Bill Gates Is Coming To A College Near You

Xyn writes "Microsoft chairman and chief software architect Bill Gates visited UW-Madison today as part of his 2005 College Tour, designed to promote greater youth involvement in technology careers. Gates discussed "The Impact and Opportunity of Technology: Why Computer Science? Why Now?" at a student forum."

Comments

Do as you say or as you do?

[JanneM]

So, a guy who famously became the richest person in the world by skipping college and leaving a technical career in favour of business is now trying to persuade people to go to college and study technology?

Come and get shafted, boys and girls!

[SysKoll]

Why Computer Science? Why Now?

Come work in computer science, boys and girls! Why? Because you'll have an opportunity to experience first-hand the effect of offer and demand on the job market, when we at MS will lobby for an increase of H1B -- the ones for 2006 are already allocated.

Because since the industry is mostly managed by lawyers and MBA, not engineers, you in the tech field will never compete with us lawyers and sons of lawyers for these coveted positions of execs who get a raise at the same time techies are laid off.

Because in spite of all Bill Gates' public wailing for attracting talent, he spits on tech talent, and so do most CEOs. The only "talent" he cares really about is execs, especially sales and marketing execs. That's talent. Design? Programming? Architecture? A commodity at best. A cost to be outsourced.

And you wonder why there is such a decrease in engineering and science students? Of course they want to work in finance and law. Do you think they are stupid?

Re:What else can CS give us?

[adrianmonk]

What is left to study in Computer Science? What algorithms are still out there waiting to be uncovered?

Well, for starters, nobody has even figured out whether or not P == NP yet. Sure, most people strongly believe P != NP, but nobody really knows for sure.

Kinda along those same lines, cryptography is built on the idea that certain tasks can be computationally infeasible to one group of people (eavesdroppers) but feasible and practical for the people who want to securely exchange information. We have stumbled on some algorithms that seem to fit this in practice, but according to what I understand, there is not really a cryptosystem out there for which anyone can supply proof that the computations that look hard actually are hard. For example, if I recall correctly, RSA's security rests on the idea that it is computationally very tough to factor a product of two very large prime numbers. But we don't know that there isn't an efficient algorithm for doing this. All we know is that we aren't yet aware of one.

There are other active areas of research. For instance, right now "managed code" systems like Java and .Net are in their infancy. Computers have only just recently become fast enough that it is practical to consider switching to just-in-time compilation, and the thing is, there are optimizations that can be done when compiling at runtime that can't be done when compiling before runtime. (For example, you can use real profiling data to automatically create code that is most efficient for the actual workload.) So there are bound to be a lot of techniques to be discovered in this area.

And there are other potential areas of research as well. We are already starting to see dual-core processors because it's looking to be hard to increase processor speed in conventional ways. We could probably use some research on how to do parallelism in other ways, possibly even going beyond dual-core machines or even beyond Von Neumann machines. If we ever feel compelled to do that, let me tell you, there will be a whole bunch of research needed in programming languages all over again, because imperative languages mirror the architecture we are using now but won't be suitable for an architecture that lends itself to automatically taking advantage of parallelism.

Finally, keep in mind where physics thought it was after Newton. It seemed that classical mechanics explained just about everything pretty well. Until Einstein came along and blew it all out of the water. For all we know, something like that could happen with computer science. Although it might be 100 years...

Wrong approach

[Percy_Blakeney]

Obviously, Bill Gates pulled this stunt in an effort to curb the declining CS enrollment in the US. The problem with his approach, though, is that this won't do anything to change the situation; the problem isn't that anyone considers computer science to be irrelevant, but rather that many people see it as having a limited future in this country. Look no further than the very visible layoffs due to outsourcing, and you will see why CS enrollment is down.

If I had been in the class, I would have asked Bill the following:

• What financial motivation do large software companies have to keep CS jobs in the United States?
• Do you see outsourcing as a growing or shrinking trend?
• If overseas workers are brilliant, low-paid, and trained in the US, then how will US workers ever be able to compete?
• How would you compare the long-term job prospects in the US of a business major vs. a computer science major?

Re:Answer

[Tom]

Funny, but to be fair to Gates, all indications are that he was a hell of a programmer individually.

You base this bold statement on which facts, exactly?

The only software that wikipedia attributes to Gates personally was the Altair BASIC interpreter, and even that was co-authored with Paul Allen.

So, where are your "indications" ?