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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.'"
It's great being a CS degree holder. You can sometimes get flexible working hours, decent benefits, and an ungodly low level of sunlight in the year. Given the carcinogenic effects of solar radiation these days, coupled with toxins in diet softdrinks, it's probably best that white collar workers live and work indoors though.
Work for talented programmers will never end. But work for programmers in general will not be as common in the coming years when everyone and their dog can make a website on My Space.
Oh You POS
Is studying philosophy worth it?
Yes, if you love it.
If you depend on private industry- job security to these idiots means 2 years and you're out searching again. So what if there is plenty of opportunity if you never vest into your vacation time, let alone any other benefits? So do what I did- tell private industry to go learn to program their own computers and join government instead- where at least you can be assured you'll have a job tomorrow.
After 2001, I'll never trust the stock market or private industry ever again. Driving a truck is better than doing IT work for idiots.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Yeah, it's still good, you just have to add that twist. Biology seems to be popular these days, business, marketing, others like that sure are helpful. Straight computer science? Well, you'll probably be just a code monkey. Learn statistics if math is your thing, we're always looking for people who can turn numbers into useful statistics, but program it to make it flexible. You don't have to have a double major, not that that ever hurts, but a minor or even a few electives.
VoIP stuff seems to be a big thing, especially in developing countries(ever wanted to travel?), learn codecs, learn how to program codecs, learn how to hack Asterisk and SipX and some of ht eothers, play with Asterisk@Home.
Oh, this isn't an Ask Slashdot? Sure looks like one.
IT is a boom and bust field that will gradually decay in its value as the technologies it is based on mature.
The business cycle drives investment in IT so it should be regarded as a cyclical industry just the way any capital intensive business is. As growth in IT technologies peter out (Moore's law hockey-stick growth) inevitably flat-lines as technologies hit their limits growth will fall to the same growth as the economy as a whole. Like the railroads, utilities etc.
If you are 50 or so and are looking to make a career change IT is not a bad choice - it will probably be a sound field for at least the next 10-20 years.
But for somebody who is just entering college I think that other fields, particularly anything associated with health care are better opportunities. They will surely offer careers with better sustainability than IT.
You confuse computer science with computer programming.
That is like confusing music theory with music composition, something I would hope you would be aware of.
Computer science deals with algorithms, complexity notation, predicate calculus, proofs, and grammars, most of which you will not pick up by just being a programmer.
GPL Deconstructed
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
I think there's always room for good people in CS. If you're a type who goes to Stanford/MIT/others and gets a degree in CS because you love learning about computational processes and have a natural drive and curiousty, my guess is that there are plenty of firms willing to hire you.
If, on the other hand, you want to learn CS to get a 'good job' after school, and end up going to a second-rate university where they teach you specific software instead of abstract ideas, you might not have such a good future after college.
I'm sure both types of students attend all universities CS departments, don't get me wrong. I think your attitude going into it is what matters most, if you love CS and work hard, I bet you'll be just fine. If possible, don't choose your major based on what's in fashion, do what you want.
Pls stop confusing Computer Science ie. a science of computing ( just as Physics, Astronomy, Chemistry, Geology are sciences of their respective disciplines ) with IT ie. Information Technology, a trade with fluctuating job prospects.
eg. The real-estate situation in the US is currently a bust - doesn't mean you should rethink becoming an architect, which is a seriously long-term proposition. However, you SHOULD rethink applying for a real-estate broker's license, since short-term is your concern.
I can't speak for other parts of the world, but in the Netherlands IT is one of the best sectors to be in. Frankly, I have a hard time understanding all the people on slashdot talking about how shitty a job in IT is. Maybe things in the states are totally different (for one thing, the wages are even higher than here in the Netherlands). But there is little reason why IT could not be a pretty good career choice. Of course, there are some things which might help you along:
* Work on your social skills. It's not accurate along the board, but many people think that every IT specialist lives in his mothers' basement. Be sociable and this prejudice might turn out to be an advantage.
* Keep on learning. It's fun but it's also an investment in yourself. In few sectors knowledge is as volatile as in IT. Make sure you keep on top.
* Find an employer that fits your personality. Don't expect flexibility from a megacorporation and don't think small businesses will be able to buy you education.
* But most of all: Make sure you're doing something you like (most of the time). A great salary is of little use if you hate the work. If you enjoy your work, you'll be able to go the extra mile which will pay for itself in the long run.
It used to frustrate me that I didn't know how to program C decently but I rectified that starting in 2002. I was going to start by reading The Art of Computer Programming and realized how much MATH there was, and how it would be in assembly, so I did a "shortcut" and read K&R and Code Complete and did things that way. Of course, there are no real shortcuts, and the right way to do it is learning the math and the assembly language and going like that.
This is just something I want to do. I want to stand around all those code gods and be like them (in the sense of coding and skill, not necessarily everything else). There's the old cypherpunk slogan "Cypherpunks code" and one way of learning to code is to just write code, but I want to have a track where I'm doing it the right way while I'm on the second track of actually writing stuff now.
I also find biology interesting and may take a minor (or double major) in that. I don't think I'll worry about job security much with a bachelors in Computer Science and Biology. Or even a Masters. Or Phd. I think one step at a time though.
One thing though is I want to do this. I would do this even if there was no material reward. I think that is something to think about. It would be nice if I could make more money, or get a job doing less braindead stuff, but if all that happened would be that I would know enough to contribute to the Linux kernel, or some free software projects which I like, that would be enough for me. After doing mindless BS wage slave stuff all day, it's nice to go home and do my own work where I can actually do what I want, even if I make no money at it. If I could make a living doing that stuff, so much the better, but I would go crazy if all I did was cog-in-the-machine mindless nonsense all day.
I'd recommend forgetting about a CS degree, computers are on their way out.
For a degree thats always in incredibly high demand.
English.
That's really true of most degrees, nevertheless, the structure of a formal academic environment helps many people to maintain the discipline to do it, often provides access to skilled instructors that make gaining understanding easier, generally increases the diversity of equipment and resources you have access to in the learning process, may, as a degree is something people often take note of, increase the material reward you get from it, and may make you eligible for additional financial assistance (which may or may not make up for the additional cost) and other benefits.
Whether those benefits are worthwhile for any particular person interested in getting an understanding of the field will, of course, vary from person to person.
As a professional software programmer for over 20 years, I'd advise anyone who wishes to still be programming professionally in their 50's to spend a summer selling used cars. Being able to sell yourself will be much more important in the later years of your career than your technical knowledge will be.
I'm tired of {system-,network-,db-} administration, programming, and every other trade skill getting equated with Computer Science. CS is a branch of theoretical mathematics and has very little to do with anything you can sit in front of, type into, click on, or reboot. And I don't mean this as a (serious) troll. I just hate to see the term misused, much like engineers cringe when they hear the building maintenance staff referred to as 'engineers', as in "we'll have an engineer bring some buckets up to put under that leak in the roof."
/End of Friendly Math Snob Rant
I have found there are just two ways to go.
It all comes down to livin' fast or dyin' slow. -REK, Jr.
Yeah, and you can become a particle physicist in your spare time too.
G.
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
- You got a poor quality degree (either from an institution with no reputation, or a low 2.2 or lower classification).
- You haven't done anything interesting with your time at university (join / run any student societies, etc).
- You haven't taken the opportunity to get any work experience (most universities run summer placement programmes, if you can be bothered to sign up).
You get out of university what you put into it. If you're just there to get a piece of paper, you will just get a piece of paper and it won't be much use to you.I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Yeah, and you can become a particle physicist in your spare time too.
Dang - and I picked quantum physics instead - oh well wrong/right again.
Was it right or wrong to pick quantum physics before I read the sentence?
The concept of an "IT" job is way too vague to be useful. IT has long since split into various disciplines (eg. hardware guy, code monkey, dba), and now those are subdividing even more. While there isn't that much difference between being an oracle dba vs. a mysql dba vs. a mssql dba, there is a big difference between being a java/c#/c++ coder vs. being a site builder, and a huge difference between being a site builder vs. a dba. The differences in these fields are reflected in what CS (or related) degree (or job skills) one might want to pursue. The real question(s) ought to be "Is Still Worth It?"
Yeah, and you can become a particle physicist in your spare time too.
Well actually you can, it's just rather unlikely that anyone would hire you, without the backing of some sort of accredited school saying that you know it. In terms of knowledge, you could know the exact same things, you'd just lack a piece of paper vouching for you.
There's nothing magic about going to school; colleges these days aren't repositories of secret information, released only once you've sworn an oath of allegiance to the guild lords; you can find out most of what's being taught in any college class by buying the book. (In graduate classes or more participatory classes, it could be harder; but I'm thinking about bachelors-degree physics and mathematics.) In large universities, many classes aren't even taught by professors anyway; just by TA's (slightly more advanced students) reading from someone else's notes or from the book.
The reason the un-degreed student isn't worth anything, is because most people don't have the attention span or discipline to actually learn that way. Therefore, if you said that you'd spent a few years months sitting in your room, studying particle physics, and done all the experiments with equipment you built yourself in your basement, and now knew as much as someone who'd learned it while studying for a degree, I'd probably not believe you. It's not that it's not possible, it's just not likely.
Degrees exist because they're a way of verifying that somebody probably knows something, without actually testing them. The more esoteric the subject, the more important the diploma becomes, because it's harder and harder to verify that someone actually knows their stuff.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Is this supposed to suggest that we're somehow "done" with computer science? Application is great and all, but it has basis in constantly evolving theory, just like in any basic science.
Don't be fooled. Application is important, but try doing your physics homework without understanding the underlying theory and see how far you get. If you want to be respected in the industry, and if you want to find a lifetime in computer technology fulfilling, get a degree in computer science.
If your career aspiration is "high paid code monkey," then ignore this post.
Attention deficit disorder is a complicated issue, spanning several major... HEY LET'S GO RIDE BIKES!
I teach introductory CS at the University of Washington. In our course we scan through the IMDB top 250 movies, examine historical popularity of babies' names, search for codons and amino acids in DNA sequences, parse maps and topological data, compute weather stats, analyze Myers-Briggs personality testing data, and solve other exciting problems.
Best of all, there are still a ton of great jobs waiting for graduates with computer science degrees at exciting companies. UW's students routinely end up at Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Intel, IBM, Nintendo, and other great places. CS jobs pay great salaries compared to most other fields! Most of the grads I keep in touch with are living very well at a young age.
Go check out UW's computer science videos on YouTube, which talk about what this field is, and follow several women in our department as they go through a day in their lives at work after graduating:
http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=UWCSE
How can you say that with such assurance? It seems to me that one can be good at both of these skills if they work on developing them both. Why do you think someone could have one of these skills max?
Time. Somebody who is good at interpersonal skills has to spend a *HUGE* amount of time developing and maintaining those skills- time spent at parties and at bars and in social situations. Without that time spent, any human being's interpersonal skills will degrade- to the point that we consider a prisoner kept in solitary for a mere three weeks to be insane.
Likewise on the DBA side- time. It takes a HUGE amount of time to gain and maintain computer skills- starting as a teenager working on the computer in your parent's basement instead of going on dates, clear up to the guy who reads every word of the SQL user groups to keep up on the latest changes to the language in the five major dialects.
A SENIOR DBA is going to need to be the later, not the former. There are only 168 hours in the week.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
I have a CS degree. I've got a high paying job. I found out I'm actually being paid way below average for my profession and location. I'm looking for another better job. There are plenty of them available, and they pay a lot. The key to being successful at CS is twofold. One, don't suck. Lots of people get CS degrees, but they actually don't give a crap about software. The people in college who code in their spare time for fun are the ones who succeed. The rest end up handling tech support calls. The second trick is to not insist on living somewhere crappy. You pretty much have to go to a major metropolitan area to get a job. You can't sit in hicksville and complain there aren't any programming jobs.
One other trick to being successful as a software engineer is to learn technologies in high demand. If you learn Ruby on Rails your chances of finding a hot job are pretty low. You might find work at a startup here and there, but that's about it. If you learn the J2EE platform, relational databases and all the associated stuff you are almost guaranteed to find a high paying job. Go look around on job sites, pretty much everyone is looking for Java Enterprise developers, but the supply is way low.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
So if by crappy you mean design, I don't think a degree in computer science will help. If you mean crappy as in functionality, a degree in computer science might help.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. ~Albert Einstein
No, it's never been worth it. If you are trying to decide what to do, and think that maybe you'll try programming--just save us all a lot of time and effort and do something else.
How come you never see people saying "Should I go into Painting", or "Maybe I'll try Music as a career". When it comes to careers that are art, including programming, If you don't KNOW that's what you are going to do, then you're just not going to do it well enough to make anyone happy.
When you wonder why virtually all software is buggy, full of delays, poorly designed and shoddily implemented--it's generally because someone is doing a job rather than creating art.
So then this is one of those cases where "if you have to ask, the answer is NO".
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.
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
Grammars can be used in programmatic and automatic test script generation. You probably aren't using automated testing if you aren't using grammars.
Grammars are also used in compilers and parsers... so you probably haven't worked with compilers or parsers if you aren't using grammars.
Complexity notation is important when you are optimizing algorithms... when correlated with timing information it tells you where the code hotspots are.
Predicate calculus is a little more abstract but is useful to learn because it forces you to think in terms of preconditions, postconditions, guards, and invariants, all used when you write loops, iterators, and conditional logic.
Proofs are even more abstract, but are useful when you are tracing a bug because it gives you the ability to make assertions (This should be true or false) and then test them (Why isn't this true/false?). Without the ability to do proofs you wouldn't be able to debug or test code because all you can ever say is "I think this code should do this, but I don't know why"
GPL Deconstructed
You peeked!
My point is, whether you know Computer Science or not, if you don't have proof (read college education) that this stuff was at least presented to you properly, odds are that you'll have a tough time finding someone willing to pay you... Big companies have so much overhead when it comes to hiring people, that they'll usually just throw out any resume that doesn't say "degree"
Often true, but not always. If you know your stuff and you prove it in other ways, the offers can come flooding in. Smart companies often employ people based on their open source contributions, for example, and pay as well as, if not better, than generic companies sifting through resumes. From the small set of people I know, the smartest are always hired because they're known in their community and the quality of their work is obvious, not because they sent off a resume. Basically, smart people don't need resumes, they have their reputation.
I did CS and loved it. I loved the MATH (that's what it majorly is), I loved the programming, I loved having long hair and never shaving... I loved the whole degree. It was a fantastic degree and heightened my experience at university doing the stuff I love...
HOWEVER, who seriously does a degree with the mindset, "This is what I'll do for the rest of my life"? Few I think, especially those looking for a career. I graduated two years ago and my life has taken me out to Amsterdam to work for a large IT company, back to my home (the UK) and I write this now in San José. I'm 23 and I spend most of my time travelling the world. What am I doing? Technical sales...
It's not math, it's not programming... it's not even software engineering. It's not anything I did at university. The Indian and Chinese guys have that covered here. They're also better at it than I'd be. What I've got was learned in the bars, at the sports clubs and on the phone begging for more money to continue my degree (and buy more beer). That's something you can't teach someone in India to do... How to work with people in the states. This means no disrespect, but someone born in India isn't likely to come to the US and wow with his people, presentation and linguistic skills. Someone born in the UK isn't going to move to the US and understand the local people.
It's a people-focussed world. Your degree is a ticket. Make it relevent to your overall goals, but focus on the other special experiences university has to offer.
Now there's one hoopy frood who really knows where his towel is!