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The Changing Face of Computer Science
For another facet of CS education, HangingChad writes "MSNBC is carrying an interesting article on the changing demographics of IT workers and education. The upshot of the article is that older, working adults are taking IT related courses for advancement while comp sci continues to slide as a career choice in college, which the researchers in the article attribute to perception issues." From the article: "In fact, as the technology-dependent United States struggles to stay ahead of the Bangalores of the world, the Higher Education Institute at the University of California-Los Angeles found significantly fewer students at the college level -- 60 percent fewer -- wanted to study computer science in 2004 as opposed to the year 2000. "
I thought education and career are like stock exchange, you should always buy low and sell high, but most people tend to buy high and sell low.
Now that everyone's talking about CS skill shortage, this is the worst time to start studying CS, because everyone will be doing the exact same thing, just like they did on "multimedia" courses in 1998/1999.
If you started studying CS right after the dot-com bubble burst (around 2000, "worst" time to get into IT), you will be very popular right about now.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
At my university, there's The College of Computer Science, and under that, you can major in CS (Computer Science), IT (Information Technology) or IS (Information Systems). So is it all of the included majors affected, or is it just the CS majors that are affected?
With all the jobs being shipped out of the United States and reports of massive lay offs in the IT sector. The recent announcment by HP is a perfect example of this.
Why invest in a career where you have little confidence of supporting yourself?
"All I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power." - Ashleigh Brilliant
"significantly fewer students at the college level -- 60 percent fewer -- wanted to study computer science in 2004 as opposed to the year 2000. "
most of these younger folks think they were born gifted hotshots. Most of them think they don't need no steenkin education because they already know it all..
There is a large number of young people that grew up with computers, someone 20 years old now has probably had a home computer all his life. Someone old enough to be his parent did not have a home computer when they were his age.
I'm 1 year away from graduated with a double major in CS and German (and not overworked... where are all these other people coming from?)
I'm paying just 6000 a year for my education
I'm working at a local software firm as a programmer as an intern for 11 bucks an hour (not exactly minimum wage) and yes, I get free soda. Set my own hours, too. This company has hired every intern they've had since they started (about 4 before me, so far).
So... where's the problem? I think the people who find CS courses exceedingly difficult may be in the wrong major...
In one of my senior CS courses, the professor asked what the department could do that would make things better for the educational experience. He was expecting things like more course offerings, more focus on newer languages and approaches, stuff like that. The response that resounded with too many of the students was that the professors should do a better job at helping the students learn how to translate a project specification into code.
Basically he wanted the professors to hold his hand through the process of learning how to code. Not just do a better job at explaining Java, C++, etc., but rather teach time and again the basics of actually reading instructions and writing a program that implements them.
About half of our classes that use Java have a week of remedial Java. There is no "you ought to know it by now" in them. Consequently, I just skip the first week of my CS classes that aren't purely theory classes like ones on operating systems and algorithm design. We're talking junior level classes and people still sometimes struggle with basic Java and C++. It was a mind fuck for many of them to reach the operating systems class and have to *drum roll* LEARN C ALL BY THEIRSELVES except with a basic overview of the differences between it and C++ - which most of them never really learned at all in their sophomore year.
Needless to say, my response was "we need a mandatory design patterns class for the sophomores" which caused several of the better coders in the class to agree with. People can make the excuse that CS is about a lot more than coding, but it really isn't. If you can't code worth a damn, you have no business being in Computer Science because you're either cut out for engineering, networking or nothing related to IT altogether.
Seriously, I'm not a prodigy or anything, but I can code pretty well. It's disturbing when I see people with 3.9 major GPAs in CS who can't find less than a dozen ANSI C file I/O functions within 5 minutes of a Google search. I had to listen to one of our "uber-elite" female coders complain about how hard C is to learn for the first time, even though she had a 3.9 GPA and had taken probably 15-21 credits of classes that revolved around derivatives of C. Then I get called an elitist because my attitude is that since C is a subset of C++, and you have to take a class that uses C++ exclusively, that you shouldn't be spending hours learning the basics of C. It shouldn't be hard for anyone who reachs their senior year in CS, it's not like the projects were kernel level stuff. The most complicated project we did was write a "shell" that did little more than fork a process.
The problem, I think, is that so many American kids want to have it all spoonfed to them. They don't want to learn stuff outside of class. Most of them don't even really like what they're doing for that matter! Let the numbers slow down, maybe it'll be good for those of us who, regardless of skill level, care about it and enjoy it. Mark my words, eventually India will have the same problem and the types of cheap Indian coders, who are not inherently any better than Americans, will resemble the US. There will be the legions of certificate holders who have no natural inclination or skill toward the field except their pay check and there will be those who do care. In the end, things will balance out... or American business will choose tons of cheap, shitty coders, get thrashed like they deserve and we'll get to say "I told you so."
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As a recent graduate (okay, I graduated over a year ago) and as someone who works at a software company, I have to say that if I could do it all over again I'd do anything but CS. Most universities offer MIS programs, etc, that will put you into the tech field without nessicarly being a programmer, etc. But, heck, if I had skipped the four years of college I'd probably be a junior manager at walmart by now.
With jobs going overseas, and the supply of programmers heavily outweighing the demand, I don't see any reason for anyone to be intrested in CS at all.
When I hear Gates talk about lack of tallent within the US, I really have to say "who cares". The bottom line is that less than 1% of CS majors are going to be of the caliber of programmer that Gates is talking about, but what about the rest of us 99%ers? We have the joy of fighting tooth and nail for a job, then we have the joy of not getting the dream salaries that were touted in the 90s, and then to top it off we get to fight off competition for overseas that can do our work at a third of the cost because of living expenses overseas.
Back in the day it use to be cool to be a programmer. Now when someone says that I have to feel a little bit sorry for me.
Your mammas flamebait.
Their Computer Science department acts like a bunch of elitest pricks when it comes to acceptence.
(The following is true of when I was applying a year ago)
Their applications form is SECRET and only available online for two weeks, during which you have to fill it out, answering all of their questions, and turn it back in.
How selective are they? Stories of students with a 4.0 GPA not being accepted into the school (transfering from Community College) abound. I knew students with a 3.4/3.5 GPA who were not accepted. Insane.
To have a snowballs chance in hell of getting into the department you had best have all of your math and science courses completed, the department apparently did NOT want anyone who would take any more than the minimum amount of time coming in there.
Still with all of these rules and regulations in place the department "has to" turn down dozens of students (if not hundreds...) every year.
Fuck, how do you EXPECT students to go into CS with that type of a bull-shit attitutude?
Compare this to Western Washington University, go up there, hey look, the head of the department met with me, teaches a transition course for students over the summer (and offers to, for free, go over material online with students as well who are not yet enrolled but plan on doing so) so that they can suceed in the department, and all in all, the entire department treats their students like actual people rather than machines.
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What I find amazing is how little a CS degree gets you on it's own.
Do a little search on monster.com or the liking, pick any tech related job. Look at the requirements. None of them are fufilled by a CS degree.
The ammount of therory in CS is what is killing these programs. What is needed is job training. You can graduate from a school like WPI with a degree in CS without knowing how to write a VB app. It's pretty sickening.
While I sure did enjoy Big O notation, learning how to write perl scripts would have been 3 trillion times more valuible.
I'll be the first to agree that a solid education has it's roots in therory, a solid job in computers has it's roots in application.
Why are we falling behind the Indias, etc? Because a bachelors in CS gives you no solid ground to become a good canidate for the types of programmers that are in demand these days.
Your mammas flamebait.
I work in the games industry as a programmer, and am generally leery of people with CS degrees.
On our programming test, we have simple question: implement char *strcpy(char *dest, char *src). Physicists, electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, and various other engineering majors seem to have no problem with this... which leads to various followup questions about optimization, memory use, pointers, etc.
One applicant with a 4-year CS degree asked us if he could use C++. "Sure... I guess," I replied.
So, after considerable time, he proceeded to write:
char *strcpy(char *dest, char *src)
{
char *dest;
dest = new char[strlen(src)];
strcpy(dest, src);
return;
}
When I asked him if he saw any mistakes that he would like to correct (as I do with all applicants regardless of errors), he added the following line at the top and then said "done".
#include "string.h"
He didn't win the job, but he did win the award for highest density of errors in 3 lines of code.
I'm always amazed by the people who think math is unnecessary. It must seem that way if you're so poor at it that you can't even recognize its uses. And I'm not necessarily talking about you - I'm just picking up on your example to point out that mathematics is ubiquitous if you just open your eyes. And ironically, it's often the fun software (eg. games, video/movie visual effects) that uses it the most.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
All that edjacation crap is for the birds - Ellison bailed, sodid Gates. Y should any 1 bother with collitch?
Now I'll just fire up my laptop running speculation software I bought on an infomercial, short a bunch of penny stocks I've been pumping for weeks on my spam bots and roll up North in my SUV and take a long weekend where it's k3wl... and some CS grad can ask me about Fries or something like that."
The above is not a troll - just illustrating the mentality of the good old USA, where corporations only exist to benefit stockholders, and people work for wealth, neither providing any goods and/or services to the public commonweal.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
I'm not saying that money is the primary concern for the best and brightest. I'm saying that it isn't hard to imagine a lot of very bright college students seeing news of layoffs, outsourcing, unemployment, and high housing costs in the Bay Area and saying "life's too short".
The problem is that the numbers I've seen in the news for starting salaries in the industry would be... really tight, even without saving money for retirement, starting a family, etc. I lived on a similar salary six years ago working at a start-up. Money was a little tight, but I wasn't paying electrical bills, lived in (relatively cheap) campus housing, and already owned a vehicle that my parents were paying off and insuring for me. For most folks, it would have been more than just a little tight. That's why I got my Master's degree. It paid for itself in the first year. Had I not done that, I'd probably still be seriously struggling. (Hint to CS students... count on six years.)
Since I was a new college grad, though, the cost of living has gone up by about 19.4% (3% annually, six years, compounded annually), but the starting salary has increased by only a fraction of that. Now maybe those numbers are wrong, but if I were in school right now and seeing those numbers and looking at the cost of living in the SF Bay Area (or even apartment rentals), I'd be seriously thinking twice about whether it was the direction I wanted to go.
In fact, I did exactly that six years ago. I had a choice between choosing TV production as a career and choosing CS (double major). I even won some pretty significant scholarships (including one national scholarship) in the TV side of things. Money didn't choose my career arbitrarily, but I looked at average starting salaries of $16k a year in the TV industry, and it did sway me to an alternative that I also enjoyed.
The thought of possibly having to spend ten years at near minimum wage working myself up to a wage that would pay the bills just didn't appeal to me. CS was -so- much better financially that it made the decision between those two career paths rather easy.
I see CS starting down that path. It's early enough in the decline (unlike the TV industry) that it can be turned around. It's just a question of deciding which is more important: continuing to be an innovative industry that brings in the best and the brightest... or a temporary boost in a company's bottom line. Right now, the smart companies are investing in the future, but the industry as a whole must follow in their example or we'll continue to see news stories about the decline in the quantity and quality of CS grads.
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I am a bit young right now (10th grade) but I know that I want to do something with computer science. I have pretty much decided that apps programming is not for me (other than open source endeavors), as I don't feel like losing my job to outsourcing and I prefer complex math things. I am kind of intrigued by theoretical computer science (hypercomputing and the like) but I don't know if my interest in that could coincide with my interest in eating. Would I be able to get a job in theoretical computer science? Or should I just try and get into normal IT (sysadmin, application development, etc)? In any case what sort of education should I look into? Any advice...
And this is not a recent development. The whining about a shortage has been going on for over a decade at least. And it's no wonder that there's a shortage when you want to find skilled professionals for barely minimum wage.
Years ago, I was at a company where we would be asked periodically to interview candidates for employment. Sometimes we would come across a really good candidate and never hear anything more about it. It eventually dawned on me that the company just was not willing to pay what was required to engage these skilled people.
As for getting into the computer field today, almost everyone I know knows of someone who's gone through hell (e.g my friend with a family to feed who was out of work for two years). Why would anyone take a chance on this? Sure one can get into it for the love of it, but how many people can really stick with the starving artist bit for the sake of his art?
What hope do you have if someone across the globe will be willing to do your job for one tenth of what it takes you to stay above the poverty level?
A lot of companies don't really care about hiring a genius. For them, an adequate programmer is, well, adequate. I certainly see plenty of *inadequate* programmers being hired.
The general consensus is that once your basic needs are met, changes in salary don't mean as much as more free time.
Except for one thing: retirement. I live fairly basically, in a 1030 sq ft condo, don't take expensive vacations, don't drive fancy new cars, don't have a big plasma tv, etc. But I do want to retire some day. And I don't believe social security will be there, I don't think the market will go anywhere (a lot of Baby Boomers are going to be gradually pulling money out to live off of), and we can't even begin to fathom how much health insurance will cost then. I make way more than I spend, not because I make a lot, but because I don't spend a lot. But I need every penny of it and more to put away so that I can avoid the Alpo when I'm too old to work (or unemployable).
We have an interesting set of pressures. Not only will the Boomers pretty much wipe out the social services for old people, but with outsourcing I don't even know how long I'll be working to save. It's a strange thought, but I'm completely operating under the assumption that I won't be the one picking my retirement date. It'll be when I wake up one morning and look in the mirror and realize that I've been out of work for 2 years, and that I'm old, and that I'm just not going to be hired by anyone ever again. I don't feel like I have time to worry about free time right now, I have to save for that day.
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