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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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.