Is Computer Science Still Worth It?

prostoalex writes "Is it a good idea to go into Computer Science? Yes, there are certainly pending labor shortages as Indian companies outsource to the United States, but speakers of Stanford Computer Forum generally agree that it's a good career choice. From the article: 'To ensure job security, students must learn business, communication and interpersonal skills, Vardi recommended. The personal touch will become as important as technological expertise, he said. "There are jobs galore," agreed Suzanne Bigas, assistant director of the Stanford Computer Forum.'"

Comments

Re:You can't code your way out of all problems.

[FlyingGuy]

And then there are the rest of us, who write well formated, well structured, well designed code every day, but never went to collage. We did what a LOT of people did in the 80's we picked up a copy of whatever language we could get our hands on and started teaching ourselves.

We read books, we looked at other peoples code, we experimented. We wrote our own Direct to Video Memory code to avoid the bios screen write functions.

But now we are in our late 40's and not hip and cool. We don't get hired because we don't have a piece of paper saying we know something, we just have massive amounts of code to back us up, but none of the under 30 hip cool crowd cares about that, its "You got your degree from where?" When I tell them SHK ( school of Hard Knocks ) as a joke and then tell them I am self taught, I get the "We want someone more qualified" What a bunch of horse shit.

Thats the biggest problem with our society, no one values experience, no one values wisdom gleaned from 25 years of doing the JOB.

Most of us don't care for the latest and greatest Ruby on Rails or Roads or even a race track. We don't do cutting edge, we do what works, we do it most of the time under budget, ahead of schedule and in code that readable AND commented.

So we will keep writing code that supports what all you "Latest & Greatest" fan boys think is SO cool, when in fact its the exact same language we built so many years ago, with a cosmetic twist.

I guess the other thing that is SO fucking depressing is that most CS or even SE grads these days don't have a clue how to create anything unless its spoon fed to them in some object repository. I asked a recent CS graduate if he knew any assembler of ANY flavor. His response was, "Well we had about 2 hours of it and some theory", but other then that all he knew was Java and rudimentary C.

A pretty sad state of affairs if you ask me. And people wonder why companies outsource.