College Students Are Rushing in Record Numbers To Study Computer Science (nytimes.com)

Lured by the prospect of high-salary, high-status jobs, college students are rushing in record numbers to study computer science. Now, if only they could get a seat in class. An anonymous reader shares a report: On campuses across the country, from major state universities to small private colleges, the surge in student demand for computer science courses is far outstripping the supply of professors, as the tech industry snaps up talent. At some schools, the shortage is creating an undergraduate divide of computing haves and have-nots -- potentially narrowing a path for some minority and female students to an industry that has struggled with diversity. The number of undergraduates majoring in the subject more than doubled from 2013 to 2017, to over 106,000, while tenure-track faculty ranks rose about 17 percent, according to the Computing Research Association, a nonprofit that gathers data from about 200 universities.

Economics and the promise of upward mobility are driving the student stampede. While previous generations of entrepreneurial undergraduates might have aspired to become lawyers or doctors, many students now are leery of investing the time, and incurring six-figure debts, to join those professions. By contrast, learning computing skills can be a fast path to employment, as fields as varied as agriculture, banking and genomics incorporate more sophisticated computing. While the quality of programs across the country varies widely, some computer science majors make six-figure salaries straight out of school. At the University of Texas at Austin, which has a top computer science program, more than 3,300 incoming first-year students last fall sought computer science as their first choice of major, more than double the number who did so in 2014.

Comments

Deja Vu

[Spy Handler]

I swear I saw this exact same thing happening in 1999.

And then a year later the bubble burst.

Re:Deja Vu

[DickBreath]

> I swear I saw this exact same thing happening in 1999.

1980 by my recollection.

People rushing to learn about these new fangled computer thingies because you can get paid big money by pushing buttons on these things.

The problem in 1980, as in 1999, as now, is there are plenty of posers who can't program their way out of a paper bag. You could show someone a few statements of a simple programming language, and they could memorize them. But they couldn't put together the logic of a routine to calculate the sum of the numbers from 1 to 1000. Today the FizzBuzz test is a better example as the first-level sieve to weed out the incapable.

I seem to recall the 100 Best Jobs in America and Software Developer was number 1. No surprise unskilled talentless hacks are rushing to it.

Remember those books of the genre: "Learn ${LanguageX} in 24 hours!". How about changing that to Learn LanguageX in only Ten Years!

Re: Deja Vu

[reanjr]

If you have a decade of experience, it usually only takes about 24 hours to learn a new language well enough to get shit done in it.

Re: Deja Vu

[DickBreath]

These books were sold as a magical way to become a programmer in 24 hours.

If you have a decade or more of experience, as you say, then you've already got that ten years that I mentioned should be part of the title of the book.

Re: Deja Vu

[ShanghaiBill]

Verilog isn't even a programming language though.

Verilog is Turing-complete and can do anything any other programming language can do. The difference is that it doesn't do stuff in sequence. It all happens at the same time.

Whereas Verilog is a hardware description language.

Verilog can be run on a CPU just like any other language. That is usually how it is initially debugged and tested. Even when deployed, most Verilog programs run on FPGAs, not custom hardware.

The inherent parallelism requires a different mindset. Many programmers have a hard time with that, or even with GPGPU programming in C, or writing shader pipelines. Ascending the learning curve is going to take more than 24 hours. It is a lot more than new syntax.

Re:Deja Vu

[Opportunist]

That's pretty much the problem here. This isn't business administration. You don't get far by rote learning. Unfortunately, that's the most you can hope for if you just do it with your eyes on the money, not because it's really something you WANT to do.

The big bucks, though, are only paid to those that actually are not only very interested in the matter but also have the mindset to get into it. It's the people that thrive on solving problems with computers and who don't consider it a chore but a leisure activity to dig into complex code structures, those that actually enjoy doing those things, who are doing it because they want to do it, not because money is even involved.

And yes, it is actually very possible to learn a language in a single day. If, and only if, it is a language from a paradigm that you fully understood and where you already know a few related languages (and with "know" I mean "be able to teach someone"). If you're proficient in C++ and Java, learning C# is doable in a day. You'll not have the same level of expertise and you'll probably spend a good amount of time with the MSDN open, something a seasoned C# programmer probably wouldn't need and could probably do much faster, but you will understand what's going on and apply what you know to the new language. I would not necessarily assume that it's going to be so easy with a fundamentally different language concept like, say, if the aforementioned C++/Java programmer was tasked with learning Prolog. Yes, he'll certainly pick it up faster than someone with zero programming background, but I highly doubt that a day will suffice.

Re:Echos old times

[hierofalcon]

Learning principles would be even better.

Re: Many rushing in but...

[TimMD909]

People who are good at computers will be good at it even without schooling. The degree is just putting a bow on a person dedicated to learning. You can't buy dedication.

Save $$

[al0ha]

Fools - chasing jobs that will be replaced by AI before their work careers are probably 1/2 over. Go back to Blue Collar young bloods; paid apprenticeships and a virtually unlimited future in plumbing and electrical contracting; these industries can't find enough qualified people.

Re:Save $$

[avandesande]

Never going to happen. Remember in the 90s when drag and drop programming was going to take over? I will posit this- sufficiently defined requirements are indistinguishable from computer code.

Make sure you have the dedication for CS

[foxalopex]

While it's great that there are lots of people considering learning the CS major, it worries me a little that there's a vast majority of people that do not realize that it is a type of job that never stops changing. If being a carpenter was like this it would be like needing to use a vastly new hammer that wouldn't even work the same way every couple of years. Some of the best CS folks are people who play / fiddle / learn the new technologies in their own spare time ontop of what they're taught. And don't think competent employers can't tell the difference, they can.

Re:hmmmm

[uncqual]

I didn't get that either so I did the unthinkable - I skimmed the article and found this (before I gave up)...

Some university leaders said they were concerned that certain measures taken to address surging student demand may disadvantage people who are already unrepresented in computer science — including women, African-Americans, Latinos and low-income, first-generation college students.

Some universities now require incoming students to get accepted into computer science majors before they arrive on campus — and make it nearly impossible for other undergraduates to transfer into the major. That approach can favor incoming students from schools with resources like advanced programming courses. It can also favor male students — because women on average are less likely to have taken a computer science course in high school.

“When you put any kind of barrier in place in terms of access to computer science majors, it tends to reduce the number of women and students of color in the program,” said Maria Klawe, president of Harvey Mudd College, a private college in Claremont, Calif., that has become a national model for diversity in computer science.

Although, it seems any decision on the part of female students to eschew available computer science courses in high school isn't a "problem". Surely very few, and no public, high schools let boys take such classes while preventing girls from taking them. Perhaps girls and boys tend to choose different courses in high school, but that's a free will choice of each student.

Similarly, I don't see it as a "problem" that women are under represented in commercial fishing and logging (two of the most dangerous professions in the country) or in plumbing and construction laborer (dirty and hard jobs respectively) -- I don't see a lot of women clamoring to get into these fields and finding that they are excluded based on gender (vs. strength or willingness to take physical risks or willingness to get dirty and work in unpleasant weather conditions -- all of which would be their choices).