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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?
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
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
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.
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.
I feel this post being greatly disturbing.
That's like saying "We don't need to teach the kids art in kindergarden anymore, because we already have had plenty of great artists in all of the different art forms, and now we need applied artists, like archetects". (excuse the downcast).
Computer and Software Engineers THRIVE off the sciences created by Computer Scientists. Too many people think CS is all about writing source code, but really, it's just like any other science; it's research, research, research.
Breakthroughs are still left to be found in all the fields, and new fields are just now being created (bioinformatics anyone?), and if we just give up on the science now, we won't have engineers implementing it later.
Don't believe I don't see your part about needing other sciences to migrate to using computers, but who do you think design the algorithms for integrating other sciences into Computer Science, the Engineers who build solutions, or the scientists in other fields who haven't had the training in mathematics or the algorithms to make things more efficient. And before you give me that crap about "computers being fast enough and having enough memory these days to deal with shitty programming", think about this; the *simplist* of protein folding implementations requires hundreds and hundreds of CPU hours, even cutting a dozen off of it means massive cost cutting for the organizations using it.
Face it; telling people to stop moving to CS is like telling people to stop moving towards Physics, or any other discrete science; it's stupid, short sighted, and just plain wrong.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
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!