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Gates On Future of CS Education
lilrowdy18 writes "In an interesting article from Eweek, Microsoft chairman and chief software architect Bill Gates talks about how the lack of spending in research and development is 'kind of a crime'. He also talks about future problems that are facing the computer industry including outsourcing and the speed of upcoming processors." From the article: "Microsoft taps both native-born talent and foreign talent, but Gates said he is frustrated that more U.S. students are not going into computer science. 'The fastest growing major is physical education,' he said. 'The Chinese are going to wake up and say we missed this opportunity,' he joked."
I thought Gates was a University dropout....
Let's see here:
1) Four years of one of the most time intensive majors in colleges
2) Going through Microsoft's dehumanizing interview process
3) Getting free soda in exchange for 80 hour work weeks at minimum wage
4) Getting fired at age 28 for being too old
versus...
Well, anything actually.
When academics and computer scientists create "standards" as a result of substantive research, MSFT chooses to ignore them. If MSFT hasn't come up with something themselves, or hasn't had a key role in financing/advising the development, then they don't use the standard. If they don't use the standard, then it never actually becomes a de facto standard, due to their monopolistic hold in the computing world.
Who wants to produce research that is dead before it's ever published? Especially for those who see research as a way of improving the world in some (even small) way, it seems that CS research in many directions may not be the way to go...
Ladies and gentlemen, he might finally have a good point. At my current school, one that has approximately 2000 students, the minimum requirement of 12 students per class to keep it active was not met for ANY computer class (web/graphic design excluded), so they will ALL be canceled next year. This WILL (excluding the debt, corruption, etc) be the reason for the US becoming a second or third world nation, unless this trend is reversed.
+1 funny, -2 overrated. Life isn't fair.
... perhaps it is because the modern CS students have just spent three years learning about operating systems by using open source operating systems?
Once upon a time you could make real money by working for a startup Microsoft. Today, it's just another job and all the cool ideas are coming out of Google.
How many of your Comp. Sci. peers got jobs before graduating from college? I know that only two of my fellow students did. How many business, accounting, education, and other students get jobs? Again, I don't know about your experience, but all my friends who chose not to major in Comp. Sci. did quite well and landed nice jobs BEFORE they got their diplomas.
Supply and demand. This is a no-fucking-brainer for students who go to college in order to get jobs and move on with their careers. Last time I checked, nobody wants to spend -- or waste -- for years of school in order to end up unemployed. There are tons of articles that describe newly minted CEOS who decide to hire and developm in India or China because it is cheaper. Kids read that and decide not to fall into the same hole as the previous generation.
Sorry Bill, not every students gets to be one of the wealthiest people on the planet. Software was hot in 80s. Now it is a freaking commodity. Let's move on.
Believe me -- with the dummies with new CS Masters degrees I see getting hired, you'll do fine.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
So maybe we'll be dethroned as having The most overweight teens because of the global obesity problem
well, what would you rather have a country of obese programmers who die of heart disease at age 40? or some of our smarter more talented people going into teaching kids how to exercise and diet properly, so they can lead longer heathier lives.
I guess gates would rather have the former... and rely on computers to design the medical technology to replace a 'frail' human cardiovascular system ith a 'easily replacable' mechanical system..
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
Right. Raise the barrier to programming so high that no one feels inclined to pursue an interest in the field. That's bound to generate more programmers!
C has held back the development and advancement of the art of software design and programming by at least 10 years. All true programmers develop in assembler.
Rediculous
You hit the nail on the head. When I was in college, my roomate who was a buisness major switched to computer science when he saw an article in US News and World Report which said that computer science majors would start at $40,000 a year. The only major that started higher was chemical engineering. Buisness was somewhere in the middle at $29,000 or so, with art at the bottom with $18,500.
Now people are avoiding computer science because there is no growth seen. There is percieved shrinkage in the USA. HP lays off 11,000. Sun fired 4,000 a few years ago. Who wants to work in an industry where they have no job security?
It is not like someone can get a degree in computer science, get a job at GE starting at $40,000, and work there the next 30 years and retire with a pension. Most comp sci people I know work on a contract basis. One year at a single company is considered a long time by some people. Then there is the pain in the ass of finding a new gig.
How does someone plan buying a house under those conditions? What do you tell the bank? Umm... I have had 5 different contracts the past 3 years.
Then there is the question of sanity. Who will live longer. They comp sci guy, who works 60 hour weeks, under stress, then even when he has no work, he is stressed looking for work. I see an early death due to heart attack. Or is it better to be a PE teacher, making $35,000 a year and spending time outdoors lobbing softballs and playing tennis?
The problem the comp sci students are going to face is the same problem the auto workers are facing. Companies don't give a crap about americans, even though the companies started in the USA, the CEO and board of directors are American, and they sell their product to Americans. They will move their factories and tech support and anything they can to Mexico or India or anywhere they can find cheap labor. The CEO's are pretty much trators and they are crapping on the USA.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
Gates seems to be complaining about the lack of people who can do R&D, not about a lack of programmers.
Sure, programming and systems administration get outsourced. What about R&D or consultancy? I am sorry (actually not) but the field of CS is broader than most slashdotters seem to acknowledge.
In terms of the shortage of CS grads, I wonder, did he factor in those of us who bailed because the only stupid jobs we were being offered were stinkin' M$FT technology jobs?
Over the past five years a fair number of university educated IT professionals in their 30's and 40's got fed up, myself included, and found work in other industries where our talents are valued, the work is interesting and the business environment is competitive (not monopoly ruled).
I have a good chuckle when I hear the blather about CS grad shortages.
Anyone can spend money, and I'm quite aware of the many things that they're supposedly working on, but why aren't we seeing any real benefit in the Microsoft products that we're actually using on a day-to-day basis?
It's one thing to work on pie-in-the-sky research (and I have no problem with that), but quite another to do that while also continuing to maintain one of the most problematic computing platforms in history in an almost unchanged state for over a decade.
Some of the money might be better spent researching things like Linux Capabilities, a feature that the mainframe OSes I play^H^H^H^Hwork on for a living have had for a number of decades now.
I mean, UNIVAC boxes and VAXen both had the concept of a permissions bitmask down over 20 years ago, so what the heck is Microsoft's problem? Too expensive to implement? I think not...
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
Don't laugh at Physical Education Mr. Gates. With our obesity rates skyrocketing and diabetes II coming already to teenagers, this epidemic will be much more costly than simply having a few less Microsoft Certifieds around.
In highschool, my gym teacher Mr. Brynard taught a better nutrition (more practical and teenage oriented) than the middle school's dietician and also was instrumental in deciding to that the vending machines in school serve no soda. I'm not saying that this is the case everytime - but the ones I met were generally very well self-motivated.
I think they'll do more good than an extra programmer or two.
And Mr. Gates also falls into the trap thinking that more programmers = more productivy. I can't really envision Mr. Brynard as the type of guy sitting down and programming for eight hours a day just because it bought more money. How happy and productive are those people who do it for the money anyway?
There's more to the world than computers - let's remember that.
And that CS degrees is just one of many fields in which the USA is underinvesting.
Not only that, but they think that China does get it, and is kicking sand in our faces.
Gates, of course, cares mostly about his area of expertise.
However, even though we as a society need way more higher education, I don't believe we need a Tablet [as Gates says all students do in the article] nor do I agree that the xBox or xBox 360 is sexy - my first degree was in Marketing/Sales and I'm a geek who owns an xBox and a GameCube.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
CS was pretty rough when I studied it
sorry it was so rough for you.
4 semester of advanced university mathematics,
I had great math teachers. For me math was always fun. The only class I remember hating was trigonometry and thinking back, I suspect it was because the teacher wasn't enthusiastic. She just went through the motions.
add to that basic logic classes,
If you don't enjoy logic classes why are you majoring in CS?
a bunch of semesters of statistics
That is weird. I only had to take one statistics class. It wasn't that bad.
on the compsci side you had algorithms,
Data Structures and Algorithms was the best class I ever took in my entire life. Ever. Dr. Jeremy Jones was the instructor's name. He really knew his stuff. I love being around smart people. I hope that some of it will rub off on me.
compiler stuff, basic operating systems,
Yeah, those were tedious. Networking classes were even harder, but I still enjoyed them.
basic processor design,
I can't really relate to that. My CS curriculum didn't include it.
time consuming practices for programming
?? Man, the best part of being a CS major is hanging out in the lab at 3:00 drinking mountain dew and joking with your buddies as you hack away on sparc workstations. If the assignment is to use recursion to traverse a binary tree, you have to love what you're doing enough to want to spend the time to implement the Towers of Hanoi problem. Wtf man? Why did you major in CS??
For me the hard classes were psychology, literature, stuff like that. It wasn't interesting to me.
In the USA, they're not only laying off IT and CS staff, they're even letting H1-B visas go unused, not that that's keeping Bill and others from lobbying to raise the H1-B cap anyway.
u lt.aspx) in the US, and they pay decent money.
Don't lie. Microsoft has literally thousands of vacancies (http://members.microsoft.com/careers/search/defa
I am leading a team of developers myself, and I have an open position, you just have to have some coding/design/intellectual skills above the regular Slashdot wannabe level to get it.
And the yearly H1B cap gets filled in the first 2 months of the year, as some friends from my native country found out.
When men used to be men
You make it sound as if his main motive was to save himself some of the cost of taxes - considering the amount of monetary donations he's made to charity, this seems rather unlikely.
In my family, I have people who retired from GM as a factory worker, who still has enough money to buy a new car every 4 years.
Next door is a nurse who is retired. Same thing, she has new cars and has money.
When I was 19 I worked in a bookstore one year during college. One of the women who worked there part time was 60 years old and was a retired teacher. I asked he if she needed the money, thinking how sad that a 60 year old woman needs to work. She said she did not need any money, had more than enough, but she was lonely and wanted to be around people. Since she was a teacher, she loved books.
My friends dad was a truck driver, and he is retired, and living comfortably in a 4br 2.5bath house.
What two things do all these people have in common? An automotive factory worker, a teacher, a nurse, and a truck driver? They all started working in the 1960's and each and every one of them has a pension in addition to social security.
It is a shame when today, skilled workers are not gaurenteed a pension. There should be a law which says that anyone who puts in over 10 years sweat and work into a company will get some kind of pension from that company. Maybe a good rule would be for every year worked, the company must pay a pension of 2.5% of that years salary, adjusted for inflation. A 30 year career would yeild 75% of the that persons salary. Add in social security, and most can retire comfortably.
I wonder what has changed from the 1960's-80's and today. Why is it today most companies don't want to offer health insurance or pensions, or make people pay into their own private funds. What has changed? Companies could afford it back then, but today they outsource work, they close factories, and they don't want to pay workers. But the CEO's get HUGE bonuses, it is nowhere in line with the bonuses they got 30 years ago.
The only way to fix it is to pass new laws. No more outsourcing of jobs. All companies must have a pension package. No lay offs unless the union okay's it. And every company must have a union, or the workers must collectivly agree on pay and terms.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
Modern coporations are cutting off their nose to spite their face. Someday they will be crying in their beer about not being able to find any workers. Well they made their own bed now they've got to sleep in it.
I say good! When there are no more programmers around we can charge an arm and a leg for our services. For somebody who graduated from college at the height of the market flooding with CS grads this sounds like welcome news.
CS, CE, and EE at UW are incredibly easy to get into - now that the number of applicants have dropped off significantly.
A friend of mine with a similar intro physics GPA as you did got into CS with no problem. Someone else I know with a 1-point-something in one of the intro calc classes got into EE.
Although grad school is still pretty competitive. Good thing it's not exactly my cup of tea. (Although did you know the UW EE grad program is half women?)
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
of his own success!!! While at Columbia, *ONLY* MS certified courses were supported, while a completely furnished NeXTSTEP laboratory served duty as email terminals to student accounts.
The argument was *anything* other than MS CS related courses was useless, and a waste of students education since there only existed MS related jobs after graduation. So bought-in to the MS monopoly was CU that they saw it as their duty to the Corporate customers who fund its programs to turnout a ready pool of qualified talent that meets their needs, and salary requirements. NYC was a fileLOCK by 1990.
Welcome Bill Gates to YourWorld. You created it. So if you don't like it, look at your own sorry assine monopoly.
Who is out of a career at 35, no matter how successful they are?
:)
The majority of athletes and coaches. Think about it, if all athletes went on to be successful coaches, universities would have 1-1 tuition in PE and major clubs would have at least one coach per player.
What are several of the richest men in the world?
Science geeks and nerds.
Of course on the gripping hand, John Madden managed to succesfully cross from PE to computers without ever having a successful sports career
...the horde of pointy-haired-managers for which American business has become a haven.
Bill Gates said it himself. From TFA:
In particular, Gates said finding recruits who have project management skills is difficult. Management overall is an area of need, he said. Indeed Gates said he welcomes students coming out of engineering management career tracks.
He doesn't want technical doers; he wants more friggin' managers!
Agreed. Do you recall when the president of HP said (paraphrasing), "The problem isn't that American engineers aren't highly skilled...Is that highly skilled american engineers won't work for minimum wage."
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
"We had a solution to this problem. It is called tariffs. We charge a tax on all goods that are imported into the USA to protect goods manufactured inside the USA."
We don't let China sell $8,000 cars in the USA. We charge the China company a tax for the right to sell in the USA.
I have a friend who is into wines, big time. He has one of those fancy wine dehumidifiers/refrigerators with the glass case. He reads about wine, goes to wine tastings, he knows his wines. Anyways, he went to France last year, and he called me when he got back. He said the same French wine he buys in the USA was less than 1/3rd the price in France. He said he does not buy that wine often because it is so expensive, but he purchased 6 bottles to bring back home. He buys many more wines produced in California than anywhere else. Seems tariffs are working well in that situation."
There are quite a few major problems with tariffs. First, they artificially prop-up industries. This makes the economy less efficient overall and in turn makes so less jobs are created in other sectors. Tariffs also increase the price of goods to consumers. And the biggest problem, in my opinion, is that tariffs severely hamper the ability of the U.S. to sell our exports to other countries. We are not the only consumers of American cars in the world. A tariff in the U.S. on cars would make so automobile manufacturers can breathe a little and can sell more expensive cars in the U.S. because there would be a tax on the Chinese cars. Then we wouldn't have to worry about China flooding our market with cheap goods.
Sounds great in theory... but what about all the other markets in the world where people are currently buying our cars? Does our U.S. tariff stop the Chinese from selling their cheap cars to the other major world economies? No, it wouldn't. A tariff would severely decrease the foreign demand for our U.S. made cars because they are more expensive. It would cause Chinese car companies to outpace us significantly in growth and efficiency because we couldn't remain competitive in the global marketplace.
"I only buy American cars, I have NEVER owned a foriegn made car."
I applaud you for your principles in supporting our American workforce. I'm sure the car companies that spend millions in advertising campaigns to "buy American" would be happy to see their money is paying off for some people. The important question though is what would most Americans do if they could buy an identical product made oversees that was thousands of dollars cheaper? The Chinese don't meet the quality of our cars yet, but most experts today are predicting that by around 2010 they will be there. Look at Wal-mart today--it's full of Asian goods. I think it is reasonably clear that most Americans would rather have cheaper prices than pay more to buy American goods.
"$1400 per employee for health care is nothing compared to the $2,000,000 bonus the CEO got? How many people could that 2 million cover? And that is not touching one penny of the CEOs salary."
Well given that GE has 1.1 million employees, your hypothetical would mean about $2 per employee.
How many people can and want the responsibility of making a multi-billion dollar company perform? If you put the wrong guy at the helm, he can run the ship into the shore. I want to make it clear that I'm not trying to defend what are often times terribly high-salaries, and some CEO's are definately overpaid.
However, look at a company like Merck. It is a billion-dollar pharmaceutical company in trouble. How many people are there out there that can step up to the plate and turn the behemoth into a money-maker again? What if the person fails? Who wants to hire a CEO that failed at his previous company? They need a "star" CEO, one who can really turn the company around. Would it be worth a few million to lure away a CEO from another co
I'm not sure about that.
It's tough to generalize about East Asian cultures, but we can generally say that most of them place a high value on education and technical skills. They do much better than U.S. culture in that way.
But they also (again, overgeneralizing a bit) tend to have a reverence for authority and experience that makes bad managers difficult to eliminate. In my experience, they do worse than U.S. culture in that way.
Disclaimer: My primary experience and information come from Japan, Malaysia, and Korea. Maybe China is significantly different from all of these?
Would you willingly pay a few thousand dollars more for a car that is in every way equal to a foreign car
The problem is that the foreign car is often a better vehicle(more reliable, better mileage, better resale, etc), so the real question is: are you willing to make a bad personal economic decision in order to help someone else that you have no other dealings with? Too many people got burned by the shitmobiles of the 70s & 80s and the "buy Amuricun" slogan just rewarded the companies for making rotten products. That's a hard reputation to shake and Joe Sixpack would rather spend the weekends working on the car for fun, rather than doing it out of necessity.
It's interesting to compare the revenue and profits of the big automakers: GM, Ford, Daimler-Chrysler and Toyota. GM has significantly higher sales than any of them, but is about the worst when it comes to the bottom line. What's Ford doing right and what's GM screwing up?
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
> If you love computers, and have a reasonable
> aptitude for programming, don't let the
> "OUTSOURCING!!!" panic scare you away from the
> field. The idea that software jobs are all going
> to disappear is as foolish
Exactly. Hey people! - getting a degree isn't enough. You need to know you stuff, get some experience, etc... And try to spread out your skill set.
Part of the problem is that the value of American degrees are greatly diminished by the millification of our colleges.
We are currently shopping around for an ERP system - and WOW - are european software house help desk and programmers way more aggressive and 'on-the-ball' than the American equivalents.
Maybe these companies are out sourcing because not only are those developers and researchers cheaper - maybe they are also more aggressive and focussed (and less arrogant).
Using "Common Sense" is being either to arrogant or to ignorant to ask people who know more about something than you.
"how the lack of spending in research and development is 'kind of a crime'."
Which kind of crime is that, Bill?
When you dump tens of billions on a one-time stock prop scheme instead of investing it in R&D?
When you donate $20 billion to a "foundation" so your father can use it to control companies you can't because the SEC won't let you?
When you use your monopoly influence to attract development partners than walk off with their code and try to drive them into bankruptcy like you did that cell phone software company?
When you threaten to fire 8,000 people in a country that doesn't support your software patents initiative?
Read my lips, Bill.
Fuck you.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Well said! I think you are correct about the attempt to destroy the middle class. But the saddest thing is that the elite class will be brought down as well. What they (the super greedy elite) don't realize is that we (the middle class) buy all the stuff their companies make! Currently it is like each industry in the US is hammering its workers which happen to be the customers for every other industry. I fear that when things really get rolling we'll be facing a gigantic depression that will be incredibly difficult to get out of.
What I'd like to see done is to have the US implement a Maximum Wage for publically traded companies. The CEO would only be able to bring home X dollars for their services more than the lowest paid worker at their company. Maybe a factor could be added that for years with massive job cuts their pay should be factored by being a certain percentage of their expected salary in relation to how many jobs they cut. Oh and before anyone says, what about their stock options. I say ethier give them no options or make tnem a full part of their compensation figured at full face value. CEOs have proven that they can't control their greed themselves. As much as I dislike government intervention, its time for them to step in and stop this. But of course they won't, they'll just raise the Minimum Wage, which only makes things worse as the CEOs will scramble to do more layoffs and more outsourcing.