Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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.
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.
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.
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
You might want to define "well paying". I have talked to alot of CS majors who just came out of undergrad programs from top schools, their salary is an insult.
I also know alot of excellent grad students, also out of top schools, who have to settle for intern like positions. They are so overqualified, companies seriously don't know how to fit them in. Companies want young guys coming in fixing bugs, not architecting major projects.
My ultimate advice in the new millenium is get a "real estate" related degree. Work for a construction company. Forget grad schools unless you are highly devoted to a research position. There is enough software in the world now to run for the next 10 years.
One was from a well-known major internet company, the other a Wall Street information company.
I didn't even apply to defense firms.
I have a shitty sig!
While I agree that the industry had too many under-qualified people (and still does), the bubble also hurt extremely talented people who simply were at the wrong company at the wrong time. Friends of mine suffered from months/years of unemployment because of industry conditions and the fact that they were older.
The real tragedy of the bubble is our industry has not learned from it. Another period of high demand will have exactly the same effect.
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!!
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.
Very true. Here at Glasgow, there have been groups looking at just why the numbers are falling. It's not as obvious as it seems. There's a downfall in numbers when the whole .com thing fell on it's arse, but there's a further downturn in numbers from people being less aware of what computing science actually is these days; schoolkids often equate computing to ICT, which is simply not the case.
Likewise, the job market is picking up again, but it's a lot more sensible now; companies just aren't throwing money around quite like how they used to any more. Perhaps it's worse in the States than elsewhere, or perhaps the Slashdot crowd are still in broken-record mode.
I too am not short on job offers, and I'm far from sending off my CV to any investment bank looking for the next batch of graduates. Perhaps it'll all hit something of an equilibrium; fewer jobs available across the board than 5 years ago, but also fewer good graduates to fill the positions available which are appropriate for them.
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.
[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.
In engineering, the higher paying jobs seem to go to EE majors working on difficult integrated circuits. At least that's what the job ads indicate. Programming jobs earn 1/2 to 2/3 as much.
I agree about forgetting grad school. Grad school is for people who really care, not for people who just want another line on their resume.
-- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
Besides, what most places refer to as CS is actually something akin to a B.S. in Computer Programming.
When I finished my CS degree twenty years ago, it covered computing science comprehensively. There was a business track and a science track. The business track was pretty lame and I started a petetion to have the business track's students diplomas state their degree was "Business Data Processing". Let's say they weren't too happy about that.
I tested out of three years of calculus going in, a year of biology (missed one question), etc. And that's while I was a pre-med major in my Frosh year.
Enough bs. During my junior year they had more students enrolling in the CS program that they had to make getting into it and remaining in it a bit more difficult. When I was going through it, we had to take Advanced Calculus (Calc IV), Electronics (used as a flunk class for EE majors), microcomputer interfacing (a secondary flunk class for EEs who didn't take the hint before), Micro Economics (I took Macro to make it a matched set, Operations Research, Modeling & Simulation, a survey of languages - a senior honors course (which was invited to as a premed student as a freshman - and freshman weren't permitted to take senior courses, let alone honors - but it was the dept. chair who recruited me so I had some time to kill and went. Four or Five other math classes (pick yours from a list) - I did Linear Algebra - the closest pure math should be getting to real math. Corporate Communications, Systems Analysis, write your own computer for a language designed & defined by consensus by the class members, running on a VAXen cluster. Write your own debugger, either for one of the languages available on the VAXes or 11/70s, or for "your" compiler. Write your own device driver for a small, simple widget and demonstrate it worked. Write a small OS and demonstrate the fact it works. Design, write, and demonstrate a working DBMS. It could have the functionality of another database - to the point of look, act, feel, but it still had to be your own work.
The department chair was degreed in both Math and English. The quality of documentation, both internal (overview + inline comments) as well as external, showing use, etc. might cost you a decent grade because grammar and spelling issues could knock you off, point-by-point. The same happened on written tests. They didn't want us to get into the outside world and be like the typical geek or nerd. I missed a year of the ACM FORTRAN programming competition because of playing in an away soccer game but participation was highly encouraged in that as well as a semi-formal, regional Basic-Plus-2 compeition which was very similar to the FORTRAN contest.
The short story made long:
The vocal minority will validate a lot of this and show things I either wasn't exposed to or have forgotten after twenty years (+ a severe head injury from a car accident - I love bitches who run red lights). The problem is people who have come out with CS instead of CP on their resume and you find out they learned programming, not the science of computing.
There's more than enough room (or there used to be) for CPs, but it was better luck in larger shops. If you are to the point of dealing with bits-'n-bytes, some who aren't CS may be out of their league - in terms of experience - but if there's enough time, the good ones can adapt. "Enough time" is the operative word. Otherwise, you find yourself without a paddle.
(or hopping online for help - but when people are quizzed about where they go for help, have that answer taken away, and each answer fails so they have to find a new one, you'd be surprised how many younger people don't know of the myriad resources available online when they should either have an HTML document full of anchors or a sizeable collection of bookmarks to get to the valuable assets as quickly as possible.
Well-organized bookmarks are just as important as the cliched r
Well, part of it really is the teaching, I have met many women in the past.
My last girlfriend definitely was strong at math, and math definitely was one of the technical subjects with a higher women percentage than other technical fields (although I would consider math more to be a philosophical field than technical).
But there are others who shy away. If the percentage of woman who cannot cope with math is really higher I dont know. But one thing I know for sure, women in their teens are much more influencable by media stereotypes than the average teen guy is. So if the media tells them math is hip they will enroll into math, and if they tell them eating shit is hip a high percentage of teen women will do it as well. That is the principle the whole fashion and music industry is built upon. Dont get me wrong, teenage men fall for stuff like that too, but not as easily as teenage girls.
So if we constantly have shows how unhip science is and you only become cool by being a total idiot, you dont have to wonder that the current situation is miserable.
But that does not have anything to do with CS student numbers going down generally. That is pretty normal if you constantly hammer into the people, that your job, you have to invest years for, and you have to open a students loan for, is moved to the third world if you are unwilling to work for third world wages (which you cannot due to your university credit, and the higher living costs). CS people were treated like shit by many CEOs in the past and as replacable dog food, so now they have the backslash of not getting enough CS people anymore in the near future and the 90s cyle will repeat again. (over here in german speaking countries we call that the Swine cycle, every tech field has to go through constantly)
Having a Masters or a Doctorate does not automatically allow you to do architecture on any project.
There is experience of the specific subject matter, communication skills and most of all TRUST of the customer/client. If I had a new Doctorate employee and another employee whom I've worked with for 5+ years doing what I need, guess who I would choose.
This is especially important in the IT industry where years of experience is important.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but almost nobody coming out of school is qualified to do much at all. Schools rarely teach the things you most need to know in business -- even simple things like "using a version control system" and "scheduling", to say nothing of making significant changes to multimillion-line codebases without busting things.
It used to be much worse since even a decade and a half ago even the basic software tools used by business were typically not the tools students would have been exposed to. Thankfully broad availability of Windows and Linux and related tools has at least helped in that regard.
But strong knowledge of the kinds of things you find in a university environment is still not proper preparation for an architect role in a major project where you'll likely be piecing together a variety of proprietary technologies, many of which a university couldn't realistically afford to expose you to. So those graduates are not "overqualified" by any stretch of the imagination.
So business does more of an apprenticeship kind of thing: You come in working on shit projects and if you do well you'll get more and more interesting stuff to do -- and in the process of doing those crappy tasks you'll learn application structure and process that aren't taught at university.
How fast the move from lousy stuff to interesting stuff happens depends a lot on the kind of company you work for, but it's been my experience that the talented people shine so bright that they're hard to miss. So long as they aren't stuck-up assholes who are hard to work with (unfortunately you get a lot of that right out of school, especially from postgrads, until they figure out they don't know everything) people want to pull them into projects. There's more work to do than people to do it, always, in software.
If I were to give advice to an upcoming graduate, my advice would be to look at the company rather than the job. Good-paying jobs right out of school are probably going to be with larger companies who need to attract talent with money because the work is no fun. Challenging, fun jobs tend to come with smaller companies who don't have a lot of money and attract talent by doing cool things -- and these are the same companies that will advance you rapidly if you're capable because they can't afford to have talent sitting around doing makework.
The drop in CS degrees is coming about because people no longer believe it's easy money. But, really, it never was easy money, no matter the impression a lot of people got during the tech boom.
jim frost
jimf@frostbytes.com
Oh pulleease. Tell me, if you had $10 million in the bank, would you STILL be doing IT? 95% of workers do their job primarily because of their paycheck.
What ACTUALLY happned was, companies stopped hiring fresh grads because there was plenty of people who already had experience who didn't have jobs who were willing to work for less money. I know programming. I've coded B+ trees and graph search algorithms in languages from C to Scheme to Prolog. You're twidilly little business logic apps are fairly trivial, thank you very much.
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.
First, a Master's degree is not regarded as that big of a deal. Second, computer science is more mathematics than it is programming. Being a good computer scientist does not mean you can code well in terms of style and such.
A person's ability to architect depends on the area they studied. If they have a phd in software engineering, they'd likely be good at architecting. Also, if they studied algorithms, they could easily out design seasoned programmers.
Also keep in mind that research is not at all the same as doing mundane implementation. While people here seem to enjoy dumping on grads, they always forget to mention that while a cs phd or master can enter the job market without difficulty, someone from the job market is wholly inadequate to do research at a university level.
People with phds should be looking for research jobs, because that is what they are trained for. Many bigger companies offer positions that generally *require* a phd or masters. If you asked a nuclear engineer to program, they would not necessarily be steller at it. Please stop comparing cs phd's with programmers.
>socialization starts at birth (look at toys and
>types of play offered to infant males vs females
Amusingly enough a recent Scientific American article on gender differences mentioned an experiement dealing with the young and toys. They offered some baby monkeys/baboons their choice of various toys. The male babies preferred things like cars and balls that involved motion. The female babies preferred dolls. So maybe babies are given particular toys because that's what they like, not because that's what is being forced on them.
The article actually had a lot of other good material on the differences between the sexes. Apparently different areas of the brain take up proportionally different amounts of space in the two sexes (they use a ratio since women tend to be smaller). Since different parts are responsible for different functions, it makes sense this would lead to differences.
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
If you feel that CS == programming, then yes I suppose you're right. But as many others have pointed out that is not always the case. I went to a Univ. of California school which didn't have any sort of "IT" degree. I was a CS major. I have now been in IT for 7 years and by IT I mean Information Technology, not programming or software engineering. (When I say IT I think of the IT organization in a business, not programming.) I have been a unix admin and now a network engineer (routers and switches). I haven't had to use Calculus ever. The linear algebra came in handy, as did the upper-level math, statistics, and other things, but after I finished my last physics class (and damn if I shouldn't have done chem/bio instead) I didn't do calc again.
I understand why it's part of the program, but I also suggest that not everyone will end up needing it. A lot of people took the networking elective classes that I did, but there was a lot of stuff in there that I know they don't use in their network programming or other things that I use every day.
I just wish I hadn't had to take 5+ quarters of Calc....
"Where quality is like a dead stinking rat - you just can't miss it."