolished english (he speaks fluently, but his speech does not reflect his high intelligence), and one other friend who decided that she wanted a boring job so that she could spend more time partying. Both of them got jobs that I would not consider enjoyable or well paying. Other than that, my smart friends got good jobs.
From my current research group, the sample space is much smaller, but the people I know who have graduated from the group are all gainfully employed in jobs that seem interesting.
My overall impression is that the job market now is smaller than it was several years ago, but that the shrinking has occured mainly at the expense of less qualified people. Intelligent people with any motivation still seem able to come up with jobs in the computing field that pay well and offer some level of interest.
Whoever corrects a mocker invites insult;
whoever rebukes a wicked man incurs abuse.
--Proverbs 9:7
[i]"Computer Science is to programming as mechanical engineering is to operating a drill press"[/i]
;)
I've also heard this stated as, "Computers are to computer science what telescopes are to astronomy".
[i]Too many people think of a BS in Comp Sci as a degree in programming.[/i]
Too many colleges think they can throw a bunch of programming classes together and call it Computer Science.
Actually it's worse now. All those in 1999-2000 who have degrees now, had no business being in CS/IT and still don't. But now they have degrees, and have held a job (many of them) and look just as good on paper as the "real" I.T guy they are up against in a job. Most managers/HR departments can't tell the difference, even in an interview.
Solution: Find a niche market within I.T where you know the stragglers aren't going to go near, or start your own business.
CS Grad working more than a decade. In the beginning it was normal. Tt was a good intersting work with reasonable pay. Then it got crazy, bubble economics kicked in. Good times for a while, but it was nutso. Then we hit the bust. Now it sucks IMO at least in big Corporations. Downsized to less than half staff, Still expected to meet crazy deadline, but now the management solution is egregious stupid process. The Job sucks. I hear the same from all my friends at other big corps.
Once upon a time we used to work long hours on interesting problems, becaus they were interesting problems, now we do it to keep our jobs. We have massive outsourcing contract in India and China, which are poorly managed. Not poor talent mind you . The guys come over for training locally and they are bright and motived. But out of sync time zones and communications barriers, mean we get less productivity in the end. But we do it cause it looks good to someones bottom line.
So I don't recomend anyone enter this field, where flex time means freedom to work all hours to meet crazy deadlines, were process has removed coding excitement, and turned it into accounting drudgery(with no gain in quality).
But if you are a good natural talent and have a passion for coding/creating buy all means enter the field. But work only for small companies/startups or do your own thing. Try to double major in Heavy Math/Engineering/Biology or anything that will open other alternatives than just being a software engineer. Or maybe just do the Biology study and do Open source stuff on the side.
I am still coding for a living, but it is no longer fun. I think daily about what I could do instead.
Computer Science it to programming as mechanical engineering is to operating a drill press well.
Too many CS grads think they're great programmers right out of school. All too often they don't know what they hell they're doing when writing code. Real-world concerns like maintainability, portability, readability, and performance are apparently not taught to CS students.
Do mechanical engineering programs have multiple courses about operating a drill press? Is the ability to operate a drill press an essential part of being a mechanical engineer? Do people who hire drill press operators want them to have a mechanical engineering degree?
Here in Norway, NTNU (Norwegian University of Science and Technology) had a requirement of 56 studying points to get into the Computer Engineer major back in 2000, but the demand has dropped so much that the requirement for 2004 dropped all the way to 45 points. (the toughest courses in Norway requires something like 65 studyingpoints, 20 points is the lowest possible).
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
With a fall in degree production looming, it is difficult to see how CS can match expected future demand for IT workers without raising women's participation at the undergraduate level.
I'm sure India can cope.
Xerox PARC is gone. DEC SRL and DEC WRL are gone. HP Labs is dead. Interval Research is gone. Bell Labs is a shadow of what it once was. Sarnoff Labs doesn't do much. IBM Almaden is being dismantled. SGI is in tatters. Apple R&D is very limited. And DARPA is going to stop funding CS research.
Who's doing advanced work? Google and Microsoft seem to have the only big remaining CS research labs in the US.
I took a philosophy course called "Practical Reasoning" that was about critical thinking.
It was fucking fantastic.
It taught me about how science is important and its role in our society. It taught me how to examine a claim and determine whether it is true or not. It taught me about ethics and how to determine if an action is right or wrong.
It basically taught me how to make the right decisions.
Women have half the money and all the pussy.
What's the definition of a successful man? One that makes more than his wife can spend.
Well part of the reason is CS graduates are telling kids not to go for the major. That's pure crap to be telling people that the number of jobs in the IT industry are going to keep going up. Yeah, they're going up and they're going overseas. I can't in good faith tell some kid to waste the next 4 years of his life in a major and when he gets out there will be either no job for him or a crappy one. I've been out of work over a year now. Mid-30's, 15 years of experience and *I* can't find work? What hope is for them coming out with NO experience? That's why there are fewer CS majors.
... in the rat race that was Silicon Valley and missed out on women, life, and everything else while you were a slave to work, then you shouldn't be passing your idiot genes on to begin with.
Quite true. I tell my relatives not to go for a CS major too because new CS jobs are being outsourced to India by the greedy and overpaid CEOs. It makes more sense to get a degree a in field where there are better job opportunities like healthcare or finance.
Just keep reciting "It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again" in your head.
WTF does that mean? I don't care what field you're in, you start at the bottom doing mind-numbing work. Whether you go on to something creative or stay doing the same thing over nonstop is completely up to your talent, vision and persperation. If you can't see a way a CS grad could break out of anything beyond doing MS Office maintenance, that's a limitation on your vision -- not the field, not the industry.
That's just the way it is.
I do consulting. One of the things I get paid to fly thousands of miles to do is fix things inexperienced recent grads did or didn't do.
The last damn thing a development manager for production code wants is some recent grad who knows all the little tricks of C++ and is eager to try them out for real. They want coders who can write mundane, middle-of-the-road code from the mainstream of whatever language that is rock-solid, robust, maintainable, testable code.
Figure out a way to demonstrate that knowledge to a hiring manager and you'll get inundated with job offers.
So no, your "so overqualified" grad students aren't really overqualified for real-world coding. Who gives a damn if they know compiler theories if they're not writing compilers.
Since when? Why wasn't I informed that I could major in playing Counter-Strike?
Demand has been decreasing for at least the past two years. Last year's first year classes for Computer Science were at about half the size from a few years ago, and this year the classes were about half of the size compared to the year before. This is true for all three campuses of the University of Toronto.
People should research schools before going there. There's only 10% or so worth their salt (if that?). If the program smells, it probably sucks. What research are the faculty doing is probably the biggest indicator of quality of institution, especially in comp sci. Their not doing any? good luck.
Foreign language majors have enjoyed a recent surge; particularly in the Indian and Chinese Language areas of study.
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
You must have not been paying attention when he said it's the grad students -- not "22-year-old[s] with a CS degree" that are the ones who are overqualified. If Master's or Doctorate degrees (which typically involve a major project that gives real programming experience) don't qualify you to do more than fix bugs, what does?
As someone with a Master's and someone with friends with Master's from different Universities I can safely say you are wrong. A Master's does not really add much to your qualification outside of the topic you did your research in. As for the project/thesis, it's a lot of work for school but not much compared to a job. Especially since it is generally a solo project. The real value of a job candidate with a Master's is that they have a greater pre-disposition to go research a complicated problem than just start writing code.
Also there are very good reasons to start recent grads doing maintenance. First, they generally have exaggerated opinions of themselves and their code quality is sometimes low ("big" fish in a small pond). Maintenance can help correct that, it can give them a broader perspective, exposure to larger scale projects, introduce them to the local coding and design standards, and possibly most important of all they learn the domain specific knowledge for the job. Once you have worked on a product/project you are better qualified to expand it or work on the next version.
In short, the University does not demonstrate you are qualified to do a job. It demonstrates that you are qualified to learn to do a job, that you are able to complete long and sometimes boring tasks.
Too many people think of a BS in Comp Sci as a degree in programming.
Yeah, like the people who came up with the curriculum at my university. (Which is a pretty highly regarded school for CS, at least at the graduate level, in US News' survey.)
The undergrad CS program trains programmers. There is exactly one theory course which is required. Other than that, the classes are all practical and programming-oriented. Presumably the grad programs cover more of the 'S' in CS. But at least where I went to school, BS in CS was definitely a BS in programming.
Of course there is no money in CS if you go the route that most people think - i.e., fixing bugs and running the systems. That's monkey labor (depending on the system obviously; running amazon.com's website isn't a cakewalk). The real money in CS comes from people with ideas who take those ideas and turn them into code and turn the code into $ by selling it on the internet. Many .com companies failed because the lacked the idea. Maybe they should have a requirement on entrace exams to universities if you want to major in CS. The question would be: "what is your idea?"
Everyone knows that if you want to work for m$ then you should get a business/marketing degree instead of a comp. science degree.
This is a poor misconception. From my experience, most CS students frown on working in IT. They want to work on huge projects or specialized software and cringe at the thought of touching "icky hardware". CS students, at least from here, know very little about hardware, networking, or databases. Many are unable to install basic hardware let alone build a computer. With regards to networking, they look inquisitively when you mention the word OSI model or words like Novell, LDAP, Active Directory, or many other networking technologies and methodologies. They want to be logical and write software soley. I personally know someone who graduated with a CS degree and a good GPA and lives with his mom without any job even though he had offers to interview with companies like Chrysler but refused--he didn't get a degree to work in IT, he wanted to write software. From my experience with internships in IT, a pure programming degree won't get you very far unless you're in a rather specialized field. If you want to have a broader field you should consider differently focused programs like Purdue's Computer Technology program. I admit I'm biased, as I'm on the telecommunications and networking track in this program, but frankly I think learning how to use and create databases like Oracle, some programming such as VB.Net and Java, with a heavy emphasis on computer networking and network management provides a much better basis for which to do well in IT. This kind of knowledge is far more applicable then a pure software degree like CS will get you. Thank you for entertaining my rant.
In my experience, both with my undergraduate and graduate classmates, and with those I interviewed for programming positions, there are two types of CS grads. The first is the CS grad who got into the field because they have an inherent interest in programming. The second is the CS grad who got into it because they were told it was a good career path. The latter group is not necessarily bad. A lab partner once surprised me with poo poo'ing the idea of getting a MS CS, he said he would rather get an MBA. My naive reaction was oh god, the dark side. Now he went on to start his own software business, not a dot-bomb - a business that developed and sold an actual product, and he did quite well. He didn't need to be the best coder around, but having a decent technical background was invaluable for his business.
Unfortunately my former lab partner is the exception not the rule. When hiring I look for those with an inherent interest in coding. One metric is to ask what they did outside of class assignments. I don't care how goofy or stupid their homebrew project was, and getting them comfortable enough to tell me about it can be challenging, but the fact that they sat down in front of a computer on their own time and coded something that worked merely to satisy their own curiosity or desire is telling. The CS grad who can only tell me about his/her homework assignments goes to the bottom of the pile.
Another way to get off the bottom of the pile is to do some kind of internship or co-op job.
I've worked in IT for 25 years. I've held several jobs, and I've worked as a consultant. I look though the job boards and newspapers all the time.
From what I have seen, most IT jobs don't require a degree of any kind. Those that do will gladly accept a BSEE as fast as a BSCS. Usually, even when they ask for a degree, they will usually say "or equivilent experience."
What employers really want is about five years of professional, recent, verifiable experience, in whatever technologies they happen to be using. And they want to pay about $15/hour.
As for the chicken and egg, how do you get experience until you have experience question: in this economy, you can't. Oh sure, there are always exceptions, but for the most part, the IT field is too glutted for new commers.
I graduated with my CS degree in 2002, didn't find a job until 2003 (making a whopping 12.75 an hour doing sgml work) was then tasked with creating a JSP/MySQL web app all by myself (does this count as abuse?). Putting me in the shitty position of bitching about not getting paid a fair amount/possibly being made to do go back and do something I didn't want to do or shut-up and do something I "enjoyed." Needless to say I took the next job offer I got (which was about a year later) doing xml tagging/support for 15$ an hour at another company. This company had 2 programmers (with MS in CS same school I went too) working on a Web app (using MySQL and JSP). One of them was making a respectable salary for the area, the other was p/t Intern making less than I. Neither of them seemed to be getting very far (I don't think they had tomcat running). So I get to work with them "p/t", after a few months I get moved to doing that full time. By the end of the project I had written (or re-written) nearly 95% of the code. (yay go a nice promotion at the end). Still, my degree didn't get me either job, both were starting positions where none of my co-workers had any degree. The degree may have helped by making me look more "potentially useful" but wasn't needed. I'm still making less than what I thought I'd get starting out, but at least I enjoy my work. If you don't enjoy CS stay-away, its not going to make you wealthy and its not guaranteeing you any employment.
> Yes, they may well better understand what is to BE coded, but most that I've seen are damn sure not qualified to actually DO the coding.
It's all subjective isn't it. From personal experience I'd disagree.
Having worked as a programmer for 8 years now (through several jobs and languages), and fortunately been unemployed during that time for about 4 months total, I've worked with a lot of other IT folk. I myself don't have a CS major. I started one but after spending a year learning skills I deemed to be useless and esoteric I changed to an Arts major. And on reflection I definitely stand by my decision.
From my experience there is almost no correlation between a CS degree and good coding. This has also been the consensus among friends who do have CS degrees (and who are overwhelmingly excellent programmers). I've worked with a couple of guys who have had Masters in CS and have been stunningly incompetent (they couldn't understand core concepts). Conversely, most of the guys I've worked with that didn't have CS or engineering degrees designed and wrote solid, clean, efficient code.
No Sig for you!
absolutely agree! cs is not a degree of learning how to program at all! it's the wrong perception by the non-cs ppl
Where I work there's a huge shortage of "technical" testers, i.e. testers who can write their own tools and sophisticated automation. Hiring a good developer is such a PITA, it's unbelievable. Most of the folks coming in for the interview don't know jack. I mean, come on, they can't write the textbook code to remove the unneeded characters out of a string.
You would think that in this job market finding a good candidate shouldn't be a problem, yet from what I see the current "unemployment" of much of IT/CS personnel is "unemployment of idiots", they shouldn't have gotten their positions in the first place.
how about the scientists of CS do their job and reduce the number of IT workers necessary.
unfortunately the only ones willing to sponsor progress are vendors with their services, but this is hardly any better.
If you ask most people what "Computer Science is to programming as mechanical engineering is to operating a drill press" means, they might say "Well, it means that Computer Science doesn't teach you to be a masterful Programmer".
What it ACTUALLY means (or what it should mean, if most nascent Computer Scientists didn't misunderstand it) is:
All Computer Scientists are (trivially) Programmers, but not all Programmers are Computer Scientists.
Really, do you expect that anyone who claims to be anything more than a token Mechanical Engineer couldn't easily master the drill press, if he put his or her mind to it?
Or, perhaps more interestingly, if someone was incapable of mastering the drill press, could they really claim to call themselves a Mechanical Engineer? Really? The congnitive skills required to easily comprehend the forces acting upon and within mechanical structures apply directly to deftly and precisely handling a simple device such as a drill press. Long-term incompetence with such a device indicates that the individual should (probably) not call themselves a "Mechanical Engineer"...
An incapacity to deftly manipulate complex logic in the form of a program would (or should) make false any claim of Computer Scientist...
-- -pjk Perry Kundert perry@kundert.ca http://kundert.2y.net
I loved computers and programming long before it was cool, and I will long after it is. I'm glad the temporary fanboys are leaving, so my chosen profession can be pure again. I am not the best programmer by far, and I am not the highest-paid one by far, but IMHO, the challenge of designing and building a good application out of thin air that fits a need well is the most fun you can have while still getting paid, without being a gigolo.
Can I get an amen?
It's not surprising. It's a repeating cycle in the computer professions. We are now near the end of the doom and gloom phase. CS enrollments drop, less new IT professionals enter the field. Salaries stabilize. IT spending goes up, shortage of IT workers drives salaries up. Freshmen read about high salaries in IT and flock to CS. HR depertments hire any warm body to fill IT positions, then wonder if being dead might be OK if the mortition did a good enough job.
The party phase lasts a year or two. With salaries about as high as they will get, companies resort to other benefits to get enough IT workers. Suit and tie required becomes just try to make sure the holes in your shorts don't show the naughty bits and wash your flip-flops occasionally. Have a manicure and a massage!
Then the bubble bursts again. Queue massive layoffs. The corpses and warm bodies wash out of the field again. The swollen ranks of CS majors graduate at just about the worst possable time. Freshmen hear about the out of work graduates and choose nearly any other major.
"One metric is to ask what they did outside of class assignments. I don't care how goofy or stupid their homebrew project was, and getting them comfortable enough to tell me about it can be challenging, but the fact that they sat down in front of a computer on their own time and coded something that worked merely to satisy their own curiosity or desire is telling."
Well I'm developing Cold Fusion* in my spare time, Hire me!
*The physics kind.
WTF do you think Core Image (realtime photoshop like filters), Core Image (Real time video filters) and Spotlight are?
Do you think they came out of a crackerjack box?
Are you saying IBM is not doing research?
As for your assertion about not needing CS majors, I agree. Competent developers are needed regardless of their educational background with a willingness to learn. Learning should be a continual process for developers.
I don't have a degree and I've been working as a developer for almost a decade.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
It is completely natural that far fewer people are studying computer science. The corporate jobs have gone overseas, and what they haven't offshored they've hired H1-Bs and L-1s for. An entire sector of employment has evaporated here in the U.S, just as it did with the steel industry, the garment industry, the automotive industry... And the kids can read the writing on the wall. Good for them! I hope they find something they can be successful in.
I remember when the mechanical engineering field collapsed, back in the nineties. Auto manufacturing had gone overseas and thanks to NAFTA, to Mexico and Canada, so there weren't many jobs available. On top of that, the defense industry in California dried up, putting hundreds of thousands of experienced engineers out on the street. At that time, Mech.E was being called "the new liberal art".
Computer science is going through that right now. The computer science major is now just like an art or physics major -- no prospects. The only people who'll study computer science nowadays are people who LIKE it, career notwithstanding.
Think about art majors, for example. They know they're not going to get a corporate job or make a lot of money. They know they're pretty much in for the whole "starving artist" thing, that they'll end up working some joe job to pay for their materials, and that the likelihood of their making it big is pretty minimal. They do it anyway, because they see majoring in art as an end in itself rather than a career path. If they hit something just right, they might make it big. Even if they don't, they'll probably be able to make a little money on the side here and there and supplement their income.
It's going to be exactly the same for computer science majors, with one (beneficial) difference: computer science majors will usually be able to find a computer-related job that pays their bills, and they MIGHT be able to score something in civil service or academia and even be successful.
This isn't that important. It's mostly going to be used by corporations to justify increased outsourcing, and by colleges to justify increased advertising and the pursuit of federal grants.
It's bullshit in other words, not in the sense that enrollment ISN'T dropping (it IS) but in the sense that they claim it matters (when it doesn't).
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
I liked/agreed with their assessment of the issue - but disagree with the conclusion. My reading of it (summery) is "computer science students are dwindling, because it's hard - well tough - it's what we're going to teach them like it or not"
There is no doubt that CS students are dwindling. My query is - does it matter? don't get me wrong - we NEED CompSci students. They have a place. But we also need grunts to maintain the infrastructure of business and industry. These people are NOT comp-sci graduates.
IT is a commodity in businesses (i'd find a reference to an article but got a bub to go grab and look after). the IT infrastructure is vital to businesses. CS people design - not maintain. I wonder where we're getting the maintainers from.
If a man doesn't make enough to help provide a woman with an environment suitable for raising children(i.e. something significantly better than she can get on her own), he's not going to attract interest from women-unless he has something else serious going(i.e. gets on TV or is a serious bad-ass).
If engineers start killing CEO's/Managers/politicians etc., women would take them more seriously-but it might be better for all involved if the companies just stopped paying obscene salaries to CEO's and compensated engineers as a group in accordance to the benefits they've given society.
social skills are largely an indication of how much a guy has gotten laid in the past. Them that has gets is a law of sex. Women are largely like robots driven to get with the guys that have gotten the most nookie-and they will do so unless forced by economics to do something else.
Rather than computer science .. why don't colleges give out a degree in "Enterprise Computer Science" or something like that.
..not a software development shop designing an operating system .. J2EE, .Net, C++ .. Also they should learn about databases like DB2 and Oracle. Maybe also learn basics of routing and IP. Seriously some CS grads don't know diddly of what's needed in a corporation.
Basically a stuednet will take courses in working for a corporate IT department
These types of enterprise computing skills will become more necessary in the future. Current CS grads writing enterprise systems software suck at it. I am not saying nobody should learn CS. I am saying that a newer branch of CS needs to arise (MIS and CIS dont cut it cause they arent as hardcore).
This is similar to how Engineering has branches such as Aero, Civil, Chemical, Industrial, Mechanical, Nuclear, Computer etc.
"Why is obvious to anybody working in the field."
Are you sure english is your "primary" language? You don't seem to have a good grasp of idiom, or of the spoken language.
From my experience the quality of the CS grad declined drastically once the major became popular. Too many schools IMO became diploma mills.
And are we solving the wrong problem? Isn't the goal of good software automation? Instead of trying to crank out graduates to baby sit buggy software, or use inefficient development tools and techniques; should we instead be creating more efficient software, tools and techniques which require fewer programers and/or IT monkeys?
I for one prefer quality over quantity any day.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
I like that quote -- it makes it sound like having women's participation in the field is the worst possible outcome. "We must find some alternative to having women in the IT workforce!"
Evan Prodromou | evan@prodromou.name | http://evan.prodromou.name/
You can either kill one(or several) or figure out how to lie/cheat/steal more effectively than they can.
I presume that dialoguing with the young chap is required for determining the presence or absence of said giftedness?
Akarsz Magyar Gentoo fórumot? Akkor
Some schools are doing just that. I know that my own school works hand-in-hand with industry to develop projects so that they get free labor, and we get real world experience. That is just inside the classroom. The number of outside-the-classroom research projects being cooperatively done with industry and/or government is amazing.
And these aren't just programmers-for-hire projects, either. So far we have done an assessment of the compliance of a financial institution with federal regulations, a information system security engineering project where we designed a incident aggregation system, some digital forensics projects, and more.
I am also curious why you seem to lower internships as not having real, tangible consequences. On a long-term internship I had in my undergraduate work, I was placed in an engineering department and had to develop projects that went to production. In fact, I had to redesign products, design new products, acquire the parts, schedule time for assembly, call the machinists to get things in order, set up testing procedures for these projects, and decide if the final product was ready for shipping to real customers in which real money was exchanged. When things went wrong, I was called in to face the CEO and explain what happened, where we were, and how the problem was going to be fixed.
I never made anyone a cup of coffee, nor got the luxury of sitting there watching someone else do work while I played with equations. I was in the engineering department and was expected to be able to step up to the plate as the engineering staff was already short as it was. It is my hopes that most of the hiring individuals realize that not all internships are fluffy.
I think some of the "geniuses" might very well be in that pile of resumes that you go through. Hopefully, they are smart enough to be able to differentiate their real, tangible experience from the fluffy internships people assume when they see "intern."
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"We are Linux. Resistance is measured in Ohms."
there are the two categories.
unis can go screw themselves.
i imagine the coders on this rainy sat
afternoon are coding. the posers are on slashdot.
I am in IT thanks, running a multi state network.
oh, and those who went into security can kiss my ass also. you need to know how to program to be worth jack shit in that field.
Quote : "It's a little like the split between theoretical physicists and experimental physicists. One group sits in their ivory towers while the others are making a ton of money in the real world."
You realize, that without theoretical physic, most expeirmental physicist and chemist would not go that much far ? Think relativity and Quantum Physic. You also realize that now the separation between theoretical physic and exprimental physic is blurring because except a few free landplot, they need each other for constant advancement ?
As for experiment physicist making a lot of money, I call bunk. All physicist I know of never earn a lot, whatever is there speciality. Now if you had said, biochemist, or cellular specialist you might have been right...
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
it is difficult to see how CS can match expected future demand for IT workers
Demand? Demand is satisfied by outsourcing companies in Bangalore. We don't need no stinking American CS majors.
I, for one, welcome our new Antichrist overlord.
Before posting silly articles such as this, please try to (even pretend) that you can pass a sobriety test (walking the line, blowing into the tube...) as you said "With a fall in degree production looming, it is difficult to see how CS can match expected future demand for IT workers". What bullshit! There are 40 billion university educated people with "B.Sc.Computer Science" stuck on their walls (or at least hanging on the wall of the shelter/welfare centre where these graduates now call home). There aren't CS majors coming out, because before going in, they see that others who have come out are unemployed (or pushing brooms, pumping gas, asking if the customer wants fries...). What looming I.T. crisis are you talking about? These stories are written by people who (apparently) have no idea how many desperate, unemployed CS grads walk the streets at night diving into dumpsters for bottles. When you wrote the article, was it booze, crack, or weed that gave you your topic? I ask as it holds no basis in reality. And don't give me a story about 'oh, but the degree isn't any good', that's bull too. Most of these programs have CO-OP work terms attached (and you have to take them, and your employer has to be satisfied for you to pass the COOP course, and you have to pass it to get the paper). The short answer is that there is no work. Some work got offshored. Some work is being held in (semi-permanent) suspension as companies are spending less than 10% on IT as they did in the 70's through the 90's. My university wasn't that large (8000 students) and never fielded a large number of CS grads (25 was the most ever per given year). I think the number has shrunk to less than 4 per year. Why take it if there is no work?
You must be joking.
Show me a coder that has led an OSS project, done the heavy lifting of "cat herding" and intimately knows how to get things done in the real world.
I'll take a person like that in a heartbeat over someone with an M.S. in whatever and no true experience / passion / body of work.
If there is something wrong in the computer field these days, it is too many people wanting a high paying salary without a true desire to learn, devotion or grasp of the basics in the technology field.
At a previous workplace, I once met a "security" administrator, that couldn't manage an OS install, of any OS. I am sure that kind of ignorance is replicated all over the industry by know-nothing people looking for bucks only.
Where I am working now, I have a developer in my group, just graduated from a top 5 engineering school with a C.S. degree. The first words out of his mouth, "I don't like to code, I want to do something else".... (holding down a dev position, mind you).
I don't know what everybody here is complaining about... I majored in Computer Science from the University of Maryland, graduated in December of 2003, and am now working as a software engineer at a very presitigious company (and making $60K to boot). All my friends who've graduated recently have been able to find jobs with other big companies such as IBM, LockHeed, Microsoft, etc., and ALL are making good cash.
So what's the big deal?
Petey
Your post too.
You're right about getting women to stay home and raise babies, but the reason isn't liberalism, it's conservatism.
It's the conservative fatcats who've raised the cost of living and forced those women to go to work. I'm sure most of them would rather be good liberal earthmothers and stay home with the kids.
But the conservatives want more money, so they need women in the workforce (for lower salaries!) so they bring home more money to be spent. Money spent by the proles means more money in corporate coffers = more money in fatcat pockets.
So the real Americans, the liberals, have to work to support the godless fat lazy power-broker fucks; that's important, because the master race needs more yachts.
Because kids are starting to learn that Computer Science is not about computers.
Oh sure, I love computers and everything, but I realized early on in University that Computer Science is not about the parts I like. All the fun bits about computers show up in other careers, like real science.
there is a problem in NH.
:-(, do not have enough knowledge to run an ISP/CLEC.
why cannot i find a 20 something person who knows unix, networking, basic programming/scripting, etc for 31,000 to start? In the next year, after proving themselves valuable, they get 36,000.
after a few years working for us, they can take their knowledge elsewhere for big bucks. or stay with us, as their salary slowly increases to 40,000 +. that is a lot of money in NH compared to MA.
but nope. the people we see, including our customers
Also, the people who claim to know linux, never really do. sigh. It seems the ones who know unix started on bsdi long ago and made the transition to fbsd. they know the daemons, they know the gear to support the lan, and they like what they do.
i ramble.
I was in a meeting recently where they pointed out that outsourced indian workers were 40% cheaper than real us-based employees. Still that is cited as a reason to outsource.
However that's not a huge difference to bridge. I'm also not sure that this included the more hidden costs such as lost productivity because of time-zone differences, and language barrier issues.
Outsourcing isn't a panacea to everyone's problems, hopefully we figure that out before everything crashes in india too.
As one member of my management put it "India has alsost a 24hr time difference from here, so we'll have people working round the clock"
Is there anything "special" about CS compared to other careers such as law or business? Things come, things go. If there is some special reason to "protect" computer workers, the gov't hasn't shown it with H-1B attacks and ignoring the offshoring. In capitalism the wages and opp'tys should guide where one should go, no? If CS wages and opps drop, then that's that. If it is for national security, then do something about the H-1B and offshoring. Otherwise, ignore it.
Table-ized A.I.
If you can't handle the thinking required for doing simple entry-level calculus, there's no way you'd be able to get your brain around everything you'd need to in order to be a good programmer.
All I need to do is stay employed for the next 2443 days and then I'm bailing as quickly as I can. The house should be paid for and I'll have my 15 and 55 in with the current company. Take the cash payout from them as well as the cash from the other company pension I spent 10 years with, all the 401k, traditional IRA, and Roth IRA money (all of which I've made max contributions to since their inception) and continue to invest (that's right, I've been saving/investing instead of consuming 'cause I saw this brick wall approaching years ago).
All I'm going to need is a respectable health plan (hence, riding it out for another 7 years) and some reason to get up in the morning.
Maybe I'll go grow coffee in Kona like a former colleague. Maybe work at a Starbucks. Maybe flip burgers somewhere. Maybe just teach kids/adults to read. I dunno. Don't really care. I will have served my time (35 years in the IT industry). Enough, already.
Anyway, I real feel bad for folks just starting out (I've been cautioning them to diversify their concept of profession for years). The hours were always long but now you get no pay or respect. You also get to live in fear of your job going overseas.
Some advice; get security clearances and work in the defense industry. Jobs requiring clearances are not likely to be outsourced or given to H1B or L1 holders. You may not get rich (although I hear Lockheed-Martin is giving 10k signing bonuses for folks with the right tickets) but at least you should be able to eat.
Good luck all.
I was trying to speak from the perspective of people who might otherwise identify with guys like Gilder, Forbes etc. They don't see the CEO of Enron as the most problematic members of society -- some silicon valley "nerd" who goes into prison on a pot charge, gets punked out, infected with AIDS and becomes obsessed with indetectably corrupt the transaction logs of TRW's computers -- _he's_ the problem to them.
Seastead this.
So where is the problem? That's the return of the equilibium. And forget about women, that's ridiculous.
I fail to see how this 'research' is approved for release as a credible analsysis.
Some of the points omitted:
a. What is the ratio of men to women getting degrees in fields that traditionally have more women than men (education, nursing)?
b. Why omit the fact that the percentage of women getting engineering, biology, physical science degrees has doubled since 1980?
c. Why omit the demand for different degrees with the entry level salary and number of available entry level jobs for each field?
d. Why not produce a companion article that instead of using the statement
> is difficult to see how CS can match expected future demand for IT workers without raising women's participation
USE
> is difficult to see how Women's studies can match expected future demand for workers without raising MEN's participation
This bias towards producing 10 o'clock news worthy soundbits such as the one below is inheritly bad.
* a new crisis, women don't get technical degrees
"I don't think it has as much to do with "communication" skills as it does with empathy"
perhaps it's more along the lines of being able to communicate empathy. being empathetic yourself, you should have known that's how we all feel.
As fucking hard as it is for a graduate to get even an entry level job in the IT industry, they sure have alot of nerve harping about having trouble finding enough people. The same idiotic cry of desperation went out when I was choosing a career path six years ago. Lo and behold it was a full year after graduation until I actually found even temporary employment in IT.
Fact of the matter is, you can switch out any major for CS. Recently there was concern over American kids' lack of interest in engineering and how we're falling behind. When was the last time you saw an ad looking for engineers out of school? Why go through all that when you'll end up answering phones at Visa with the philosophy and womens' studies graduates?
Special Eddy and PA businesses have little interest in keeping educated folks in the state. Every time they utter the words "brain drain", I want to throw up. Someone ought to be held accountable for all the lives irresponsible statements like those in the article are going to trip up or even ruin.
Another way to meet the "demand" would be if people who'd left the IT market because there was no demand could shift back in and get a job.
There are nicely paid lobbyists such as ITAA who keep perpetuating the "IT shortage" myth, and it is a myth. Companies just don't want to do any training for all the IT fads that keep coming and going like the wind, and flooding the field is one way to avoid having to train or wait for a learning curve. Spot shortages are necessary to transition from low-demand areas to higher-demand ones. But flooding the field takes away that needed transition bridge.
Table-ized A.I.
I have been working IT for the past 4 years as well as working on my CS and looking into some ceritifications. Based on the feedback I got from the certification crowd about their sub $60k jobs being horrible, here is how I view it.
In the early 90's when computers were taking off and every business was convinced that the IT department was the heart and soul of the company, they didn't really understand who should be working on these projects. Certification companies such as CompTia and Microsoft convinced a lot of major business that certifications were all they needed. They didn't need someone who spent 4 years earning a degree because they really loved computers. No, they needed the person who studied for one year to get some certification to run their IT.
They were also able to convince these businesses that these certifications were so important that it required huge salaries to go along with them. Salaries in the range of $60k all the way to $100k. Just for a piece of paper. So over the course of a few years, a lot businesses began to realize that they are paying people who have done nothing more than take a series of tests, more than some of their executives who studied four years for a degree. This is when the tech bubble burst.It amounts to greed.
Now, don't get me wrong, certifications are okay, if you have a love of computers and are able to "flesh" out your knowledge. But if all you did was study a book and take some tests, then you don't know squat about computers. Infact, I know of several people who never even used computers before or since, who were able to get their certifications. This lack of knowledge started to diminish the view of the entire IT field. Now, even legitimate CS graduates have a hard time finding work in a company that was burned by some fast talking suit who didn't know what "Safe Mode" in Windows was, because it wasn't in the book.
You are probably wondering how I quantify these statements. Well, recently I was looking to supplement my CS theory based education with some practical knowledge that would benefit me short term. I was looking into the MCSE for a short while. I happened upon a discussion group and started asking what was the best way to get started. The only replies I got back where "There is no money in it, I suggest being a (insert career here). I only make $60k a year and haven't been able to hire anyone for more than $40k for a long time." Seems like a very ignorant thing to say to someone making less than $20k a year. So doubling my salary isn't worth it? How greedy. And because of this greed, companies are lowering salaries. No wonder no one wants to study a field were too many people have been burned before to even give you a chance.
Do you know what made me go on to do ME and EE as an undergrad, and CS and EE as a grad? (and no, I don't sleep. Sleep is for after degrees)
Long, boring account:
I have a strong background in studio art and interpreting literature. I also happened to be good with people. My father looked at me and said, "Okay. You're good with people, you like to write, and you're creative. Now, get good at math." He showed me how I could still keep my love of art and yet get into a field where I could have a real impact. He waited until late in college to really push the matter, but in hindsight he had been making sure I kept up in all areas since day one, even having me learn things like multiplication tables a year before my school would expect me to. I was never particularly great at math, though, because I had no real interest in it. Frankly, it is because reasons for being interested in it hadn't been planted in my head, as school rarely gave insight into the application of the base concepts I was learning, just that I should memorize them because one day in the distant future, for some unknown reason, it would be important. It wasn't until someone sat down and showed me, "Hey look what you can do with Laplace Transforms, differentiation, and Fourier series" that I thought, wow, this stuff is really useful.
So, with the encouragement of my parents and my boyfriend, I took my creativity and skills with customers to engineering, whose primary enrollees sadly seem to lack in both. (And, speaking with those who hire in industry, it seems that they agree.) So far job offers have not been a problem, and unlike the other cookie-cutter memorize-math engineers, I can actually design and engineer something creative and useful, and can market it. (You can tell the difference between the creative engineers, and those who can spit back rote learning in order to solve a problem. It's always a pleasure to be in a team setting with the former, but the latter are oftentimes just as well being replaced by Google and a good modeling/simulation program, although I am sure I will be modded down for saying that.) No, I am not a whiz at math, although now having relevance to go with the concepts has certainly improved my math skills to the point that they aren't too worse off from your average engineering student. What I don't know, I can look up.
It's not too late to grab those creative, "people-types":
So, the last time my university had little munchkins running around Ooooing and Aahhhing at all of the career displays, and all of the engineering profs navigated their way over to the math and science club folks, I showed up and grabbed the artists and pulled them over to the robots and lasers, and showed them exactly where they fit in engineering. Then I told them that while they could take a billion classes in middle and high school in their favorite subjects, and breeze through them because they were already so good at it (I find many high school art classes are behind the real talent in the classroom, and only offer those kids an hour to draw, not an hour to learn something), why not jump into Advanced Placement calculus, chemistry, physics, etc. courses and work their tails off learning that material so they would have that side to market, and then their creativity to solidify the deal? Learning differential equations doesn't make you any less of an artist, nor does having that piece of paper claiming you're educated about art on the wall make you any more saleable if you're not any good. (I found places for my art without a single person asking for my art degree. That is not to say that I am a good artist, though, as I am admittedly quite mediocre, as many in the industry are.)
Now, that isn't saying that people shouldn't go to college for Art or English majors, but if even a few jump ship (and lets face it, the arts or communications are what females are pointed toward from day one in many classrooms) and attract that component of which
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"We are Linux. Resistance is measured in Ohms."
for this year's Freshman according to numbers printed in the latest university magazine. I was surprised.
But then again, #1 is "University Studies" aka undecided, which really doesn't surprise me.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
My theory simply relies on the fact that people want to have decent lives -- you know -- the comforts of a home, mate and children with some decent security. These things are systemically denied engineers largely through ghettoization.
For the exact opposite, I suggest you take some time and visit New York City or Washington D.C. to see female-saturated ghettos in service of the guys who are the _real_ problems. And yes they know how to attract women -- and dump them due to "downsizing" just as they did with the bulk of boomer females when that demography hit middle age.
Seastead this.
I had horrible grades, and I got a job. Didn't put 'em on my resume, of course, and they never asked. HAW.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
It's about, you know science. CS grad programs don't really teach product engineering, they concentrate on mathematical abstractions. Interesting, important stuff, but not something that's going to help you build systems well.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
"While some men apparently would be happy to spend the next 40 years of their lives working on the next version of MS Office, I want to *do* something"
I find what you said really rude and uninformed. There are literaly thousands of different types of jobs in the world of computer science. There are many more if you add electical engineering and information technology. There are computer scientists who "do" something everyday. What about the programmers who wrote the code to work through the human genome? What about the programmers who right code to simulate the effects of drugs to reduce the use of lab animals? What about the code that helps scientists find the cure for cancer? Isn't this doing something?
My resume is an example of moving around in different parts of computer science. In 9 years I have written financial software, device drivers for networking and storage, advertising software, network management software for high performance computing clusters, and now I work on software for radio controlled devices. My friends work in lots of other areas. Open you mind and then maybe your eyes will see what is really out there.
-- soldack
At least for us that are already in the field.
Dont need any more snot-nosed graduates mucking up things out here in the real world.
Sure, mod me down, i dont care.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Finally realizing that my degee in English from Iowa State University (1969) impressed nobody, I retrained myself in the early 90's to program MS-DOS and Mac OS 6. All you needed was Turbo Pascal and a few copies of books by Wirth and Knuth, on the DOS side, and a complete set of every developer tome ever edited and/or written by Caroline Rose (plus a modicum of guts and imagination), and you could eke out a livelihood for about a decade. Microsoft certification and the rise of Windows killed that, despite the fact that MFC is about as complex as chicken soup, if you've ever had to learn Mac using Codewarrior. Later, I realized that my "career" was simply an early variation on outsourcing, since it was cheaper to hire a bright hacker in Cedar Rapids who didn't know chum from sharkbait than it was to hire a CS grad who had a fair sense of his/her own worth. As every one who has ever been on the hiring end of this equation now realizes, cheap code without continuity was, is and probably always will be extremely remunerative. While Bill Gates will never suffer for this, a legion of poor hackers will have the satisfaction of knowing that the future of software belongs to Open Source, most of which will be written in the former Soviet Union and Red China, bankrolled by IBM and other EOB's.
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
It will be nice if we get less CS people in the market. Managment is too used to being able to pile on the work and walk all over us since they know there is no where else to go.
One day, things will be back like they were in '99, and the Sysadmins will have power once again.
-insert maniacal laughter here-
I have a BS in computer science and am in currently getting my masters. I have worked in the industry for 9 years or so and I love it. I find that people don't seem to understand what working as a computer scientist means. They also don't understand the infinite variety of things you can work on. I have lead a varied life for a programmer I think. Everytime I think I have done it all something new comes along and I am interested again. They don't understand the amount of creativity that can be involved. In some cases art can be involved. In some ways I think that computer science is the ultimate mix of art and science, creativity and logic.
If people really do feel that a shortage of computer scientists, electical engineers, and information technology folks is coming, they should do something about it! I feel that schools don't offer nearly enough grants for these areas. I also feel that years of success in industry have drained away many of the good teachers.
People who work in these fields need to try to spread the word about just what is that we do. I know folks who make software for video phones, rc cars, navy ships, stock traders, and massive computer clusters. There are so many things that you can do in this field. Many of them help people (like medical products) are innovative (music/video players), artistic (video games/web sites), etc.
I think if people really understood what is done in these fields more would be interested in it.
As for salary...I know quite a few software and hardware engineers and they all seem to be doing pretty well. CS is like any other field where you have to work hard to do well and move up.
-- soldack
Ahhh...thank you. Now it makes sense.
When I came into UC Berkeley 4 years ago, only 5 people a year were allowed to switch to the EECS Major (Electrical Engineering and Computer Science). If you didnt have a 3.9 or higher, don't even dream about changing your major to EECS. We had a equivalent of that in L&S just called CS, but that still required around 3.7 or higher to get in.
nowadays, I hear you only need like a 3.2 to get into either majors, which is a major drop since 4 years ago. honestly, I don't really mind the drop in interest. that just means less geniuses to fight against for jobs.
HD Trailers
This man has sucked the cock of Jesus Christ! Talk about holy water!
This wartbag has suck the cock of Jesus Christ! Talk about holy water!!
...and it was already hard to find a girlfriend. More seriously, the trend is definitely apparent here at Berkeley. The intro classes were over 250 students three years ago, and are now a shade over 100. The major that accepted only 30% of students then will take anyone with a B average now. It's good news for me though if this means less competition for grad school slots.
IEEE Spectrum reports that the number of employed EEs in the USA declined from 444,000 in 2000, to 363,000 in 2003 (-18%). This means that 1 out of 5 EEs are out of work.
So, from that I conclude that anyone contemplating a career as Comp Sci or EE, should have his primary school graduation certificate revoked...
Musicians often work their asses off for little money at all. Most have day jobs just to make ends meet.
Sure, the guys on top might get good money for little work, but they're by far the exception.
Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach either, do tech support.
"They conclude by saying 'With a fall in degree production looming, it is difficult to see how CS can match expected future demand for IT workers without raising women's participation at the undergraduate level.'"
Repeat after me: Comp Sci Degree IT Worker. Half of my group at work (more than if you include the manager) don't have Comp Sci degrees. Strangely, its the guys that do have the comp sci degrees that keep on fawning over what Microsoft is doing next. The rest of us care about things like design and process improvement and stakeholder management and, well, writing code that's easy to read and maintain.
Article is clearly confused on the distinction between Computer Science and a job in the Information Technology department...
They start letting the chicks in just as I'm picking up my degree. Tip to new students: take electives that are NOT math or you may not see a woman that can speak english most days.
Our experiences differ, but let me explain myself.
/love of doing it/ is enormously helpful, but those 2 being equal, I'll take someone who has the knowledge of the underlying theory over one w/o any day.
I would agree that experience trumps "college" (at least in the US) by a large margin, and the
I had one "senior" programmer some time ago ask why her code equivalent of 1/3 * 3 isn't equalling 1.
Part of the problem is that people get the degree not because they want to, or enjoy the subject, or even show much an aptitude for it, but they think there's big prizes at the end. I've been doing this for quite a lot longer than you, and have seen the rise and fall of the dotcom bubble, and man, the HTML monkeys out there calling themselves "programmers" are finally starting to get weeded out. But that was a big reason for a big swell of CS applicants, I think.
I know that "kids these days" are coming out with their degrees lately never having written a compiler (nay, even a lexer!), never looked at regexes, don't know what big-O notation is OR why it's important, never did numerical methods, investigated CPU architectures, etc. Some don't even have basic algebra skills.
But boy do they know their way around Visual Studio and JBuilder! (mostly)
Mind you, the school from which I graduated had a very heavy theory based first 2 years, and a broad exposure to many languages, paradigms, architectures, etc., so maybe my view is biased by that. I consider myself lucky to have attended there given what I've seen from people elsewhere.
Before you design for reuse, make sure to design it for use.
Geez, don't take it so literaly. It was a glib one-liner by a CS101 TA who was only interested in getting a general point across. But OK, I'll answer your questions seriously:
1) no, but it's not unusual for a mech eng student to find himself operating a drill press while preparing a final project
2) no, but understanding material construction methods and limitations is essential
3) no, because people who run machine shops aren't idiots like the guys who run IT shops
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
...Steam sucks! - Or didn't you know :)
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
I run regional services for a MAJOR software organization (as in multi-billion), there are only a few out there.
Now, we have about 20 positions open in my region right now. Guess what? You know how many people I have to interview to get ONE good candidate? Usually about 25. And this is doing cool stuff. J2EE architecture, design, and development for REAL business, mission critical systems.
It's not only the college grads, we stopped even hiring them, they were so bad. It's the guys with 5+ years experience. They can't do it. And we pay very well, above market.
Now, we just worked a deal with a partner of ours to get a couple dozen guys from Bangalore to come over here for a while. Guess what? These guys have, on average, 4-5 years experience. But you know what? They can code like a mother. AND, they have GREAT communication skills (despite their accents). Are extremely professional, and do a great job. I'm not paying them any less than I would a local, either.
So I don't know it is, but man, if you know any good J2EE architects and developers let me know.
AND FAST
Not necessarily, a lot of socially maladjusted nerds do have empathy, they just have no social skills, so they come across as 'creepy'. When you spend all of your waking life away from human contact, either at the computer or the TV, then you never learn to act properly around other people. The problem with that is, when you do end up around other people, you come across are very awkward and dull, no matter how interesting or friendly you are.
There's no substitute for a regular social life. No, IRC isn't a substitute. You can talk all day and night on IRC, be most interesting and funny guy in #d&dlosers, make friends with everyone there, but when you step into the real world, if you don't have any experience interacting with real-life people, they're just not going to like your company at all. You'll just freeze up, conversations will be one sided with the nerd being defensive, either trying not to give anything away or worrying about how he's coming across.
I think the solution to this is to throw away (literally) the TV/computer and dive head-first into social interaction. Just force yourself into social situations, constantly. After a few years of this you might become a more sociable person who's actually enjoyable to be around.
They conclude by saying 'With a fall in degree production looming, it is difficult to see how CS can match expected future demand for IT workers without raising women's participation at the undergraduate level.'"
.COM boom, then the bubble burst and there tons of people out of work and no jobs for the people coming out of school. Why would people gravitate towards an industry that is in a rut?
.COM bubble's period, and then it dropped into negative teritory. People came in to fill those projected jobs, but then they suddenly weren't there anymore, and many got burned.
Sorry, I call BS. Degree production is down, because enrollment and completion is down, because the job market is down.
The schools were flooded during the
Reguarding the matching of future demand bit: that is what caused the problem in the first place. Deamand was projected way into the future to show the growth of the
/ loves software development
/ graduated 8 months ago with 2 years of industry experience
/ still unemployed
Who in their right mind would spend 4 years in college, working toward a degree that is more demanding than most to going into a job where they are expected to work double the hours the rest of the labor market does and for pennies compared to union jobs. Then to be told they don't have a job anymore because some jack*ss executive sends their job overseas so they can justify oversized bonuses justified by so-called cost-savings. Today, your better off becoming a truck driver.
A programmer's *perceived* value has a lot to do with the "fluff" issues you so readily dismiss, such as office politics, user interface design, and bullshitting better than your competition. It would be nice if pay and kudos were usually based on pure technical issues, but in most places it just plain is not.
Table-ized A.I.
If you use calculus in your coding then you are unusual. Calculus just isn't applicable to the vast majority of coding. Other numerical methods are - but not calculus. Forcing people to learn it is like making medics learn latin. Yeah it broadens the mind but really it isn't relevent
If it's true, which I wouldn't immediately jump the gun to claim, then I guess it's all the better for us CS majors. Less competition!!
She could have found the cure to Microsoft and instead she's not. Good job, sir.
why the fuck does ths have anything to do with putting more women into CS? if people aren't going to do it of their own accord, then coercing them isn't the answer.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Ditto on what other people have said. Yes it comes and goes in cycles, but the rebound on this last cycle will never reach the level of CS demand during the dot-com era. Besides who's going to go into a field where age discrimation starts at 36, so at best you'll get 10-15 years befor having to pump gas or flip burgers. I only worked in my degree field for 3 1/2 years after I graduated in 96. I'm finally going to get back into it after having been out of it for 4 years. So I've not had a job pertaining to my degree for the last 4 fucking years. And I won't be making as much either. Goddammit! Computer Science sucks ass!
DON'T EVER FUCKING CHOOSE A MAJOR BASED ON THEORETICAL DEMAND AND POSSIBLE HIGH SALARY but then again don't choose a major that won't earn you shit like English or Underwater Basketweaving.
Do I sound like a bitter underemployed computer programmer? MAYBE, IT'S BECAUSE I AM!! Oh and grades are important. Don't fucking kid yourself. GPA matters!
You need everything.
Indeed. It seems that those who master and/or enjoy a particular subject seem to overemphasize its value to a CS major or programmer. Unless you do pure technical research in an R&D lab, developers and other IT people tend to use a lot of different skills on the job. No one dominates, or at least no one dominates on the average such that one can predict ahead of time what to focus on.
In my IT domain, math is not used that often at all, at least not "engineering" math.
Table-ized A.I.
All freshmen, not just UCLA.
http://shit.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/23/1 434224
So if CS pays crap of course people are going to pick a different major.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I was sure a good part of my experience was skewed because i was taking CS at a community college and not at University, but feedback from friends at Uni indicated that, although having more classes to choose from, they felt similarly.
I finished my AS reqs for CompSci and am taking a break before going back. The more I think about it, the less i really want to finish a BS with it as a major.
I asked a bunch of my friends what they wanted to do with a CS degree and the overwhelming response was programming, with a few really just wanting to work on/repair computers or be sysadmins.
CS as it stands now really only appeals to me as a minor. Everything I can think of doing after college would be better with a different major. You want to design MPs? take EE w/ CS minor. Encryption/AI? that'd be math w/ CS. hell, any of the sciences would be better off if taken with CompSci as a minor.
I'll still be taking CS courses when I go back, because i love it. it just seems to me that, unlike most majors, CompSci doesn't have a clear association with any given industry, it's either a catch all (like lib arts for computers) or a misorganised Programming certificate..
just my 2 cents as a CS student who won't be returning for the BS..
Rise up in the cafeteria and STAB them with your plastic forks!
Here is a funny real life story when I was an undergrad at UCSD.
It was the first day of the quarter. I got to class a little early at the applied engineering and mathematics building. I sat in the center of the lecture hall. Man those girls in the front row are pretty hot. This class is going to be great, I thought. Eventually, the lecture hall filled up. About 5 minutes after the hour, the professor walks in and puts his notes and syllabus print outs on the table. The prof goes to the chalk board and writes ECE Digital Design. Within 10 minutes the foxes in the front of the lecture hall one by one left. When the last one left, all the guys begged her to stay. She said she thought this was the lecture hall for the psychology class. There were virtually no American women in the lecture hall.
Bottom line is: women don't want to be engineers and get a grip.
You guys freaking crack me up! I am a 2003 PhD in Info. Science, 1997 MS Computer Engineering, and I have a BS in CS and Mathematics. Interspersed with all that are several years of real-world programming experience, including work with some well known corporations. Where is the great pay? I have yet to experience it.
Last year I made just over $52K working as a university IT support person and web designer because that was the only work I could find as I didn't care to be a struggling assistant professor someplace for even more pathetic wages. From the time I got my degree in early 2003 until November of 2003, there was no programming work to be had. I took the only offer that came along because the programming component of the job--but it felt kind of like trying to drive on the interstate in 1st gear. My situation has improved a bit in 2004 and this year, but I am now making $58K with some other money coming in from adjunct teaching (at a *major* east coast university) and through part-time consulting work. It's a far cry from what I thought I would be doing in my top-flight IT career! I *might* clear $65K this year. The person who had my job before me went to work for Amazon for ~$80K with a $10K signing bonus and other perks. I have more experience and better overall skills than that person (my opinion), so I guess the lesson is that I need to escape higher education if I ever want to make any real money.
I am stunned that the median starting salary for numbnut CS grads is $52K. I got a little over $35K at my first job in 1995. Clearly, wages have gone up some, but mine sure haven't! Something smells funny--Kali wages are skewing that figure, but the high cost of living in Kali must offset that pay. For example, after my masters, I went to work as a software engineer for $45K on the east coast, while a friend who went to work for Intel in Kali got $54K. My swank apartment was $640/month while his was about twice that for a tiny 1-bedroom in a rough part of town. It's all relative!
I've been shouting myself hoarse but no one listens. Would you want your transcript to have the following letters:
BS
would you?
Strange, but I just read that same thing a few posts up referring to management types, not girls. Sounds like a lot of men like to use this excuse too.
"I'm a people person. I deal with the customers so the engineers don't have to. Don't you get that? What the hell is wrong with you people!" -- Office Space
Oh yes, I meant "he waited until late in high school to push the matter..."
He waited unti it was time that I chose my career path, but not so as it was at the last, last minute.
My apologies.
That's about as realistic as being a good doctor, but not knowing how to operate the tools that are used, directly or indirectly, by the doctor and his staff.
"Do people who hire drill press operators want them to have a mechanical engineering degree?"
Had you put some thought into this statement, you'd realize that a large part of engineering is deciding how to construct things to accomodate the current tools available. If you don't understand the tools, of what use is the engineer?
For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.
I spent 7 years in IT, and I want *out* (well, technically, I am out already since I was laid off). I advise anyone thinking of going into IT as a career to think twice about it. The jobs are not there, and what jobs that are left are quickly being outsourced to Asia. Much like mine. The days when CS degrees and IT jobs were a good thing are pretty much over. Sorry, guys, but that's how it is.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
I can think of three right away. I know one with with a CS degree, who was something of big shot for some time; now he is driving a truck. I know another who was an experienced java programmer, who went back to school to be an auto mechanic. Then there's me, I'm hanging in there with my "consulting practice" (ie temp work) but it sucks.
My major in CS (counter strike) is going well...
Maybe people are finally realizing that this is (or at least can be) hard work and that it isn't the "coolest" job on earth and that "computer programmers" don't all write and play cool games all day long.
Going through college, many of my classmates and others at other Uni's and 2-year colleges just jumped on the bandwagon for no other reason than "everyone's doing it and you'll get a great job". Most of them didn't even have any decent experience with computers before coming to college. Heck, even the CS degree required a basic class about how to use Office. I would hope that someone would already have some experience before deciding on a career in computers, but - sure enough - some had to be told what a "right-click" was.
I have about 12 years of experience with computers (built networks, did admin on servers, was assistant network admin), but now, all of the employers want you to have a certificate that only shows that you know how to pass a test, I don't have the money to go back to school, so I'll find something else to do and save my computer and network knowledge for use at home.
Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy.
So what do CS majors do? If it's not a programming qualification, what is it?
garble
What a bunch of bullshit. You obviously know nothing of philosophy. Take a few graduate courses in philosophy of logic or philosophy of mathematics before you spout this crap.
Not a surprise. When my oldest son was still a toddler, he didn't have a single toy car. One day we went to visit my parents. My youngest sister gave him a Barbie doll to play with.
So what did he do with it? He pushed it across the floor going "Vroom! Vroom!"
Socialization? I call BS! Those who think that the differences made by an entire chromosome are merely limited to determnining whether the person has a penis and testicles, or a vagina and breasts, and that everything else is due to socialization are delusional.
I realize it's not PC to say that gender differences are more than genatalia, but seriously. A hammer is not a screwdriver. Big whoop. Just because they're different, it doesn't mean that one is more important to have in a toolbox than another. Same with gender.
I think some people are forgetting that "equal" doesn't always mean "identical"--as in $100 in quarters is equal in value to a $100 bill. One is easier to carry around, the other can buy things the other can't, etc. Likewise, male is equal to female in value. How can something so simple be that hard to comprehend?
*SIGH*
This isn't the sig you're looking for...
You were so close to it, yet you missed the obvious solution: have more men enter computer science.
Yes more women should get into computer science. However the number of women in computer science is not directly related to the total number of people in CS.
Although I know that this data is not sufficient to be indicative of a trend, I believe enough of what I hear from CS professionals to believe it is.
I think all this reflects is that the skill set of CS is simply becoming more common. A lot of the demand nowadays is not people who just have CS experience...it's CS and engineering/physics, or CS and biology (bioinformatics), and so on....and for those sort of things, you don't need a rigorous "CS" program, just good background in the tools relevant to your area.
So, I'm an older programmer (35 to be exact) and I've been coding for a *LONG* time. I was self taught starting at 10.
My work in the industry has always been praised. I've been constantly promoted and paid well.
A few years ago, I was doing some security work and wanted to understand the math behind the crypto libraries that I was using, so I tried to brush off my math. I ended up going back and I'm now in the process of finishing up my math degree. So, I can tell you a few of things from very direct and current experience.
1) Not doing well at math doesn't mean you can't code well. Until I went back, I was not terribly good at math.
2) At my school, University of Washington, the CS majors are math pussies. They bail on math dept. classes after a year of calc, a quarter of linear algebra and a quarter of stats. Yes, they get some math later in algorithms classes and the like but I know CS *PHDS* from good schools who are crappy at math.
3) I find that I occassionally use math in my work but not very much and it's hardly ever the calc -- it's almost always the linear algebra, number theory, and set theory.
Now, I think that you have to be smart enough to be able to handle math (as I obviously was) but that's different actually using math as part of the job or needing to take it as a condition of getting the degree.
You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake -- but you could be if you got off your ass.
University math requirements have risen dramatically this year and I think there's a correlation between the two.
Just stick with it.
Actually, most of the programmers I've dealt with over the past 15 years tended to rarely comment (much less document) code unless forced to do so by tech writers. (For reference, I was a CS major, and I've worked at SGI, Oracle, Yahoo, and several small/startup companies)
Also, their coding styles ranged from (most commonly) incomprehensible to others (and occasionally themselves, when they had to go back to it) to (rarely) so elaborate they never got things finished without micromanagement from above. It was very unusual that someone else could just sit down and modify/fix code written by another coder without either the original coder assisting, or else the modifying coder spending a great deal of time figuring out what the code's details and nuances were before trying to fix anything beyond a blatant error. Knowing how to code cleanly and with an eye towards maintenance is a far cry from actually doing so. Even with peer code review and coding standards. Plus, in "fast" environments (such as startups or early-stage small companies), taking the time to do it right from the start often bogs things down too much (yes, this will cost you later... but right then you just want to make sure you get to "later" -- it's all about balance.)
As to hiring, many of us (I can only speak about those I have compared notes with) found the following preconceptions to greatly assist the process of hiring a good coder:
(Remember, these are empirical/anecdotal generalizations from which to start, not "rules", so don't flame me for bashing or promoting school types... Each, except Stanford, had clear strengths and weaknesses.)
(also, all these generalizations are talking about fresh graduates from undergrad, not advanced degrees)
As to Computer Science in general, I've always half-joked: if a field has "Science" in its name, it probably isn't (especially with all the 80s focus on science and engineering plus PC-ism: sanitation engineers, Social Sciences, Soft Sciences, etc.). I've always been proud that my alma mater never fully gave in to this and kept their "Politics" department, rather than changing it be "Political Science"
Does it support my position when a reply attacks a straw man?
The computer major (Course 6) is still the largest at MIT, but has fallen from 35% of undergrads to 22%.
In the 1990s many CS students were more interested in $$$ than the discipline. Many of these "mercenaries" have fled now.
The problem I'm talking about is an immediate one: people don't want to go into careers where their basic needs are not being met. It is a taboo to talk about reproduction as a basic biological need, which is why people are so prone to hysteria about this, but it isn't nearly as taboo as talking about the influence of social policy on the gene pool -- which takes generations even if you have a genocidal maniac running the eugenics program. You guys who conflate the simple assumption that people want to try to have families, with the hysteria-inducing visions of goose-stepping eugenics doctors simply clouds the issue so people don't face up to what is being done to the economy now.
Seastead this.
Fresh out of college and already need 3 bedrooms? I suppose it's possible for other people in other majors to have gotten enough girls knocked up where you need rooms for your kids. But this is CS!
It is a lame attempt of picking a hypothesis to prove before doing the research.
Why doesn't this article correlate with the SAT/ACT standardized test results for math between men and women?
If women score significantly lower in math, then maybe the alleged issue starts before college.
Have gone on to very lucrative positions in Advertising or Web Design. I don't know anybody who 'did' Art expecting to be hanging in the Met -- all of the ones I've known did it because they liked it...
I know why Freshmen CompSci major numbers were down at my University: the Computer ENGINEERING program was the largest growing of all majors there. Lots of freshmen start out as CompEngr majors and then find out Electrical Engineering classes are too hard. So by the time they are seniors, it all evens out in the end.