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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.'"
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 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.
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.