Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
Computer science enrollments crashed after the dot-com bust
Busts can spoil a career in any field, really.
Here I was finally thinking I'd get a raise this year because of labor shortage!
Listen kids, there is no future in IT. Plumbers and lawyers is where it is at.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
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.
[
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.
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.
--
Learn electronics! Powerful microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
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.
maybe on slashdot proprietary software is dying but in the real world? far from true.
Look on the bright side, we'll get a bailout in a couple of years
Yee-Haw!
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
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.
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.
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.
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.
From where I sit, there is a huge demand for entry level IT professionals in IS and in CS in India.
I worked at a recruiting firm that specializes in IT for the last two years, and let me tell you, we could not find enough programmers, specifically in Java. The firms we were working with constantly were upping the pay to try and attract workers to our city but in general, the demand for labor was much, much higher than the supply.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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, $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 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.
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