Slashdot Mirror
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."
Plus, knowing how the underlying hardware works will allow you to write much more efficient code.
I was not so interested in the sorts of semi-skilled professions of coding and systems administrations.
Come Again ?!?
As a matter of fact, some of it is.
For example - how much faster do you think it would be to use the SSE2 16 byte registers to memcpy() instead of the C stdlib way of doing it byte by byte? Answer? A *LOT* faster. Which is good if you're moving a lot of data real time.