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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.'"
This can be logically stated as Post Hoc.
A occurs before B.
Therefor A is the cause of B.
Just because the markets are hurting right now doesn't make students more likely to apply for a career in CS or IT. Heck you can do far more broader things with a business degree or an MBA than you can with a degree in CS.
Employment rates at graduation are often incredibly skewed. Frequently only those with jobs will report the fact; a lot of people who still haven't found one won't. I picked the law school I went to partially based on its "percentage employed 6 months after graduation" number, plus it's median salary number. It wasn't until I graduated that I realized how fake the number was.
If I had to do it all over again I'd probably major in pharmacy. Good money, good job security, good hours.
Maybe they would take Non-proprietary software jobs?
Do you think all those big name opensource projects are written by volunteers?
Do you think redhat and novell do nothing?
Does the name SUN ring a bell?
Even if proprietary software companies were failing left and right they could work for whoever is replacing the failing vendors.
I thought golf studies was a ridiculous degree, but hedge fund studies? Financial mathematics, sure; economics, likewise; and a degree which combines the two is perfectly reasonable, if liable to drive the mathematically inclined nuts and the mathematically disinclined to drink. But "hedge funds" sounds awfully specific for a major.
From the article:
Yeah, and businesses also want people with 10+ years J2EE experience. What they want isn't necessarily what they can get. And if you have ALL of the above, technical skills, marketing skills, negotiation skills, and management and industry training, the only positions you should be considering are CEO and CTO. With those negotiation skills, you should get them.
What's wrong with H1B visas? A bunch of folks at my work are here on that (or equivalents). They aren't competing with Americans because we still have lots of open heads we can't fill across the company.
Finance is one of the biggest consumers of IT and development resources. My first job out of college was at a hedge fund as a IT developer. Many people don't realize that finance is heavily computer and information driven these days. The days of people working on gut feeling is dying out. At the hedge fund, there was only two traders who actually traded in financial instruments. The rest of the non-support people were analysts who came up with strategies based on models and information provided to them by quants and programmed into their infrastructure by CS people. Their infrastructure was maintained by IT people.
My point is that finance going downhill is bad for IT and CS because that's one of the most information driven sectors outside of software and hire a lot of CS people out of college.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
I don't mean to sound like a hippie, but I'd blame it as a side effect of consumerism. What I mean by that is that as an effect of consumerism, people's goal in life is to become rich, rather than have a great career or reach any other sort of goal. Personal achievements are replaced by monetary and material gain, and what you have supersedes what you do or who you are. You are only as successful a person as how much money you make. People would do the dumbest job in the world if it paid well.
I think it has to do with the fact that people genuinely believe that their goal in life is to become rich, have fun, good sex, then a wife, kids, all of which are supposed to make you a happy and accomplished man, or so they think. The Los Angeles mentality prevails, satisfy your basest instincts, make money, use it as a leverage to satisfy your basest instincts more, produce offsprings, die.
In this context, genuinely caring about anything else makes you a "nerd" or "geek", which, seen under that angle, is actually a great thing to be. It's just a shame that our culture raises people to produce as much wealth as possible and nothing else. Actually I'm pretty sure you can interpret the movie Matrix as a critique of consumerism, in which people, being in the movie used as batteries, are in our real life money-making "batteries".
You just got troll'd!
But that's not their fault. How many vocations can your average teenager try before being asked to choose a degree? Probably zero, unless you count sportsman as a profession. The education system just isn't set up to let people try different things and find out what makes them tick. If you aren't turned on by pure math or poetry or French or geography, then you leave none the wiser never knowing that perhaps architecture is your thing, or software development, or hell perhaps you'd enjoy public transit planning. I think letting high school students try a variety of different jobs would be a good step forward, but don't anticipate it happening anytime soon.
Anyway. Don't get too uppity. Getting a job doing your passion is great, don't get me wrong, I get paid to play with high performance clusters all day and it's fun. But there's a downside to that. It's been two years last week since I started full time work in the software business, and it's been two years last week since I lost my main hobby. When I've been fixing or programming computers all day I just don't feel like doing more of it when I get home, or at the weekends.
I got lucky in finding I enjoyed computers at an early age, but now finding a replacement passion for my spare time turned out to be not so easy. It's not a bad life - I go out a lot in the evenings, and the times I'm not partying or hanging out with friends I waste playing video games or reading Slashdot :) But it's missing something that I'd still have, if I worked in an area that wasn't my passion.
I make a living as a programmer... and do acting, singing, and cooking as well but not professionaly.
I don't want to live as an actor, struggling to pay the rent by doing bit pieces and commercials, nor the equivalent work as a musician, nor busting my ass in 14 hour days in a commercial kitchen... yet I somewhat enjoy a good programmer's grunt work. But certainly, I'd love to be able to have my same lifestyle by acting, singing or cooking and just program as a hobby.
I'm thankful that my ability to program allows me to partake in other activities without the pressure of making money out of them.
As a Slashdot discussion grows longer, the probability of an analogy involving cars approaches one.
I'll give you a simple formula for straightening out the problems of the United States. First, you tax the churches. You take the tax off of capital gains and the tax off of savings. You decriminalize all drugs and tax them same way as you do alcohol. You decriminalize prostitution. You make gambling legal. That will put the budget back on the road to recovery, and you'll have plenty of tax revenue coming in for all of your social programs, and to run the army.
Sadly, you are right. I'm on sqaforums.com, and 99% of the threads posted there are n00bs from India asking people to do their job for them. It seems a high percentage of people there don't want to learn on their own and figure out things. A lot of them just grasp on to buzzwords and ask vague questions about various qa test tools. Guess I should find a different forum. :)
Speaking as a CS professor, the dynamics are subtler than that. Yes, a large number of those new students are not the students we enjoy teaching and they won't add much to the field as a whole. However, as others have pointed out, many students when choosing a major don't really know what they want to do. Low level classes are like sales pitches, we are trying to get students interested in the field - the more bums on seats, the more likely it is that "undecideds" will find a real passion for the field. You don't think that the only people who are passionate about a field have been passionate about it since birth, do you?
In addition to that, more CS students means more funding which translates to more professors and better resources, which will certainly have an impact on CS as a science.
Not really. The numbers I've seen from legalizing drugs would only boost US Revenue by about 20-30 billion per year.
That's 1/10th our peacetime defense budget. Not really a ton of money.
At the moment drugs are smuggled in. Every dollar of that smuggled drugs money goes to the drug exporting nations. Much money is spent policing and prosecuting drug smugglers. Legalising drugs would decrease the amount of drugs imported due to, now legal, drugs farms opening up to serve the need, and also a percentage of all drugs money currently leaving the US would be reclaimed in tax.
How much would be saved on police work? Without a prohibition like policy there would be less criminal activity surrounding drugs.
I don't preview or spellcheck.
If you have no family obligations, join a contracting company and whore yourself out for them for a few years with no benefits. Then take that experience to one of your customers and work for higher pay (a cost savings for the customer) with benefits... Ta-Da!! you have a career.
Well, this is assuming that drug farms would pop up throughout the states. I have never harvested Coca myself, but I am assuming that it would be quite difficult raising a crop in the U.S. that is best suited for conditions in Central or South America. And opium poppies, even if farmed in the U.S., could never approach the quantity of poppies grown in the Opium Belt in Asia.
If drug farms did spring up in the states, the only major drugs grown would be Marijuana and LSD. These two drugs are already largely produced in the U.S., so there would be no substantial change in where the drugs are coming from.
Currently, money and property that is discovered by the Federal Government is seized. A great deal of money from drugs is already being sent to the government.
Doh. messed up decimal point. It's only $90,718,474 per ton.
There's not much money in going black market for legal things, most people prefer the safety of dealing with a merchant that will still be in the same place tomorrow. Sure, some might buy black market to avoid the taxes but most of the ones who jump aboard with the legalization will remain legal. Besides, tax evasion is perceived as grave, with illegal goods you don't really have a choice since paying the taxes gets you caught but with legal goods the evasion is too much risk to be worth it.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
First, $20B > zero, which is what the government gets now from the drug trade.
Second, as other posters pointed out, it would also reduce police spending by several biilion dollars and allow them to focus on crimes that might actually affect you!
It was indeed. After all the years I spent playing music I can testify that there are just two kinds of people in the music business: the creative musical talent, and those trying to get rich off the creative musical talent, usually "by whatever means necessary". People who've only ever had "real jobs" simply cannot fathom the level of sheer asshattery a musician trying to get paid to perform has to deal with. That's why for years now, I've been releasing the music I do under CC while making my money in IT. Obviously I'm not willing to do 60-80 hour weeks, so I don't get the big bucks. But I get what I need to be secure and to keep making music without having to be on the same side as the RIAA. No-one tells me what the next album should sound like, or what the CD cover should look like. No-one tells me how to do what I am most passionate about. All I have to do is squeeze it into "off time" and I get full creative control. :) That's just life...
The way I see it, I am compelled to do the music no matter what else is going on anyway. If I were alone, marooned on a desert island, I'd still do it after struggling to survive in nature, with no audience. So I could complain about how our society treats artists and musicians like crap, or recognize the fact that artistic ability isn't really a survival skill in nature either.
Caveat Utilitor
If it takes "a bastion of holier-than-thou ego junkies" to write decent program code in the 21st century then so be it. What elnyka was talking about is about average Joes switching to CS degrees and making it through college with an eye out for the professor and the other eye on digg (or slashdot). They then go on to copy-paste a chunk of code from online, pass it off as their own work, then pose as a computer programming professional when they don't know how to code a proper quicksort after two Artificial Intelligence courses. The companies these fakes work in proceed to shakingly grow, then fall because of the collective stupidity, bringing down the others in the resulting panic too. As a last example, take the field of medicine. Are doctors "holier-than-thou ego junkies"? No. However, the field of medicine will never fall because of the high degree of filtering it takes to become a doctor in the first place. Only the true doctors make it. None of the jerks that thought "oh, doctors get paid well, so I want to be one too!". Want bugs in your bodily systems? No. Have good true doctors. Want bugs in your computer systems? Up to you...
That's basically eliminating most taxes for the wealthy (capital gains) while putting the tax burden on a soma tax, with the the implicit assumption that productive people will divert more of their income to pacification. It basically converts the government into a casino that knows that most of its money is generated from irresponsible, usually poor people turning the arm of a slot machine. You might say, "Well that's what the social programs are for!" However the dead weight loss of taxation coupled with the other budgetary expenditures would ensure that the services were less efficient than if the poor weren't doing meth and picking up hookers in the first place.
You're seeing the consequences of the modern philosophy that "every child should go to college", and the resulting dismantling of high school vocational education programs throughout the U.S.
The reasons I see for this bogus argument:
1. People with college degrees get paid more than people without them. No one disagrees with that.
2. Politicians can easily argue for policies that aim to give every child a college degree, because every parent would rather have their own kid be a doctor instead of a bricklayer (replace with any white-collar and blue-collar professions).
3. It allows that same doctor to place the blame for the bricklayer's condition on the bricklayer, because it allows the theory that if the bricklayer had done what they were supposed to, they would have gotten a college degree and become a doctor instead.
4. From point 3 above, that sort of thinking justifies paying bricklayers badly. This is something business management likes a lot, so it now becomes easy for politicians to justify the same policies to wealthy campaign donors.
Result: everyone wins, except those people who do blue-collar jobs.
I am officially gone from
I don't see how legalizing these two things would bring more money into the country. Aside from marijuana and LSD, most drugs are smuggled into the country, and money leaves the country.
You are wrong here. The price of raw stuff is about a tenth of the street price, when it crosses the border of the U.S. 90% of the street prices goes to the dealer network inside the U.S..
If you legalize those drugs, the price at the border would still be about 10% of the current street price, but you don't need such a vast and secretive distribution network anymore for the legal distribution. Driving around with one big van through the suburb takes 1 person and 1 van, and not a hierarchical group of three feuding gangs with 20 members each to serve the same suburb. So the gouvernment could easily take 50% tax and still be cheaper than the illegal version.
That's basically eliminating most taxes for the wealthy
The wealthy buy their tax exemptions from the congress, so forget the class warfare rhetoric. The effect of eliminating taxes on capital gains or dividends would be to 1) encourage the middle class to invest, and 2) make it possible for anyone to start developing a stream of property income by buying shares in companies that pay dividends.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
when I interview people for a technical position, I'm measuring aptitude, attitude and experience, and perhaps the least important is the latter, provided that the candidate is capable and enthusiastic; I also work hard to weed out the bullshitters! I definitely do not discuss salary etc until the candidate is on the short list, perhaps not until they are made a job offer, although it is made clear that salaries are towards the upper range of the industry standard for the right person, but I am not interested in someone who sees it as merely a job, rather than an interesting career.
for example...
firstly, a simple practical exam to weed out bullshitters, for example, a linux box which has been sabotaged to not boot properly. I apologise to the candidate if they think it is demeaning - I explain that it's as much about seeing if I can work alongside the person to solve a problem as much as to test their skills. in some cases this sort of test reveals quite a lot about whether the person actually knows jack shit. some people might say it's unfair, but if you're working with complex computer systems, and the shit hits the fan and the bosses are looming, you're going to be fixing things under pressure, so if you can do it in an interview situation it's a good sign! If the candidate enjoys the challenge, that's a very good sign.
secondly, I test depth of knowledge... asking questions beyond their field of expertise. I might ask the difference between bluetooth and wifi, or discuss network switching latency. If the candidate bullshits, it's a bad mark. If they don't know, but show interest in the subject and can grasp the key concepts quickly and discuss intelligently, it's a major bonus.
thirdly, I like to test character; discussing whether using an open wireless access point is moral or not can give an interesting insight into someone's morality.
I still don't think that we have to do anything. A market will eventually get made for the paper. Heck, if I had Warren Buffet money lying around I would probably start shopping. Some of this stuff has sold at 20c on the dollar. Even the worst subprime has only had 25% default. Anyways, at this point something will get pushed through because if they continue to stall and the system pulls through on it's own Paulson, Bernanke and crew will look even more like idiots.
Once the gov. buys up all the mortgages I'm fully expecting them to renegotiate terms, give super low fixed rates, etc... (say Hi! to Frannie and Freddie part 2) Basically screwing over everyone like myself who saw this coming and acted responsibly. I guess I should have bought more house than I could afford with some IO ARM a few years ago...
Yeah but the downside of people saying "Sure, I'll do this and not ask for a lot of money" is burnt out kids working at predatory employers. A lot of NPO workers get suckered this way. Ive seen it first hand, and it isnt pretty. Some NPOs have attitudes like "We'll get them young, work them like dogs, pay them nothing, and they'll get fed up at year two and go into the private sector. Thats two years of hard work from a smart kid, for nothing!" All the while management is living at fortune 100 standards. People get suckered this way because theyre afraid of being called dumb and consumerist by people like you.
I think there's an argument for demanding a good wage AND not blowing it all on toys.
I just sold my Wii which was sitting and collecting dust. It felt very liberating. I get this feeling every so often where I feel like I own too much unneeded stuff and I sell it. Demanding a good wage and a good lifestyle isnt "consumerist" its being smart. Spending it all on junk and maxing out credit cards is.
I think its easy to sit in your high-horse and call everyone "consumerist" but the economy works on the principle that consumers will buy things. It keeps people employed. I'd rather start seeing people make purchasing decisions for reasons other than lifestyle branding, keeping up with the jonses, or because a celebrity endorsed it. That's the first step to a better life and collectively we are very, very far from there. I doubt humanity will ever get tired of these gimmicks.
you want more capable computer programmers
ok, fine
but you don't paint a picture of what a "capable" computer programmer is like
what you paint a picture of is a frustrated fragile mess. if you were truly CAPABLE, you would be able to HANDLE the messes you encounter. your definition of capability excludes an extremely important skillset you obviously are woefully substandard on
when you are a programmer, you have to work on a team. the programming is difficult enough. you also have to successfully navigate the various bullshit you get from your fellow programmers without creating more problems with a poor attitude, or even worse, getting so full of anger you become a ticking time bomb of impotent rage
furthermore, encountering substandard bullshit is not your personal cross to bear. everyone, EVERYONE in their life encounters mediocrity, in every field. they are able to deal with the bullshit of mediocrity. why not you? is the proper response to scream and moan like a toddler who doesn't get their toy when you see a mess? that's you, asswipe, a toddler: a child unable to deal with their environment as an adult. THAT'S YOU. you fail. you are a substandard programmer on that measure
personal mental hygiene is valuable skillset for a programmer. you have none. you are just as substandard as the programmers whose technical failures you despise, and just as toxic to getting things done. your a terror to work with. a passive aggressive festering bunghole who everyone must avoid, not an asset, a fount of wisdom people feel glad to turn to for advice
the ones who stay at the top, as opposed to the ones who burn out, bitter, disappointed, and despised, are the ones who can keep it in perspective, and understand that this horrible you mess you see is not some sort of temporary situation, but a standard one, across all professions, in all time periods, and going forward, forever. mediocrity is a huge part of the human condition. learn to accept that, or know nothing about your life and your profession
get USED to it. deal with it. learn so it doesn't get to you SO FUCKING EASILY
you obviously are not someone who is going to stay at the top. you're a burn out waiting to happen. go, program like a hermit, don't leave your basement, refrain from social contact. that is your fate, because your mental hygiene is zero. you've allowed yourself to become a festering bunghole of rage
you are solely responsible for how rotten and miserable your life is, because your attitude sucks. you can derive pleasure from being someone people go to for help. rather than a fixer who cleans up messes in a blind rage. it's how you appraoch what is rewarding in your field. currently, you simply apply pleasure from being a fucking know-it-all, damn the others around you. ok, you're so fucking smart. so if you're so fucking smart, how come you're such a mess? not so smart after all. your attitude is not the responsibility of the rejects you have encountered and their rotten code. it is YOUR failure
fix yourself, asswipe. you are worse than 10 of the pathetic programmers you describe. i really, sincerely mean that. your attitude is more toxic to the health of a project than their poor programming skills
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it