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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.
While the growth of CS grads will mean a lot in the long term. With more people making new products creating more jobs.... in the short term there will be an influx of kids that we will need to deprogram the strict rules that were taught during the education.
There is a difference between accedemic theory and real life.
A lot of showing them when to break the rules and seporate yourself from the religion of OOP. And then when they should embrace the concept of OOP in a non OOP environment.
Then there is teaching them to work in a team and put their egos aside and do it the way that is said to do it, even if it seems less efficient at first.
Then I will need to go over all my arguments again.
Them: Why do it that way?
Me: I need to keep the code open for new features.
Them: What features?
Me: I don't know yet, but they are going to ask for something, and if you keep this section flexible it will prevent us from rewriting everything.
Them: You are just an old mad who doesn't want to use new technology.
Then they will do it there way.
3 months later...
Them we need to rewrite the code because of this stupid request that wasn't part of the original project spec.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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 /
At my university, we've been watching the explosion of CS majors for the past few years and wondering when the enrollment curve is going to flatten out. So far it shows no signs, with CS already being the largest major in the engineering school.
We are scrambling to find instructors for the new sections that we need to open, and rooms in which to teach them. We're hardly alone - all of our peer institutions are reporting similar trends.
One thing that does concern my colleagues is that a significant portion of the students now entering CS show little aptitude or interest in programming concepts. Students who have failed or dropped the freshman "Introduction to Programming" two or three times in a row absolutely refuse to switch majors. They want that six-figure starting salary, and they will do whatever it takes to get the degree. I am guessing the same thing is happening at every other school that isn't taking some measure to push unqualified students out of CS.
Employers should be prepared to ask a lot of "FizzBuzz" interview questions over the next few years, because quite a few under-qualified CS graduates from prestigious schools are going to be hitting the job market.
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.
Students are flocking to CS majors because they're easier than Gender or Ethnic Studies and require less critical thought. Plus, the CS textbooks have the answers at the end.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I'm now in college for my second time now, first I studied electrical and computer engineering and now software engineering (under a CS major). Due to the large crossover between computer science and engineering I'll get to talking to some computer science students. I've also got to talk to some job recruiters in some rare moments of honesty.
One thing is that many computer science majors want to go on to write code. There's nothing wrong with that, but then they have to take the courses that teach software development. Not many do, because those courses are hard and/or not very interesting. Seems to me that either these people were lied to by their CS advisors and recruiters (as I was) or they didn't have the grades to get into the engineering programs.
I've got to talk to some hiring managers and the like and I've heard them say that they prefer engineering students to computer science. This is because engineering has a more rigorous math requirements, students are required to learn the engineering process, and anyone able to get their engineering degree can pick up a new programming language quickly. These companies are willing to send a new hire to a week long "boot camp" to learn whatever language they are using but not so willing to have to teach someone that learned every language under the sun in their CS coursework how to write good code.
Now there seems to be something of a glut of software developers, at least where I live. I'll hear hiring recruiters say I need more programming experience. I happened into work doing firmware development but when layoffs happened I had trouble finding work again, so I used my GI Bill to go back to school. Having not learned my lesson yet from my experience studying engineering I went to a local university to look at their CS program that just started offering a software engineering "track".
The advisors told me that the CS department was the "lead department" on this software engineering program, that was the first lie, and that the advisors would be helpful in choosing the classes I'd need to complete this "track", the second lie I was told. The advisors are worthless because at any university where CS is in the liberal arts college their goal is the "well rounded adult". They know how to get students to take their foreign language, history, and so forth. What they don't know is how to advise students on what courses to take on actually learning how to write code.
I wasted a year in this stupid CS program because the advisors didn't know what courses actually applied to their own course prerequisites. They pushed me to take courses from the CS department instead of equivalent courses in the engineering school. Then there's the instructors in the CS department that simply cannot help but work political commentary into their lesson plans. A classic CS algorithm called the "stable marriage problem" included a disclaimer from the instructor that it was from a time when same sex marriage was illegal. It's not that 99.9% of the population would rather marry someone of the opposite sex, it's that it was illegal that was the problem, right?
My advice to people that want to get into software development is to get a major in software engineering from a school that has an actual engineering program. Lacking that go major in some engineering discipline and get a CS minor or just take as much programming coursework you can. I found out a year too late that I could have gone to the engineering college, talked to advisors that know what software engineering actually means, and not taken so much bullshit from the liberal arts instructors. I got screwed because now I've got some bad grades in courses that I was not prepared for, and didn't even apply to my CS major, and I can't just switch to engineering any more. Had I gone to the engineering school for their advice on the software engineering program earlier, or talked to the engineering advisors first, I might not be in this predicament. I should have graduated by now but instead I'm looking to take yet another year of classes before I get the education I wanted and that piece of paper that employers want to see.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Tech employers want to offshore as many jobs as they can. And the jobs that cannot be offshored will be given to visa workers.
If you can get a top secret clearance, you will probably be alright.
That has somehow strayed into being a political issue. The "honest hard working people" who don't go to school versus "evil liberal college grad elites". Seriously, people are now treating college as part of the cultural divide.
If someone wants their own small business, they very often need at least junior college and preferably more. If someone loves landscaping, do they want to actually do the design the landscaping or just use the shovel all their life while a boss orders them around? At the very very minimum, take accounting classes.
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.
In the late 80's, there was a rush of students to the then-new Computer Science majors at universities around the nation. EVERYBODY wanted in. There was the promise of good, high-paying jobs for graduates. Sound familiar?
At my small college, 800 of the 1600 Freshmen at the school enrolled in Computer science. The next year, half of my classmates realized they were in over their heads, and transferred to other majors. This trend continued until graduation, when 25 of us actually completed the major.
Computer science is like art. You either have it or you don't. In both cases, the intrinsic talent must be developed and polished, but there has to be in-born talent to begin with. You can't force it, no matter how much you might like the salaries being promised.
Dear BA major: Just because in your degree it's completely irrelevant whether you actually understand any of the garbage you're required to soak up, spill onto the test and forget afterwards, that doesn't mean it is that way in other venues, too. Unfortunately to be successful in CS, you not only have to swallow a book from back to back, you have to actually understand because you have to build onto that what's inside that book and go beyond it to actually solve the problems presented to you.
Yes, we do actually have to think for ourselves. I know that concept is alien to you and I don't expect you to understand (actually, I don't expect BAs to understand anything, that's simply not something they're required to do and I can only imagine that understanding that bullshit would actually make you go nuts), just do what you do with the crap you had to learn: Accept it as true.
The difference is that there is no test this time where you can dump it and forget it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
They learned a valuable lesson for life: Study something that you're interested in, because if you don't, the field will crush you with its weight. If you're not interested in what you're trying to study, you're in for a life of hurt. First, it will be painful to get the degree and even if you get one, you'll have a degree that enables you to do for the rest of your productive life something you do not want to do.
Studying something because "this is where the money is" is pointless. Because the only ones that WILL make "that money" are the ones that actually WANT to do it, that are willing and able to go beyond the bare minimum that someone who loathes the whole shit is willing and able to put into it. If anything, you'll be mediocre AND miserable.
Is that what you want for your life?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
So does "herding", but you'll never hear a "herd" of birds.
Oh you silly - who hasn't herd of birds?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.