Slashdot Mirror
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?
thats why no one whats to work in it. low pay, high pressure and no job security.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
So the news in this article is that MIT, Cal-Tech etc don't churn out
the most CS degrees? Did anyone even think that? Top tier schools
have never been known for quantity, they are known for quality.
That's what has always separated them from other schools, not how many
graduates they produce. High quantity schools generally don't have a
good reputation, why do you think the MCSE is worth so little, because
everyone has it. So the fact that DeVry is churning out more
graduates than MIT is hardly news worthy imo.
Next they are comparing the number of people entering CS in 2000 to
the number entering now? That comparison is farcical at best. In the
year 2000 there were still many people entering the CS field because
of the boom years, when working in the IT industry was the equivalent
of the gold rush. Of course there are less people entering now than
in the year 2000. A more legitimate comparison would have looked at
the number of people entering CS during the pre-boom years rather than
during the boom years.
While I agree that we should encourage more people to enter IT related
fields, I don't agree that using misguided statistics is the best way
to go about it.
Doug Tolton
"The destruction of a value which is, will not bring value to that which isn't." -John Galt
As an ex-CS major let me tell you one reason people are leaving. Even though I plan on going into a CS related field the courses offered by my college (UCI) were very poor. Also there was no way to test out of redundant courses. Many of my classmates left for similiar reasons, and some even abandoned CS altogether as they weren't sure they would be able to compete with outsourcing and get a job
Philosophy.
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
Goodbye to all those who just wanted to get rich quick. I look forward to working with you brave students who are chosing your career based on a love of technology.
TODO: come up with a clever sig
Obviously there is a much better career choice.
Choose wisely for maximum income!
Starsucks
attribute to perception issues
It's not a perception issue. It's a real issue.
90% of the people I know in the tech field have been laid off once in the last 4 years. I only know of one mid-sized technical company that hasn't laid off employees, and everyone there hates their job. I quit after 6 months.
Granted, this is just from my own perspective. But look, the tech job world is slowly creeping out of a multi-year massacre, now the tech world is being run by business people who don't know what an IP address is, but spend a million bucks because IBM said it was good (and promised a trip to Hawaii!)
Sure, there's opportunity here, but students are going to have a hard time competing with we techies with 6+ years experience.
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
Back in the day when code needed to be efficient at a theoretical level, when compilers and related research was at the forefront of technology itself, and when the computer was the target of research, there was a need for a lot of computer science. Nowadays, there is not as much of a need for true computer science as there used to be. Instead, there is a greater need for people who know other types of science/engineering and have the programming skills to use a computer to solve non-computer problems.
"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.
WHY THE FUCK WOULD ANY STUDENT IN THE US EVEN CONSIDER SPENDING 4 FUCKING YEARS, $40,000+ DOLLARS, 1.5 YEARS OF JOB SEARCHING TO EARN $10.50 AND HOUR ON A LEVEL 1 HELP DESK!? THAT'S THE REASON YOU FUCKING ROCKET SCIENTISTS TURNED REPORTS!!!
I've been in this shit for over a decade and I tell you this in very simple terms:
Computer Science as an industry is following that of the TV and VCR repair men. When TVs and VCRs are expensive they get em fixed. When they're cheap, they replace them. Computers are less and less a science as the hardware and software gets easier to install and maintain. Even computer programming is becoming more and more accessable to people as the higher level languages become more user-friendly.
Early on there was Computer Science. Now they have splintered into various factions like various specialized sciences following certain areas, (MIS,IT,DBAs,Programming, etc.) Because they is less and less need for the broad generalized Computer Science types enrollment would obviously go down. Just because TVs got cheap doesn't mean that electrical engineers demand went down or that scientists that research phosphates and optics are losing pay and prestige, but how many people in the last 20 years have a SMALL ELECTRONICS degree? Hell do they even offer that anymore?
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
"Why would you pursue IT at this point in time?"
Especially when it's so easy a nine year old can do it!
I think it is important to be accurate with with our language. IT is not CS. The terms are related, not interchangeable. A graduate of Devry does serve the same function as a graduate of MIT. Sometimes it is useful to talk about fruit, and sometimes we need to differentiate between apples and oranges in order to have an intelligent conversation.
This is Rajesh. He's just replaced you.
This is complete bullshit. Look at how all the CEOs are complaining about lack of CS graduates here in US. Its quite simple. When they move the jobs to india/china they can say that they we dont have enough people here. Just look at the layoffs. This is a delibrate attempt by these people to keep putting out these kinds of reports.
"There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people."--Howard Zinn
A lot of people were taking CS majors in 2000 because the perception (somewhat true) was that being a CS major alone was enough to get recruited, then you could quit school and make a load of cash.
Now of course you have actually finish your course work, and even then there's no overpaying job waiting for you, even though I'm sure you'll find a job.
A lot of guys at my school picked CS because they figured they'd get rich quick, they didn't love it. I've always thought that if you love what you do and you're good at it, you'll do alright in life.
insert inflammatory anti-microsoft comment here
Is it the computer science I learned, ie how to turn an undergraduate into a graduate student? Where everything is theoretical because that's how they like their graduate students?
Or are we talking about a DBA? Or someone to make sure your Exchange Server is up and running?
Computer Science at MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, Berkeley etc isn't about learning how to be a DBA, its about acquiring the tools necessary to do research at a higher level. Who needs an algorithms class when you can just use the sort functions available in VC++? Or who needs to read a research paper about ISAM or BSTs when its already implemented and ready to use in SQL Server?
I'm reminded of "Profession" by Asimov. Is the purpose of higher education simply to show people tools and how they work so they can have a skill or to teach people why the tools are they way they are and (hopefully) help them to make the tools better? To me CS has always been the latter.
Note, this is not a put down to DBAs, sysadmins, etc. They have their own creativity and processes that I admire and respect.
I find it silly that multi-billion dollar corporations think that there's a shortage of creative people out there willing to work in Computer Science. I would think the answer would be obvious. CUT PROFITS, FUND SCHOLORSHIPS AND RESEARCH GRANTS YOURSELF. Don't wait for a government that you're already avoiding paying taxes to to spend taxes taken from poorer people on R&D. Don't expect that just because you can get a coder in Bangalore for $2.50/hr that you can hire somebody in Seattle for the same price. And if you want loyalty from your employees, you need to show loyalty to your employees- by banking their salary several years in advance so that you don't have to lay people off when you hit a rough patch. THAT is the cost of having good people- so don't come whining to us that you can't hire people if you're not willing to pay for the cost of educating them.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
I think the biggest problem is that the average high school senior actually beleives that going into computer science means that he is going to learn how to make web pages.
Who wants to study CS when their jobs are being outsourced to India anyway?
:-)
It's a chance to travel and get to know other cultures
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
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.
Having recently graduated from a rather rigorous undergraduate institution with a degree in CS, and planing on going into the Ph.D. program at another well-respected school this fall, I find myself taking the "science" part of "computer science" pretty seriously. Somebody more famous than me once said, "Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes, biology is about microscopes, or chemistry is about beakers and test tubes." That might not be strictly true, but it's the right idea. In my mind, being a computer scientist implies that one is engaged in real scientific research. A degree in computer science should come with an understanding of the history and theory behind the actual systems we use every day, an awareness of the open issues in the field, etc.
Somehow I get the idea (and feel free to correct me if you know better) that a "CS" degree from DeVry might not match my understanding of the term. That's not to say that there isn't a place for this sort of education -- I'm all in favor of competent entry-level programmers, web designers, DBAs, whatever it is that DeVry actually trains one to be. But to use a (probably flawed) analogy to other disciplines, this sort of education is to CS as auto repair is to engineering. It takes a not insignificant amount of skill and knowledge to be a decent auto mechanic; I'm not trying to knock DeVry graduates. But I wouldn't expect a mechanic to be able to do fundamentally new things in the space of automotive design any more than I would expect a DeVry CS major to do real computer science.
(Yeah, I have some idea of how pretentious and condescending that sounds. Go ahead and mod me down.)
Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.
It may be that "the best people" form a bi-modal distribution: those who feel the road to happiness lies in having more money (money == equipment [toys] for cool things), and those who feel it lies in having more time (time == freedom for cool things).
I feel working in software is the best of both worlds: being paid lots of money to do the things I want to do anyway, i.e. tinker and hack. I still recommend CS as an undergraduate major to smart people who like to tinker.
Unlimited growth == Cancer.
The ammount of therory in CS is what is killing these programs. What is needed is job training.
I used to think that too, but I eventually figured out my professors' point. University is for learning things you aren't likely to teach yourself. Applied stuff is relatively easy to learn on your own or on the job. Theory isn't.
Now, using a broad definition of the word theory, courses do need to do a better job of keeping up with current CompSci practices. Design patterns, testing, etc.
After a 4 year CS degree, plus 4 years industry experience, I still don't know how to write a VB app.
But I can learn by Thursday.
And that is why I'm worth hiring. I actually turned up to my first job with a book on the language the application was working on, was written in (Tcl/Tk). If having to learn the language as I went along slowed me down, certainly no-one noticed.
Now, my degree did cover quite a bit of practical stuff (including programming in C, assembly and Java, database commands, etc), but also covered a lot of theory (big-O, algorithms in general, data structures, graph theory, social aspects of computing, etc.). I don't know how many CS degrees stick too much to the theory?
So the fact that DeVry is churning out more
graduates than MIT is hardly news worthy imo.
I think the better point to make is the type of grad that DeVry is churning out. I don't think the authors of this article grasp what "computer science" is. I mean, take a look at the article for a second...
Adults, many of them women and minorities, are realizing they have to go out and obtain degrees in computer science to advance or just keep up at the workplace.
Wait a second, is the workplace suddenly requiring that their workers need to know the inefficiencies of a Bubble-Sorting algorithm? Are they expecting their employees to understand that it's a bad idea to short a +5V with a ground without putting at least some kind of load on the circuit? These are some of the things I learned in Computer Science, and I really don't see someone needing to study data structures and how to implement them in C++ or Java in order to succeed in the workplace.
In fact, on DeVry's own list of Undergrad Programs, I don't see Computer Science anywhere. There's "Computer Engineering Technology" (also classified as "Computer Technology"), "Network Administration", and the one that I'm betting the article considers computer science, "Information Technology". The objective's page for IT lists the following concepts taught: "basic foundation in programming, systems analysis and design, database design and management, and networking... Incorporating a strong applications-oriented component...Integrating general education competencies such as applied research, written and oral communication, critical thinking, problem-solving and team skills." I doubt they get any more complex with their studies than what I learned in high school Computer Science class (one sem. VB, one sem. hardware / networking / research).
The article's really twisting the true definition of computer science. Fear not, nerds of the universe, these "35-year-old African American or Hispanic women" tread not on our turf! I'm more afraid about my job being shipped off to India.
In the beginning, most programmers had degrees in computer science and were relatively expensive. They worked in computer rooms and were treated with some degree of grudging respect (although companies never liked having to pay them well, they didn't make too much noise about it).
During the internet boom, several things happened to not just turn over the apple cart, but rather smash it to flinders:
1. Worldwide infrastructure was built out because companies knew they would be able to globalize the labor pool eventually, and they were willing to invest in this;
2. Companies like Microsoft, perceiving both a need and a high demand, worked to make programming more "accessible" to lower-skilled individuals (InDUHviduals, as they are called in Dilbert);
3. The Y2K panic caused all sorts of people who didn't have a strong CS background to jump into the field after totally inadequate training, and this trend virtually exploded when small internet companies started hiring anyone who so much as knew HTML and called them "Developers" and "Webmasters" (this totally devalued the Computer Science degree, as did the wholesale dropping out of school of company founders).
Cue the tech crash. Then, cue 9/11 and the recession.
Corporations now have the infrastructure to offshore whatever they want, and they have the H1-Bs and L-1's to replace people here. They go berserk, contracting out everything tech-oriented, and even start contracting out business functions, legal work, medical transcribing, you name it. If it's portable, it goes.
A few years go by.
Most people, not being totally fucking retarded, realize that they don't want to study computer science as a major anymore. They study something with better prospects, like art or medieval French poetry. A few students go Comp.Sci knowing they'll be unemployed, because they really dig it, and they'll go on to start the Napsters of the future (good for them, I say).
Suddenly, corporations have a problem.
Our colleges don't produce many computer scientists anymore. Those that DO go all the way to the Ph.D aren't Americans -- and they're going back to wherever they came from to start their OWN companies instead of being Good Little Immigrants(tm) and working for a corporation.
Some suit, deep in his six-martini lunch, wonders aloud, "Hey, wait a minute; if all these guys are going home and starting their own companies, and they have access to a really cheap labor pool, and the infrastructure we built up lets him sell his stuff to everybody worldwide, and we trained him and everybody in his neighborhood back home in OUR core business... Wait, I had a thought... What was that... Oh, yeah, so, if this Indian guy Apu, or whatever, does that, then isn't that competition? Like, with US?"
All lunch conversation dries up for a minute. The suits all look at each other.
"Say, old boy" says the Yale Man, "Do you mean that by outsourcing our entire tech staff to India, we trained and prepared this new guy's -- Apu, did you say? -- entire company for him, and at a moment's notice they could all decide to stop working for us and compete with us instead, leaving us gutted without any technical staff at all?"
"Umm... Maybe?" the first suit is starting to look a little green. Maybe six martinis were a little much. He eats a mint.
"And," Yale Man continues, "As Bill mentioned, nobody in America is studying computer science anymore because we told them to study business and move up the food chain, so we'll be (as the locals say) shit out of luck?"
"Uhh..."
"Oh, dear. Perhaps we should have Fortune write an article, and inspire young people to study computer science and math again?" He looks around at the other suits. "Surely we can appeal to their sense of national pride, and their desire to not see their own country's corporations fall by the wayside?"
And, here we are. What an interesting time this is...
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!