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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."
It wasn't mentioned in the article, but Bill also donated 2 million copies of Visual Basic .NET to all universities in US, more copies are available on request.
The software shall help easing both the finance and skill shortage.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
when every other news article talks about jobs being outsourced and the layoffs that are happening all over the place, most recently at HP.
...how the same corporations that complain taxes are too high also whine about the government not spending taxes to help their industry.
if he's complaining about the lack of CS students, then perhaps he should pay graduates more, stop outsourcing to India and relying on H1b visas... then people might just believe there's a future in CS... he and several others like him are the root cause of the problem...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Is because we believe/afraid that we wont have a job when we get out of college due to all the out sourcing going on in IT. People don't want to spend all their money on a great education, to not have chance at a job when they graduate. So they look into other majors, while possibly doing some code on the side. Simple as that.
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... 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.
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.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Gee, this is like the pot calling the kettle black, how many jobs as Mr. Gates company outsourced I wonder?
The guy is just playing the governments of the world off one another to benefit his own company. Not really news.
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.
Gates talking about the problems facing the computer industry is like listening to Dom Deluise talk about the benefits of dieting.
From TFA:
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.
This is the same Bill Gates that wants to completely eliminate H-1B quotas (that is, allow an unlimited number of foreign software developers in). This is the same Bill Gates that is constructing a huge, sprawling Microsoft Campus in India.
You want more students going into Computer Science, Bill? Then quit telling American students, through your actions, that there won't be any software development jobs left for them in America by the time they graduate!
He's just another F'ing "I want cheap labor at the expense of American workers" prick. Excuse my French.
Mmm, I think you both misunderstood. He was being sarcastic, implying that Chinese are going to wake up and say "we [as in the Chinese] missed this opportunity [to have more physical education majors]".
"A dessert without cheese is like a beautiful woman who has lost an eye." -- Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
The title should have been "Billionaire College Dropout Accountant Encourages Students To Go To College, Major In Computer Science"
Point of interest. Offering to shoot us might not work so well as an incentive as you might imagine.
2) Going through Microsoft's dehumanizing interview process
I don't know where you got that one from. Sure, they ask strange questions, but they treat you quite well when you're interviewing.
I've had two friends interview for internships with Microsoft, and a third who got a job there after college. All three of them made it a point to brag about how well MS treated them at the interviews (despite the bizarre questions asked), and how well they treat their employees.
Who gets paid millions of dollars to play games?
Athletes and coaches
Who gets put on the covers of countless magazines?
Athletes and coaches
Who gets multimillion dollar contract buy-outs when they fail to perform?
Athletes and coaches
Who gets invited on Leno and Letterman?
Athletes and coaches
Who gets multimillion dollar endorsement deals?
Athletes and coaches
Who gets put on posters and tacked to the walls of thousands of teenagers?
Athletes and coaches
Who gets worshipped and forgiven for all sins for being successful?
Athletes and coaches
Who gets teased mercilessly throughout their school years?
Science geeks and nerds
Who gets fired to raise stock prices even after successful work?
Science geeks and nerds
Who gets taunted and degraded by society at large?
Science geeks and nerds
Who gets underpaid for long hours and little security?
Science geeks and nerds
Who gets to spend 4-8 years in school in a difficult, demanding major with perceived diminishing job opportunities?
Science geeks and nerds
The perception is that you have to be born with certain talents and abilities to become a great athlete, but you can be trained to be a coach (even a mediocre one) and at least be in that field, so something fun, and bask in the reflected glory of the truly talented. Plus, we're not outsourcing football yet.
Yeah, I can't imagine why so many people are choosing PE over CS.
1) Four years of one of the most time intensive majors in colleges
I actually thought my CS classes were the easy ones. It was that damn Lit class that gave me hell.
2) Going through Microsoft's dehumanizing interview process
There are (e-gahds!) other companies to work for you know. You don't HAVE to be evil.
3) Getting free soda in exchange for 80 hour work weeks at minimum wage I don't get free soda, and I only put in 5 hours of overtime a week to run nightly processes. I get paid a good deal more then minimum wage.
4) Getting fired at age 28 for being too old
I'm only 26, so I can't say for sure, but my Boss (a former mainframe coder) is in his 50s, my team lead is in his late 30s and another developer on the team is in his mid 40s.
Just wanted to shed some light on the ACTUAL life.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
It took me *3 years* to find my first programming job after college (graduated just after 9/11)... Now I know my experience was one of the worst, but it happened. With the worries about outsourcing, the szhizophrenic (sp?) attitudes of companies ... If I had known then what I know now, I wouldn't have gone to CS either. The average programmer makes no more than the average teacher, and teachers have better pensions, don't have to go through insanely difficult curriculum, don't have to worry about outsourcing, technology trends, the global economy ... Maybe I'll take the cbest and teach CS.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
Before badmouthing MS R&D... perhaps you should look into a bit of what they do: http://research.microsoft.com/.
That doesn't prove Microsoft R&D is worth anything. All it proves is that their R&D section has a pretty website.
It seems like there are always apologists willing to defend Microsoft, or any other big company that makes shitty products and uses slick marketing to crush its better competitors, with the cry, "Look how much money they spend on $X!" So what? If $X sucks, it doesn't matter how much money the company that makes $X spent; it still sucks.
So Microsoft spends a ton of money on algorithms research? Their apps are still slow bloatware. HCI? Their interfaces are still painful to use. Security? Using Windows is still pretty much the equivalent of leaving your PC out on the front lawn with a sign saying, "Steal My Computer." They can tell us about their wonderful research all they want, but it has yet to show any meaningful results.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Wow, that certainly convinced me. A loser friend of yours was able to abuse the system and captitalize on a job market that would do anything for a warm body at a time when we were steamrolling towards a huge bubble burst in an industry. He is now back to where he was, leeching off his wife, with no future and no accomplishments besides defrauding stupid companies.
On second though, I think I'll keep my CS degree.
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
Funny. I work at Microsoft as an intern, and I didn't find their interview process dehumanizing. It was mostly tests to see if I could solve problems, design as part of a team, and write clean, bug-free code. Sure it was a pain to fly to Redmond, but they paid for the tickets so I can't complain too much. And I work only 40 hours a week, for something substantially more than minimum wage. If my product were about to ship, I'd work longer hours for a few weeks, but that's not the case. I also haven't heard of them firing people... well, for just about anything, but particularly not for being "old."
It's also one of the nicest jobs in any industry: interesting work, no heavy lifting, flexible hours, air conditioning, great office machines, free soda, good view, mobility within the company, lots of benefits, good pay, minimal dress code (anything not revealing or offensive).
I'm not sure what more you could ask for other than a northern California location or free money. Or more women. But I have a girlfriend, so I don't care that much. (And yes, trolls, she's a female human, unrelated to me, about my age, and she dates me without any chemical, physical or monetary persuasion.)
Perhaps it's just a trap, and if I come to work here full-time, I'll see what it's really like.
Perhaps not. Current employees seem pretty happy with it. Maybe they put something in the free soda?
Point #1 stands on its own, but many interesting jobs require a lot of education to get.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
No kidding, you could have a similar headline for Steve Jobs. I loved seeing this story in the Seattle Times this morning. The headline was "Gates Stresses Need for Qualified CS Grads", the headline underneath it was "Hewlett-Packard to cut 14,500 jobs in restructuring plan". Do they put these things together deliberately to fuck with us, or is it just an accident?
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
Go check out a copy of The Peter Principle (copyright 1969 -- pick up a used copy from Amazon) to confirm that the current decrepit state of our managerial skilz is nothing new.
When the nation's leaders stop rewarding managerial ineptitude and punishing technical workers, we might have a chance of turning this around. You can count on other nations (China, anyone?) not making this particular blunder.
If it offers hope to anyone, in today's WSJ (subscription required) there is a piece advocating outsourcing of our outrageously overpaid top management to bring excessive top management compensation under control. It's the 7th most-emailed article today. But it will take a long time after such practices begin (assuming they ever begin) before they filter down through the corporate structure and clueless incompetence is no longer rewarded.
I thought too that the US were a long way ahead in technology. I came for a conference in Austin, TX last November, and on the way back I stayed for a week in NY. I was disappointed in some ways:
Ok, ok, I have to compensate with some positive points...
Anyway, back to the point: the US are not as advanced as many, Americans and not, think they are. At least not in the level of technology the citizens are exposed to, I have definitely seen enough to deem it unlikely that I was victim of a long series of unlucky coincidences.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y