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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.'"
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.
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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.
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.
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