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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:
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."
This sounds like it was written by a non-CS major who has tied all their business processes to wonky VBA macro laden Excel workbooks.
The whole point of open source is that the software is already written. Just need to put it together like Lego blocks. CS Major won't help. Outsource the development and it will be done in no time.
Is this written by some guy that can't get a programming job because he doesn't have a degree?
"Wah, they're all elitist nerds. Now I have to write for this stupid website to pay rent. They're the stupid ones, not me! Why don't I get paid $200k a year? Wahh!"
Another success without college article, usually writen by someone who did not go to college. Sure, there are auto didacts able to learn good software engineering principles on their own, but few possess the necessary self discipline. To learn to think you need to hang out with thinkers. To learn a subject well it helps enormously to have good teachers. To learn discipline it helps to have structure. Nothing beats college for that, it's an opportunity you should seize if you possibly can.
Never mind the parities, networking and abundant supply of premium specimens of the opposite sex.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
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.
Another consultant who stuck it out.
"We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx..."
It's almost comical just how false most of these stereotypes and arguments are.
1) Knowing lots of theory allows you to approach a problem from multiple possible analytical angles. Lacking that kind of critical thinking will make you an excellent drone employee who can execute orders given by smarter people.
2) I take issue with "rarely used." I know CS people love their esoteric languages, but they are hardly the norm for example code.
3) I don't think I've met a single CS professor who couldn't write code.
4) Data structures? You use them all the fucking time. ALL THE TIME. You just don't know it because someone made it idiot-proof, so now even your dumb ass can use them.
5) There may be some truth to credentials making people more confident, but the same could be said of anyone with any recognized accreditation. Furthermore, I feel like this applies more to businesspeople than scientists.
6) There's a reason you don't find highly-specific industry trending software tools being taught in "the average cirriculum." It's the same reason you learn to dribble a basketball before you learn to dunk: fundamentals.
The highlights read like garbage written for adult children.
"It's not that CS degrees are bad, it's just that they're not going to speak to the problems that most of us need to solve."
What is that problem you need to solve? How to appear to be doing your job when you are actually laying waste to your company's future?
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
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.
Let the physics major debug it, thereby proving themselves.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Clickbait aimed at the hard of thinking
When a headline asks a question, the sensible answer is always a resounding No.
I've been progging for 33 years, since my teens. Classic 80ies computer kid. I do that for a living since 18 years ago. I've finally enrolled in a BSc CS track that I'l pobably manage to complete, after having done my German GED High School diploma 3 years back. I'm in the second semester, only taking a few courses at a time, and pushing a wave of exams in front of me. I do part-time, because I'm working as a professional webdev too.
Here's my observation and it's 100% spot on with my expectations and one of the reasons I'm doing CS in my late 40ies:
The basics - Math, theoretic CS ("Theoretische Informatik" ... dunno what that's in english exactly), graph theory, expanded theory of sets and so on are exactly what someone doing anything computer related at a professional programmers and software architects level should know and be able to wrap his/her head around. Being able to algebrahicly express and calculate the complexity of a relational graph in a database is a level or two above simply discussing which goes in what entity. It's tough - boolean algebra is a particularly neat alien monster to tackle if your not into algebra that much - but it's doable and it ups your understanding of what you're doing in your everyday work and it does away with the fog that covers many deeper areas that IT people encounter every day and should know more about. This is the reason you should do CS if you'e doing IT professionally. At least a bit of it on the side, in Kahn Academy or something.
Point in case: I'm in a CS project group right now reimplementing RSA to learn all the n00ks and crannies about it. Very nice. Slow as hell and crappy n00b code by my 19 year old comrades, but we all (me included) learned new stuff. For instance: Asmetric is hard and demands performance, thus is only used to do a preceeding exchange of a symetric key before the show starts. That's why https handshakes take up 1.5 of the 3.5 second rule for loading and displaying websites. Now who without some CS knowlege is aware of this?
However, there is the other side that the GP mentions, and this is a very simple cold hard fact that CS faculties need to get into their collective head: The avantgarde of software development is not in academia anymore. The regular skills you're teaching your students are most likely sub-par and will be nigh obsolete once your students leave for the real world. Yes, there is the occasional Scala that comes out of a university and then gets some hype in the industry, but that only works if the Prof who invented it is in the industry himself aswell.
Point in case here: We're doing this project in IntellyJ Idea already (bad idea imho). The introduction into the IDE was sub-par and the Prof talked bullshit and wrong details about Git. I could've given his introduction on the spot and he would've learned some new things. ... That's because they probably only moved from SVN a few years back.
Kotlin is barely on their radar and it's already being used in the industry, in non-trivial projects.
Bottom line: As far as practical skills go, CS is too far behind the curve. I'm sure they are becoming aware of this and many a college is trying to catch up with close ties to the industry, but right now I learn more and better at local meetups than in class. Graph theory and math however I doubt I find some better place to learn that than at my faculty.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I'm old enough that when I got into programming, CS degrees weren't really that common. Most companies were hiring programmers by giving aptitude tests and training people in house. I eventually did end up going for a university degree, after I had been programing for about 10 years, but dropped out after my third year because there was little relevant to the work I was actually doing and the skills I actually needed. For a lot of projects I worked on, being a virtuoso programmer was a lot less important than subject matter expertise. At one time most accounting software was written by people who were accountants that were trained in programming as a sideline.
I've found CS degrees are analogous to music degrees. Having a advanced degree in music doesn't make you Jimi Hendrix, but on the other hand if you want to be a symphony orchestra conductor or write arrangements, you're probably not going to get too far without one. But I've certainly met plenty of musicians with advanced music degrees who could barely play their instruments. And I've met plenty of terrific musicians who have had no formal training at all.
Likewise, there are talented programmers with CS degrees, but a CS degree is not a guarantee of talent. And there are plenty of talented programmers with no degree at all.
Personally, my programming career would have gone just fine if I'd never gotten anywhere near a university, but then, I spent most of it in corporate IT. I wouldn't have a clue where to start writing a search engine, but then, it's highly unlikely I'd ever have been asked to write one.
Whether you need CS majors or not depends on the work you need to have done. If you're going to develop compilers and OS's, then yeah, probably a good idea. If you're doing routine business applications, then probably not so much.
He sounds to me like he recommended hiring physicists for an engineering role, because he's unaware that software engineering and systems engineering exist. He thinks computer science is supposed to be programming.
Sounds like the author is completely unaware that software engineering and systems engineering are fields, and people get degrees in each. He thinks computer science is the degree for programming. Realizing that computer science teaches a lot that isn't programming, he suggests hiring a physicist who learned a little programming.
Maybe an analogy will help him:
If you want to design and build a physical thing, such as an engine, you get an engineer to design it. The *science* of how an engine works is physics, applying that science is engineering, not physics. Specifically, you want a mechanical engineer.
Similarly, applying knowledge to design computer-based systems is the job of an engineer as well, a different type of engineer. Either a software engineer or a systems engineer. The difference is that while an engine needs to be designed in detail, blueprints made, before it is built, for software the detailed blueprint *is* the software. You don't need the extra step of machinists physically constructing it after the blueprints are made.
Computer science is to programming as physics is to engine design.
Computer engineering, like mechanical engineering, is a degree that teaches you how to design robust, cost-effective things. Programs in the former, machines in the he latter.
I have only taken two computer classes in my 40-year career -- Fortran and Cobol. The first was for the credit in case I ever got a degree, I had already taught myself Fortran because I had already taught myself BASIC for a project in my calculus class (I was a math major) and realized I could teach myself far faster than the school can. I took COBOL because I was a computer operator and they wrote programs in COBOL, and I didn't want to stay a computer operator. Every other programming language I've learned since then has been on my own. Except for C++, I took an online course for that.
It doesn't take a CS major to be a programmer. It does take someone who can understand logic and I believe has spatial awareness, the ability to 'see' how chunks of code and external processes fit together and be able to manipulate them in their head. The best programmers I've ever met were musicians, and I think it's because the best musicians have a high degree of spatial awareness so they can 'fit' different parts of a piece together in their head.
There are different types of programmers. There are those that need a spec to get anything done because they aren't able to figure it out on their own. Some CS work will help with that, but I think at some level you can't teach it. It's like teaching me to play the piano .. I can learn where the notes are but I'll never be a concert pianist because I just don't have the dexterity and coordination. That's why I play the saxophone instead of the piano. Then there are the natural programmers that just get it, CS will help them get a job because it checks off a box in HR, but for the most part, they are very capable of learning themselves.
While I believe all aspects of CS can be learned on one's own, they can also be taught faster. Testing techniques, architectural designs, data designs, and a whole host of things can be learned by googling. But, if one doesn't know something exists, one may not be able to find it. A CS degree, at a minimum, should provide exposure to a wide range of knowledge that can be extended as one needs it and technology changes. Let's face it, while we may have come a long way since I wrote assembler, deep down inside, it's still all ones and zeroes, registers and memory.
Idiots abound, both untrained and trained. If companies were more focused on hiring smart people, paying them well, and then hiring the next level down and letting the smart people mentor them and give them the tedious tasks, we all get a lot more done.
Regardless of what degrees they have. Degrees don't mean squat, one has to actually talk to someone to figure out if they know anything.
This isn't mean to disparage learning things, I'm only saying the HR department needs to look past the degree to the person before making decisions. I've known very smart people with and without degrees, and the same goes for idiots.
I'd rather have smart non-degreed workmate than an idiot with a degree. Ok .. I'd rather have a genius with a degree, so the actual order is:
1. A genius with a degree.
2. A genius without a degree
3. The rest of the idiots for tedious tasks, a degree is irrelevant.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
Sigh. I hear this argument often, but its not true. You don't need a separate person as an architect when your project is small. Do you need an architect for putting together the barn behind your house? No. But its not because an architect isn't needed. Rather its because, building the barn is such a small problem that the builder (programmer) can perform the trivial architecture piece all by themselves (in most cases, in their head, without needing to formally declare it on paper).
It takes a while before college graduates deal with the big problems. Until one understands that big problems come with challenges that require a different approach, its hard to understand why an architect is needed. To go back to the example of the parent post: the architect isn't specifying how exactly one needs to implement the code. It is a false argument to say that they are taking away anyone's flexibility in that area; this viewpoint makes it clear that the poster doesn't know what an architect does. To go back to the building analogy: suppose the customer comes to the builders and say that they want an office building. Who gets to make the decisions on what it should look like, how tall it should be, how many entrances and exits, where does the supporting infrastructure (pumps, networking and telephony equipment, etc) go? Its not the builder or the electrician, or the brick layer or what ever the trade is. They are not laying down the vision of what to build. The architect - whether it is civil engineering or software engineering - is describing what it is that you need to implement - not how. An architect is NOT a lead developer. If you have to blame someone for taking away your flexibility in programming style, blame the lead developer.
There is no such thing as luck. Luck is nothing but an absence of bad luck.
This needs to be repeated: "The idea of programming as a semiskilled task, practiced by people with a few months' training, is dangerous. We wouldn't tolerate plumbers or accountants that poorly educated. We don't have as an aim that architecture (of buildings) and engineering (of bridges and trains) should become more accessible to people with progressively less training. Indeed, one serious problem is that currently, too many software developers are undereducated and undertrained. Obviously, we don't want our tools--including our programming languages--to be more complex than necessary. But one aim should be to make tools that will serve skilled professionals--not to lower the level of expressiveness to serve people who can hardly understand the problems, let alone express solutions. We can and do build tools that make simple tasks simple for more people, but let's not let most people loose on the infrastructure of our technical civilization or force the professionals to use only tools designed for amateurs." - Bjarne Stroustrup
I've worked with these scientists that need a little programming. It makes no one happy, the programming is lousy and the scientist is dismayed at not doing more science. I've got one guy who says "I wrote all the code, I just need you guys to clean it up and integrate it into your stuff", or "why are you designing that piece, I already wrote it!"
Let me tell you, some of the worst programmers out there are physicists. It sometimes seems like they even forget their math as they complain that their exponential time algorithm takes too long to run.