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Wall Street's Collapse Is Computer Science's Gain
dcblogs writes "Thanks to Wall Street's implosion, the chairman of Stanford University's Computer Science Department says he is seeing more interest from students in computer science. Ditto at Boston College. Computer science enrollments crashed after the dot-com bust as students turned to hedge fund majors. And are computer science grads getting jobs? The professor at one university program that graduates about 45 students a year with CS degrees, wrote in a comment: 'Last year 87% of our seniors were employed before graduation. The median starting salary was $58,500. A majority of CIS students had multiple job offers. From where I sit, there is a huge demand for entry level IT professionals in IS and in CS.'"
It always depresses me to see how many college students have no idea who they are, and just float about on the breeze of the moment, going for the buck instead of what they already see a passion for doing. They weren't reflecting upon their lives as a teenager, they weren't deciding what makes their hearts go faster, they were just assuming that someday their Fairy Career Mother would pop out of a cloud to tell them what they should do for the next forty years.
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... and hookers!
We just had a career fair for Electrical Engineering and Computer Science students, and the organizers mentioned to me that it was the busiest they've ever seen. Not that there are any more students in the department.
My theory is that all the students originally planning to go into finance/consulting realized they might actually have to get jobs in the real economy, doing more than Excel and Powerpoint (investment banking). This was during the week of the Lehman/AIG collapse.
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Learn electronics! Powerful microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
Mod parent insightful:
:)
If the US legalized prostitution and drugs but heavily regulated and taxed them, then our country would have so damn much money that a war here or a housing bust there wouldn't matter!
maybe on slashdot proprietary software is dying but in the real world? far from true.
Well,
Everything isn't that bad. Really. I think the assumption of either a senior admin position or a entry level stuff is too simplistic of a analysis of our industry.
There are lots of in betweens. Right now being 42, and about the middle of my career I am going back to school to finish all my degree work. I accomplished everything I wanted to do and now have on my resume the entire ball of wax, from admin to CIO.
I just do not have the degree work which I want.
On the weekends I put in VoIP systems for lawyers and doctors offices using sipxpbx. (That includes all of the nuances of reprogramming the network routers or installing routers that can do QoS). I can do a lot more, including coding middleware (apache axis), and also write backends for a lot of websites (servlets).
But the point is, I am sure an industrious college grad could figure out to do these things and the point there is to be flexible.
I started my career and built upon becomming an expert in:
1) Software Engineering (C++ and Java)
2) Relational Databases
3) Networking
Set your sights on these areas, and try to study them and become competent so that you are flexible to address most opportunities that come your way.
If you cannot find a job, hit the pavement and cold call companies. I do it all the time, and it works!
So if a old 42 year old geezer can do it, so can you.
Finally, I think most people who enter the computer field think that it is like any other job, where you can just graduate and then start a job and just treat it like any other invocation.
You have to continually learn, which means interrupting your career like I am doing to go back to school.
If that prospect is daunting, you might not like CS as a career (I.T.). If you do not continually improve yourself you become fairly useless fairly quickly.
So instead of playing games all evening or watching TV when you get home, start cracking the books guy. :-)
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
How the heck is CS as a science supposed to gain anything from the flock of people who select their subject of study based on which gives the best money/effort ratio at the moment?
These are just the kind of people who spend the minimum possible amount of work to get a grade. I wouldn't think they would be interested in CS. Instead, I would imagine that they would be interested in software engineering (management) so they can land a low level manager job straight out of school.
From where I sit, there is a huge demand for entry level IT professionals in IS and in CS in India.
"Last year 87% of our seniors were employed before graduation"
Since this data was collected before the Global Financial Apocalypse, how is it any indication of the industry's resilience to a Wall Street Collapse? Let's wait and see what happens to next year's students...
2007: "IT? That's sooo 2000! They all lost their jobs in the dot-com bust! Finance is where it's at!"
2008: "Finance? That's sooo 2007! They all lost their jobs in the Wall Street bust! IT is where it's at!"
Do you really want those people?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Since at least the dot-com era and maybe before, there's been a demand for entry-level software developers. It's the subject of Steve McConnell's essay Orphans Preferred. Companies like pulling cheap labor from colleges and grinding the people down until they either burn out or get wise and fight back at the bullshit, at which point the company replaces the burnouts and malcontents with the next wave of suckers.
A gain in college CS programs is not a net gain for the field of CS.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but most of the actual beneficial gains in CS have not been made due to substantially increased student CS populations, or even as a corollary. Yes, it's had it's part in small breakthroughs, but in my eyes a lot of those small breakthroughs haven't brought on strictly by academia, and a lot of the big breakthroughs have been pushed by corporations - again, not academia. Seems academia has been largely "me too, let's do what's hot in business" when it comes to CS for the past decade+.
And it certainly can not help the CS graduates themselves. More CS graduates means lower wages. There's already a hardly any "computer science" related jobs out there, even in academia. Sure, there's business programming out in the corporate world, but those wages would also decrease
There are already too many people who want to work in IT/CS and have the degree, but are unable to do so due to the glut of IT workers. This is just going ot make it worse for recent grads.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Isn't it a bit premature to be talking about the fallout of the Wall Street debacle, as it relates to college enrollment?
I mean, what does he have to base it off? A two week to 30 day trend?
Attributing last semesters enrollment to something that hadn't even happened yet (at least, it hadn't been properly attributed to Wall Street) is kind of .... Umm..... I dunno HOW to put it.
--Toll_Free
The economy, I do not think you realize just how big it is. Realize that we could end up triggering a global depression in the next couple months if the politicians in power right now fuck it up.
Bushism: "This sucker could go down."
This time he's right. We've had bank runs in H.K., U.K., Tokyo, the U.S.A., and a complete market shutdown in Russia. We managed to fuck up the world, and we managed it not through wars for oil or failure to legalize and tax certain things, but with the best intentions in the world, to make sure everyone could have a goddam house.
On the bright side, now that a deal has been made in Washington, we just might be able to hold of global total systemic economic failure.
But do us and everyone you know a favor: If you live in the USA, vote every current politician in your area out of office.
Republican, Democrat, or random, they all fucked up on this watch. Get some untainted blood into power, that at least for a short time, people might focus on doing the right thing rather than re-election.
---- Liquid was a patriot ----
We do not need more tards in Computer Science. Even after the down-turn after the dot.com bust, we got these people who can't for their fucking life understand what a pointer is, writing the crappiest code everywhere they go.
We need quality, not quantity. The more we get tards who just go and graduate into something because it's "the next thing in getting $$$", the lesser the quality of work being performed.
Ugh.
I was sitting in Mass last Sunday listening to this priest drone on about helping the poor. The social Gospel - I get it. Here was this guy that went from the comfort of his middle class home, into the comfort of the seminary and then onto the comfort of parish life. His needs have always been met. He has never experienced scratching out a living, hustling or cutting corners to get by. Like many educated middle class white people he assumes that all others that look like him shared the same gilded upbringing. The fact is that most people haven't experienced this Leave it to Beaver sort of existence. Most of us took some knocks just to put together a decent existence. And for this it seems all we get asked is to give more and more.
I want to know one thing. At what point is it no longer my fucking problem? Is there some point where I'm off the hook? If I write a check for $5,000 am I done? I look at my check every two weeks and gasp at the deductions. And let's not forget about the yearly tribute to the IRS. It never seems to end. Someone always seems to have their hand out with some hard luck story. At what point is it no longer my fucking problem?
I was back in my hometown of Cleveland, Ohio last week for my 25th class reunion. It was a great event and it was fun to talk old times. Being in Cleveland was apropos with all this $700 billion bailout talk as a result financial institutions giving out bad loans to the underclass. Cleveland is a textbook example of what happens when you give home loans to a class of people that are fiscally irresponsible and not deserving of a home loan. Furthermore Cleveland is also a text book example of rampant dependency of social welfare programs. If you want to know how we made out on LBJ's War on Poverty go to Cleveland. Poverty won..
It's not for lack of trying that poverty won out. The intentions were good but the notion that you can give a layabout a check for nothing and expect him to run out and get a job in short order is simply delusional. We have been proving this on a daily basis since about 1965. These are more misguided middle class assumptions like I hear every Sunday from Fr. Social Justice. If we just help out poor DeShawn to get back on his feet again he will surely find himself a job and start providing for those 16 bastards he has fathered in his 20 years of pathetic existence. Excuse me while I sarcastically snort.
I was standing on the street that I grew up on and I counted about 40 houses with for sale signs, most of which were abandoned and boarded up. In the 20 years that I grew up on that street I don't ever remember more than 2 housed being for sale at once and none where ever abandoned. Shit, if a cigarette butt was dropped some old DP would be out there cleaning up. The street was a mix of people of Irish and various Eastern European extractions. Everyone was blue collar. No one was rich and most came from a dirt poor existence.
The neighbors to the right of us emigrated from Lithuania shortly after WWII. In Lithuania they were considered intellectuals. Stalin's thugs killed everyone they knew. They escaped to Brazil and then eventually came to America where they became factory workers. They never picked the language very well and stuck with their own kind but they were good neighbors. She's still alive and alone on that street. Now she's surrounded by a different kind of thug that has zero appreciation for what she endured. Her house has been broken into several times. She's afraid but does not want to move into a nursing home and she cannot sell her house in this market. She's 94 years old.
The sad part of it is that this was a good neighborhood up until about the mid 90's. It was around this time that lending institutions were being coerced or willing participating in high risk loans targeted at poor minorities and when we say minorities here it does not included Asians. Really in Cleveland when we say minorities we are talking about blacks of Southern extraction that initially came here for the industrial work but sta
What are you talking about? most of my friends who studies CS had jobs lined up before they even finished school. All sorts of jobs: traditional software businesses, google, web businesses, web stores, sysadmin jobs, etc. Just enroll at a quality institution and do your best job. You'll find employment.
we must preserve computer science as a bastion of holier-than-thou ego junkies who fill the void in their lives with a constant need to primp their supposed technical superiority
dude: the only thing worse than an incompetent programmer is a competent programmer who thinks sunlight shines out of his ass. your attitude sucks
i'd much rather deal with a humble computer idiot on my team than a preening egomaniac like yourself, no matter how good you can program
adjust your ego, please. it makes you suck worse than the "tards" you look down on, jackass
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Computer science enrollments crashed after the dot-com bust as students turned to hedge fund majors.
And we see how well THAT turned out. Hopefully they will stay unemployed now.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
but with the best intentions in the world, to make sure everyone could have a goddam house.
Oh rubbish, the only intention is to make money (literally). The debt spiral has to increase exponentially (Running at 10%+ per year) to survive. That means selling debt to exponentially more people each year. Eventually, you have to find a way to persuade everyone to take on debt. How?
Tulips?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania
A good time had by all; The Roaring Twenties?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roaring_Twenties
This time it was housing in America. In fact, it's irrelevant. The real cause is the fundamental nature of bank credit. When you take out a loan, new money is created, this new money "boosts" the economy, the stock markets. It's really mostly inflation. But along with the money, which doesn't change, you also get debt, which increases exponentially. So there is a boom which has to be followed by a bust, the longer the boom, the bigger the bust and to continue the boom, more and more people have to take out new loans... Remind you of anything?
Eventually you run out of people... And it crashes anyway... You even read about it in the newspapers, they're giving loans to people who have no income... WTF? ... If you've read any Austrian economics, you can see the crash coming a mile off.
Deleted
Nevermind that, if we could only regulate the whores in Congress, we wouldn't be in this mess to begin with!
I think you mean "loss."
The dotcom boom brought about massive numbers of totally disinterested programmers who were only there for the perception of the money it was supposed to bring them and were thus only as good as a minimally passing grade required them to be.
Worse, fairweather career chasers are always stuck behind the curve. It takes a couple of years for the media to pick up on a starting boom. Then it takes them four years to get the degree based qualification (admittedly less to get the MCSEs etc. that then got such a terrible reputation). That means they usually manage to turn up right around the end of any given boom... or often a little after... and bitch about how much they hate this career that was supposed to be an easy way out for them, all the while taking the few remaining jobs from the people who do want to be there.
Combine terrible "just enough to qualify" attitudes, diluting overall quality, and creating a massive imbalance of supply over demand when the field's hurting the worst, pushing salaries even lower... and I left wondering if there's a single way computer science actually gains, as opposed to loses, from these people?
Yes, Wall Street has had them for the last little over half a decade. And the sickening little idiots have leeched everything out of that market and crashed it around their own ears. They were also there, en masse, in the real estate industry. You remember the raging a-holes who figured they'd get BMWs and a huge paycheck out of raping anyone who wanted to buy a home during a housing boom.
Please, for the love of everything holy, nerdy, or whatever you subscribe to... don't encourage them back in to our field.
Go out to schools, colleges, career fairs...
Tell them all about the long hours of unpaid overtime. Tell them all about management that doesn't get technical reality. Tell them about the stresses. Tell them about how tough the lean years were after the dotcom boom and how that's a cycle that will keep coming back.
Then carefully only talk up the parts that'll appeal to those with a genuine love. Tell them about how they will get the latest IDEs and graphics suites paid for. Tell them how they'll get the satisfaction of seeing their own name in the back of a game manual. Tell them how their embedded code could end up, admittedly unheralded, saving lives in some critical application.
But, for the love of God, don't make the mistake of thinking fairweather career chasers are something we want back in the industry.
First, you tax the churches.
You take the tax off of capital gains and the tax off of savings.
Easy
You decriminalize all drugs and tax them same way as you do alcohol.
You decriminalize prostitution.
You make gambling legal.
Easy, but collecting taxes on the un-sanctioned/black/gray market activities will mean you're still fighting the same exact battles as we are today.
Not to mention that if you try and implement any of those ideas, the Prohibitionists and Moralists will revolt.
Just look at the debate over lowering the drinking age to 18 or legalizing marijuana for examples.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
collecting taxes on the un-sanctioned/black/gray market activities will mean you're still fighting the same exact battles as we are today.
Exactly - just look at alcohol.. why the number of gin-runners and speakeasies is through the roof since the lifting of prohibition..
err, wait.
1) You cannot force people to change. Fascist techniques like forced rehab are good at costing a lot of people a lot of money, but do not have good success rates at actually enacting change. The bald assumption that throwing someone into rehab will magically make them change their life is stark ignorance at best.
2) Forcing a huge taboo onto drug use most certainly has the effect of reducing the amount of people in any sort of rehab program. If you are worried about getting the book thrown at you and such, you are not likely to volunteer to get help even if you wanted to. It is of paramount importance to actively make people that actually do seek help feel comfortable in doing so - they are the ones that you have the best chance of changing.
3) Sudafed... you do realize that's mostly propaganda, right? Real drug chemists don't do nickel-and-dime stuff like boxes of sudafed. They go for much simpler bulk reagents, like any chemist.
4) You talk about "societal costs". But do you really think that people that want drugs have any difficulty in getting them now? Is the only think keeping you from going out and doing heroin the illegality of the chemical? Of course not. So the people that really want to are already getting all the drugs they want, just through unreliable and less safe means. So you are already paying any "societal costs". At worst, they would stat the same as they are now. At best, the reduction in taboo may allow some people to get help if the want it, and the safer supply will eliminate many of the supply-side problems associated with "drug use". This can only improve.
5) And this is the big one: Making drugs illegal hinges on a fatally false assumption - that making something illegal actually reduces it's occurrence. This was obviously not true with alcohol, and is obviously not true for any other drug out there. Given that basic economic forces will happen any time there is a demand for something, we, as society, have a very important choice to make: "Who do we want to produce the supply that will inevitably meet the ever-present demand". Here, we have three choices: Private Industry, Public (government) Production, or Organized Crime.
Personally, as a small-government loving citizen, I like the Private Industry option, but really... I'd gladly take either Public or Private production over handing all the profits over to organized crime like we are doing now! Are you seriously telling me that you want to hand the entire multi-billion-dollar industry of illegal drugs to the mafias of the world? So they can have the profit instead of legitimate organizations? Remember, you don't get to skip out on this question. By saying you want to keep drugs illegal, you are saying you want to hand profit to the mob.
Note: none of this says that we have to make drugs something you pick up at the corner 7-11. You can have legal business and still regulate the industries, much like we do now with tobacco and alcohol. There are many options we can explore there.
Ce n'est pas une signature automatique.
It seems to me that the last time there was a major enrollment of those with little interest in IT other than financial gain, the job and wage market went down the toilet. Employers find themselves with a great number of IT workers to choose from, but unfortunately most of them have little experience beyond books, and little interest to learn more.
Most of the best IT geeks I know are good not only because of good schooling (and sometimes without), but also because of a driving interest which causes them the learn new concepts which often translates to better workplace skills (sometimes offset by those that recommend or waste time on weird solutions that don't pan out).
They won't have much competition as people graduating now are not entering the industry, and won't have any industry experience over the next few years. They should do quite well.
I studied electronics engineering and never worked in that field. My first job was in a small IT company where almost everyone was EE, including the 3 owners. The company made a shitload of money at that time, and they are still doing great.
Let me tell you a little tale.
Just before I was made redundant, I had a conversation with one of my would to be Indian replacements (hello Mumbai!) and he literally told me he was afraid of doing his work because realized the consequences of doing something wrong.
No wonder. He was very enthusiastic, bright and proactive, but nothing can prepare you for dealing with systems that handle processes and services in a global scale from which millions of dollars *per hour* may depend on.
Oh no, wait, there is a thing that can prepare you for it: experience.
Last thing I knew about my former department the service have degraded and the company was close to suffer a real meltdown (as a matter of fact we had two during the month I was still there after my redundancy was announced, our would to be replacements had caused it, our old timers, all with redundancy notices served, fixed the problems).
You *must* take experience into consideration depending on the position, not to do so is an outrageous dereliction of duty that no enthusiastic person will be able to patch when disaster strikes.