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The Danger of Picking a Major Based On Where the Jobs Are
theodp writes: In his new book Will College Pay Off?, Wharton professor Peter Cappelli argues that banking on a specialized degree's usefulness is risky, especially since one reason some jobs are in high demand is that no one predicted that they would be. "A few generations ago," notes Cappelli, "the employers used to look for smart or adaptable kids on college campuses with general skills. They would convert them to what they wanted inside the company and they would retrain them and they'd get different skills. They're not doing that now. They're just expecting that the kids will show up with the skills that the employer needs when the employer needs them. That's a pretty difficult thing to expect, because of these kinds of problems. So the employers now are always complaining that they can't get the people they need, but it's pretty obvious why that's not happening." On CS-as-a-major, Cappelli says, "If you look at most of the people who are in computer programming, for example, they have no IT degree-they just learned how to program. Maybe they had a couple of courses in it, maybe they were self-taught. In Silicon Valley, the industry was built with only 10 percent of the workforce having IT degrees. You can do most of these jobs with a variety of different skills. I think what's happening now is that people have come to think that you need these degrees in order to do the jobs, which is not really true. Maybe what these degrees do for you is they shorten the job training by a bit, but that's about it. And you lose a bunch of other things along the way." One wonders what Cappelli might think of San Francisco's recent decision to pick a preschool curriculum based on where today's tech jobs are, echoing President Obama's tech industry-nurtured belief that "what you want to do is introduce this [coding] with the ABCs and the colors."
Most corporations are so badly run that well educated employees only make everyone else look bad.
Seems like the biggest reason not to pick your career based on the economy is this: you'll probably won't like the job. So, instead of doing something you enjoy, you get to spend 50 years doing a job you hate. Now, if you guessed right, maybe you'll hate your job, but at least make some money. But if you guessed wrong - you'll have huge student loans to pay, and a lifetime of misery, all because you' placed money above your happiness.
Most of the STEM students that I've met chose their major based on their interests and/or already possessed skills. It seems to me that there are viable career opportunities in all STEM fields. Why worry about your choice of education when you'll develop skills regardless?
Finding any job is a full time job regardless of your major. And you neither entitled nor guaranteed to get a job you'll like.
any degree any college. it's just an admission ticket, anyway. sorta like a High School degree back in the day.
I used to wonder why I was always being singled out at work and that's it. Simply being smarter is an issue even if you're not being condescending.
Also it's impossible to get your resume seen for decent jobs unless it's exactly what they want. Which doesn't happen unless you lie or have extremely low standards.
...the push was to get us high achool blank slates into engineering, at least in Washington state. The driver for this was Boeing, but it was also a national thing too. Most of the noise was about the wages. Of course, what i noticed then, by '91 or so, was that area was getting filled back in, and those jobs were getting harder to find out of college.
Microsoft, Aldus, Visio, Wizards of the Coast, etc, were starting to get on a roll, and my peers in CompSci were the ones on the front of the wave... as well as Silicon Valley too. Good times then.
So, the moral of the story is... if you follow things, the winners will be the ones already well into that pipeline. People just getting into it will most likely lose. The catch is those who already got going weren't prescient when they did.
You want a relatively good gig (in the US)? Go welding, diesel mechanic, electrician. Oh crap, all those gigs require actual work, though...hard work in crappy conditions, though. I'm posting this in the wrong forum.
As someone who has managed a dozen dev teams with nearly a hundred different programmers, yes a person with a CS degree is typically a superior nuts and bolts developer -- that is stronger in development related skills, but not necessarily overall.
Some of the best devs I've worked with or managed were english or biology majors. While typically less well versed (all else being equal) in the hard skills, thier 'soft' skills were much better and often compensated. For example, they weren't the best algorithm designers, but they were better able to communicate with each other and with clients. Combine those learned 'soft' skills with decent self taught 'hard' skills and you generally have a better overall dev.
And that's the crux of the matter. University is not a vocational training program. University is where a person goes to learn about a broad range of subjects. And, most importantly, where a person goes to learn how to think and learn.
If you want a code monkey (and only a code monkey), look for someone with a vocational/technical education background. If you want more than a cog in the machine, look for a university grad.
The corollary is that, yes, those general ed and elective requirements DO serve a purpose. Chosen well, they help expand your horizons and teach you a little something about the world. So, when whatever major you did pick becomes unmarketable (and many do), you aren't left with nothing but useless knowledge.
I can think of one thing in CS that I see gives people with little to no CS education a lot of trouble. Algorithmic analysis, to be specific big O notation. I've seen people not get algorithmic growth at all and end up implementing something that is O(n^2) when they could easily come up with something that's O(NLogN) or even O(N). Surprise surprise when they have to process even a middle amount of data they have problems. I have learned something else though. If someone tells you that their app runs in N^2, log(n), or nLog(n) time they probably know what they're talking about. If they say N! or even C^N they really know what they're talking about. If they tell you it's linear that could either mean it really is linear or that they don't know of any other running time.(Literally I saw code that was obviously N^2 but the developer said it was linear because he didn't know of any other type.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
And they won't get it because nobody wants to train newcomers and they don't want to pay for somebody that has the experience.
If people think millenials are spoiled, just look at the people running companies.
..is to look at your passion and talent. Of course, you can't ignore the job market, but it should be a secondary consideration
For example..when programming is the HOT market..
The talented, passionate people do very well because of their talent and passion..and are rewarded handsomely (like me)
The not-so-talented or passionate may get a job during the boom, it may even pay well, but when the bust comes, they are the first ones "staff reduced"
NEVER pick a career based on the job market unless you have (at least a little) talent and passion for it
Switching to the "career of your dreams" is usually a bad idea I know several reasonably competent engineers and scientists who bankrupted themselves, and crippled their family finances, "pursuing a dream" of being a stay at home parent, pursing an artistic career and lost their engineering edge while they did it. They now regret the decision, but have no chance of recovering their engineering edge sufficiently to return to their original, much better paid fields. They'd have to start over as a 40 or 50 year old intern with obsolete skills, and there's no market for them.
If your dream is so important to you, fund it yourself as a hobby or a pasttime. I know too many reasonably competent engineers who blamed their lack of focus on their "lack of inspiration" on their lack of interest. They switched careers, and turned out to be as unfocused in their new "inspired" career. But because they were "unfocused" in a poorly funded career, they've either gone hideously broke or drained their family's finances finances supporting their career. I've known several who are literally a million dollars poorer between the loss of engineering income and with the educational costs of the career switch, for jobs they can't get because they're competing with much, much cheaper kids who are also dependent on family support to keep them fed. They spent their retirement funds and their kids' college funds on their "dream" careers, and they're pretty unhappy about it now.
Frankly, I see the same thing played out regularly for people who have doubts about their lovers or their spouses. They abandon decent, workable relationships in favor of their "soul mate" or someone else tempting who is "the one". If the alternative pastime, or alternative partner, is so ideally suited to you, let them work for it. Don't abandon your current working life or your current working relationship in favor of an unlikely dream. There are far too many broken careers, and broken hearts, from such switches.
Most simply put, I'll offer the advice that so many agents and editors give to their dreaming clients. "Don't quit your day job". If you turn out to be that good at your hobby, you'll find the opportunity to turn to it later as a full-time career. It's much less heart and wallet braking to work at your primary job and your primary relatonships. Just don't _lie_ about it, and over commit.
I was hired by an Indian outsourced (I am local) and they brought in a consultant who would like for references and made a fake resume for me. I quit in disgust!
The problem is when people do this shit HR will simply demand more on a resume and look for keywords in Taleo and rank them by score and filter out all the good people. Resume inflation was also an issue but it really did start in outsourcing companies.
You put an unrealistic demand and a million headhunters from Bangalore say my guys have 10 years of experience in HTML 5 and what are you going to do?
Not saying your guys did this per say? But it hurts natives too as management gets the impression $45,000 a year is the average for a senior developer who has 8 years experience in 5 dozen languages and will now consider no less.
THe worst is Taleo that HR uses. It was never designed to do HR's job but the salespeople mentioned hey do your HR stuff while my website does the recruiting for you etc. So it scans for keywords and only the top 5 ranks get emailed to the secretary for the interview ... all the ones from Bangalore with 10 years experience in HTML 5.
http://saveie6.com/
The full text should have read:
They're not doing that now. They're just expecting that the kids will show up with the skills that the employer needs when the employer needs them. And they'll dump them back on the street whenever their skills don't match what the employer "needs" this quarter.
Seriously. What went wrong? Employers used to not think they were entitled to perfectly-shaped disposable cogs. They not only brought new hires' skills in line with their needs, they imbued them with the corporate culture and philosophy, ensured that they were kept trained or retrained, and in exchange avoided the continual expenses that come from bringing a new, untried person who doesn't even know where the paper clips are kept. And, as an added bonus, the employee might feel loyal enough to put a little more of themself into the company's ongoing fortunes.
Why, somehow, do you think I didn't struggle, or that I enjoyed a life that was particularly well off?
When things go wrong, and you fall short of your goals, and unfortunately, we all experience failures then you take whatever it is that you *DO* have, and you do what you can with it.. That should *NEVER* mean giving up on what you love to do... it might mean you can't do it for a living right now... but that doesn't mean it's permanent, and one should not ever settle on striving for less than what they love, because while following your passion doesn't make you necessarily rich, it at has the best chance of not leaving you with any real regrets in your life. And being happy with how you've lived your life, especially as you grow older and reflect upon it, is something that no amount of money or material success can ever hope to compensate for.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Maybe you found something that works for you in whatever hideous corporate workplaces you've decided you want to work in, but if you're so smart you would have left employment per se a long time ago, just for the tax relief, or found a nice startup to work in where you got to work instead of play office politics. But you didn't because you love office politics, that's why you spend 2/3 of your time focusing on it and you don't even bother working the other 1/3 by your own admission. You are the problem with office politics that people are going to run into. Please do tell us where you go fishing, so we can avoid that particular lake.
There's more to being your own boss than "just being smart". A lot of people are simply more specialized than that. That's a benefit from living in society. You don't have to do everything yourself.
This isn't the stone age.
Although you can minimize the politics somewhat by working for a smaller company where they don't have the luxury of putting up with any dead weight. Silicon Valley is probably great in that regard.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.