Computer Science as a Major and as a Career

An anonymous reader writes "IBM DeveloperWorks is running an interesting Q&A with Director of IBM's Academic Initiative, Gina Poole. In the article she talks specifically about taking computer science as a major and ultimately as a career. From the article: 'There are a couple of reasons [for the decline in science and engineering degrees]: one is a myth, believed by parents, students, and high school guidance counselors, that computer science and engineering jobs are all being outsourced to China and India. This is not true. The percentage of the total number of jobs in this space is quite small -- less than 5%. According to a government study, the voluntary attrition in the U.S. has outpaced the number of outsourced jobs to emerging nations. Further, for every job outsourced from the U.S., nine new jobs are actually created in the U.S.'"

Comments

Retail

[Wellington Grey]

Further, for every job outsourced from the U.S., nine new jobs are actually created in the U.S.

Yeah, nine new jobs in retail: the world's most depressing and soul-sucking career.

-Grey

Intellectual "property" and computer science

[Anonymous Coward]

As far as I'm concerned, the core problem is the USA's patent law. Patent monopolies destroy free markets in the monopolised thing, by definition. At best, all that can exist is a free market in the patents themselves. So, we have a situation where the free market in stuff computer scientists do well, the service of writing programs to make a computer achieve some stated end, is sacrificed in favour of a free market in stuff lawyers do well, quibbling over bits of paper granting monopolies on being the only people allowed to achieve some end (and don't give me crap about patents only covering one way of doing something, (a) sometimes there IS only one sane way, and (b) patent lawyers pride themselves on making patents as general as possible).

So we have STARTING OUT patent people getting salaries of >USD100K , and computer scientists being told they should just simmer down and accept USD13K salaries like those of workers in developing countries. The indisputable fact is that while patent (and to a lesser extent copyright) monopolies over software exists, a free market in the service of writing software doesn't.

If I were training today, there's no way I'd train in computer science if intended to stay in the USA. It's just become too hostile to real innovation, with politicians clapping themselves on the back because they think more patents == more innovation, when the opposite is true.

You might argue that patents are valuable [in the strict sense of capable of being assigned a value and having large value], and that patent attorney salaries are commensurate with that value. This is trivially true but not actually a relevant argument: of _course_ a U.S. patent is valuable, it's a right to prevent 300 million people doing something for 20 years. But a legal right being valuable doesn't make it right it should exist. If slavery is legal, being a slave owner is likely to pay much better than being a field laborer who charges a fee. While slavery exists, the market value of the field laborer is depressed, and the slave owner is rich. You'd be a fool to choose to be a laborer rather than a slave owner if the choice was yours and you didn't care about ethical considerations.

Patents and copyrights depress the market for being paid for the thing that computer scientists are good at: writing new code.