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Hardware or Software Major?
fa1uzure asks: "Recently, there have been many articles on Slashdot about the lack of people enrolling in IT courses in post-secondary, as well as the need for more people in these areas. Being a Computer Science student, this is great news for me, meaning I may be in demand in the future. But CS at WLU is essentially a software-only course,
as it is in many other universities around the world. In most of these articles, it generally says that the IT industry is loosing the new graduates, but it does not specify which area of IT is most at risk. As I move into my second year, I would like to know, are hardware people going to be far more in demand than the software people, or would software still be a better choice than a hardware-centred degree? I could easily transfer to a hardware oriented program
but would like to know in which direction the future is moving before I make any choices."
Seriouly, do yourself and your career a favor. Double major in another field, such as business, marketing, etc. It will probably pay off more then a degree in CS. I know I wish I would have had someone tell me that before I graduated a few years ago. Unless that is you want to stay in the academic or research field.
I think its important to differentiate between
(which IMO) is something you can easily do without a degree - How many 'PC World' backroom employees do you think have one?
- Saying IT/Hardware and meaning 'electronics/pcb design/embedded systems', which like I've already pointed out is more 'electronics' than CS.
<Before someone states the obviousWindows in 6 Bytes (IA-32) : 90 90 90 90 CD 19
Pick the one you enjoy, and the one for which you have an aptitude. And hedge your bets by not overspecializing.
If you wanted to be an astronaut or a professional athlete or an opera singer, serious calculation of your prospects would be in order, but there will be a demand for both hardware and software for the rest of your lifetime, and no one can tell you which will be a better bet. People who listened to "Get into ___ because of the looming shortage of ___!" always seem to regret it.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
They [hardware engineers] never get laid off
;-). And when it comes to logic synthesis tools there's not a lot much out there that's open source.
You're obviously not living in the real world.
Lots of hardware engineers were laid off during the current downturn which started in 2001. And many have had a hard time finding work during this period.
The thing to consider with hardware engineering is that if you have been laid off it's much more difficult to keep up your skills up to date than it would be with software design. Hardware design tools tend to be proprietary (especially the ones used in industry) and they cost as much as a home mortgage, so you're not going to be going out and buying some EDA package so you can keep up your skillset. Sure there are some open source HDL simulators like Icarus and GHDL, but most hiring managers in hardware design will probably not have heard of them or they consider them toys (a false perception, of course, but hiring managers don't know this
If you get laid off from a software job you can easily go and start (or work on an existing) open source project to keep your skills up to date since there are lots of highly regarded open source (free) tools and languages out there to use.