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College Students Are Flocking To Computer Science Majors (ieeeusa.org)
Slashdot reader dcblogs writes:
Enrollments in Computer Science are on a hockey stick trajectory and show no signs of slowing down. Stanford University declared computer science enrollments, for instance, went from 87 in the 2007-08 academic year to 353 in the recently completed year. It's similar at other schools. Boston University, for instance, had 110 declared undergraduate computer science majors in 2009. This fall it will have more than 550. Professor Mehran Sahami, who is the associate chair for education in the CS department at Stanford, believes the enrollment trend will continue. "As the numbers bear out, the interest in computer science has grown tremendously and shows no signs of crashing." But after the 2000 dot-com bust computer science enrollments fell dramatically and students soured on the degree. Could something like it happen again?
Mark Crovella, the chair of Boston University's CS department, notes that "the overall interest in computer science at B.U. is currently at about twice the level it was at the peak of the dot.com year." But the article points out that salaries for new grads are still rising, "which suggests that demand is real." And Jay Ritter, a professor of finance at the University of Florida's Warrington College of Business Administration, adds "I'm more worried about the job outlook for people without these skills."
Mark Crovella, the chair of Boston University's CS department, notes that "the overall interest in computer science at B.U. is currently at about twice the level it was at the peak of the dot.com year." But the article points out that salaries for new grads are still rising, "which suggests that demand is real." And Jay Ritter, a professor of finance at the University of Florida's Warrington College of Business Administration, adds "I'm more worried about the job outlook for people without these skills."
The idea that having a CS degree makes you a competent programmer is laughable... Those "deep" algorithmic problem solving abilities are what pay so much, and more important, and interest in them. My value to my employer has little do with any degree and mostly due to the fact when I was given a problem, I could identify why the current solutions had failed because I knew how computers work.
The majority of CS majors I know can't even tell you how a processor works on basic principles. It's just a black box to them, and when things fail like a stack overflow, they don't know what that even means.
Given the rampant ageism in tech nowadays, you'd better have an exit plan. And so should all these new entrants into the field. More and more, tech jobs should be seen as just stepping stones, not a career in its own right. This was predicted 5 years ago, and people lost their shit over it. "Never going to happen!"
The downside? Well, say you interview as a graduating college senior at Facebook Inc. You may find, to your initial delight, that the place looks just like a fun-loving dorm -- and the adults seem to be missing. But that is a sign of how the profession has devolved in recent years to one lacking in longevity. Many programmers find that their employability starts to decline at about age 35.
Gone by 40
Employers dismiss them as either lacking in up-to-date technical skills -- such as the latest programming-language fad -- or “not suitable for entry level.” In other words, either underqualified or overqualified. That doesn’t leave much, does it? Statistics show that most software developers are out of the field by age 40.
Government data show that H-1B software engineers tend to be much younger than their American counterparts. Basically, when the employers run out of young Americans to hire, they turn to the young H-1Bs, bypassing the older Americans.
And then there's the widespread discrimination based on sex and ethnicity. Plus having a pool of talent twice as large means you can dispose of them twice as fast, and it's going to put tremendous downward pressure on wages and working conditions.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
It would't hurt to take CS as a major and business as a minor. Never know when you will find yourself in a startup and taking on a management role.
How many will make a run for it as soon as they realise that CS is not about developing fancy websites or iOS apps. Dropout numbers are far more interesting. Most of them probably won't get past second semester.
sudo rm -r -f --no-preserve-root /
I would flip that recommendation around a bit. I think that many students who are considering computer science as a major would be far better served taking it as a minor, and just getting a basic exposure to the fundamental concepts. As a major, it is a poor choice unless you have a passion and an aptitude for the material. Students without passion and aptitude will have a very short and unspectacular career in the field.
... will usually be the ones without any formal qualifications who picked up [insert trendy language de jour here] on their own and now write cut and paste sphaggetti code because they have no idea of how to structure a program properly and know next to no useful algorithms. Everything they produce is either mickey mouse code or code blocks from a code site glued together lego brick style and hoping it works.
Just FYI - on my CS course I learnt processor and board architecture, networking (TCP down to ethernet frames + routing principles), AI, relational DBs + normalisation, graphics algorithms, formal proofs and CUI design amongst other things.
I suspect like a lot of people who've never done a degree but work with people who have you have a huge chip on your shoulder and to make yourself feel better you pretend degrees are useless. Well they're not which if you were smart enough to actually get one you'd realise.
You're arguing for some sort of union or guild style of organization and instruction. That's not what university is for. University is not there to teach the practical state of the art, it's there to teach the academic state of the art. The tech stack is incidental to that end, and Microsoft has absolutely nothing to do with this topic. There are a lot of people who confuse university with a job training program, and the US government and culture at large has done nothing to discourage this. Computer Science is Turing, McKay, Shannon, Knuth, Dijkstra -- and note how only one of those people ever owned a computer. Both the theoretical and practical are important scopes of knowledge for a programmer, but the university's purview should only be the former.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.