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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."
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.
...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.
any degree any college.
Nonsense. Someone with a psychology degree earns a third what someone with a chemical engineering degree earns, and if four times as likely to be unemployed.
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.