Do Businesses Really Need to Hire CS Majors? (cio.com)

A new article in CIO magazine argues that when it comes to computer science, "few of us really need much of any of it." Slashdot reader itwbennett offers this summary: At the heart of the matter is the fact that most businesses don't really need programmers to be deep thinkers. For them, it's "just as worthwhile to hire someone from a physics lab who just used Python to massage some data streams from an instrument. They can learn the shallow details just as readily as the CS genius," according to the article.
CIO's anonymous author promises an incomplete list of "why we may be better off ignoring CS majors." Some of the highlights:

• Theory distracts and confuses. "Many computer scientists are mathematicians at heart and the theorem-obsessed mindset permeates the discipline."

• Academic languages are rarely used. "...the academy breeds snobbery and a love for arcane solutions."

• Many CS professors are mathematicians, not programmers. "One of the dirty secrets about most computer science departments is that most of the professors can't program computers. Their real job is giving lectures and wrangling grants...."

• Many required subjects are rarely used. "...it's too bad few of us use many data structures any more."

• Institutions breed arrogance. "...the very nature of academic degrees are designed to give graduates the ability to argue one's superiority with authority. "

• Many modern skills are ignored. "If you want to understand Node.js, React, game design or cloud computation, you'll find very little of it in the average curriculum... It's very common for computer science departments to produce deep thinkers who understand some of the fundamental challenges without any shallow knowledge of the details that dominate the average employee's day."

"It's not that CS degrees are bad," the article concludes. "It's just that they're not going to speak to the problems that most of us need to solve."

Comments

My Take...

[beheaderaswp]

From my standpoint, this is an earmark of of the end of IT as a professional specialty.

At this point technicians are treated as hourly workers- if they exist at all. The word "engineer" is being banished from the IT profession. Support is by phone script. The network is built on appliances. Configurations done by subcontractors. Job qualifications require education over experience. Certifications are required- but are generally useless without a degree.

Programmers are shuffled in and out on contract....code is undocumented. Competence is un-rewarded.

And management doesn't understand the technology with a mentality that says: "Do the minimum possible to get a short term result".

The net result is lots of titles like "Network Manager"... "Network Architect"... "Vice President of Information Systems".... ETC.

And yet none of these people have functional knowledge of real practical networking or server administration. They function as gateways to subcontractors, some of which follow the executive from job to job, and the officer level of the company is so ignorant of the issues involved that it continues.

Then there's the "Cloud".

It's the biggest ripoff any company can be subjected to. A multi-layer IT staff that only administrates the actions of sub-contractors. And yet while this management structure can be three layers deep- it does nothing, presents no skill set, and is useless without the added expense of subcontractors which provide "IT Expertise" as a service. And the company... isn't even in control of it's own data. It's security and availability is now preserved by a third party company whose interest is singularly profit.

So when "CIO Magazine" writes an article saying that CS majors are not needed all I can do is chuckle.

An Open Secret Known for Decades

[clawhound]

This is an open secret that's been known for decades. The best minds that I've work with are almost invariably from other majors. The sharpest programmer that I know came out of the music department. In most positions, technical skills represent about 1/5 of what you need to do a job. Those other 4/5 matter a whole lot. It's easier to teach a humanities person some technical skills than it is to teach a technical person humanities.

Re:Heh

[arglebargle_xiv]

Construction doesn't need every carpenter to be an architect but you'd better have an architect.

Or just a competent builder. My dad was a builder, and almost every single architect-designed house he built needed anything from significant through to major design changes to get it from what the architect wished for to being physically buildable and in compliance with building regulations. There was one house that was so bad he refused to build from the architect's plans when the owner wouldn't agree to him fixing them. Forty years later the owners are still in the house, and they'll be there till they die, no-one in their right mind would buy what they ended up with.

I've seen the same thing with software, I once did a bit of work for a company where their salesdroids would spend their lunch hour telling me why their Grand Poobah System Architect's design couldn't ever work. It didn't even take a developer, even the sales guys could see why it couldn't possibly work, and they had things like MBAs and BComs.