![Education Education](http://a.fsdn.com/sd/topics/education_64.png)
![IT IT](http://a.fsdn.com/sd/topics/it_64.png)
Interest in CS as a Major Drops 839
Dasein writes "The Computer Research Association says that the popularity of CS as a major among freshman has dropped in the last four years. Why is obvious to anybody working in the field. They conclude by saying 'With a fall in degree production looming, it is difficult to see how CS can match expected future demand for IT workers without raising women's participation at the undergraduate level.'"
Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics (Score:3, Insightful)
All it proves is that number of Freshman interested in studying CS at UCLA is dropping.
Instead of admitting that the quality of their CS courses are dropping, these guys are trying to show a general trend.
This is not news for nerds! This only news for the clueless masses (R)(TM)
Re:Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics (Score:3)
I'm about to graduate with a CS degree. I had two well-paying offers from two well-known companies. My friend had 3. Everyone I know in CS either has a job or is staying for grad school (and not because they had to, because they want to).
Re:Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics (Score:3)
Perhaps you have something that sets you apart? Excellent marks, a body of previous work, good networking? All of those things? If you are skilled and passionate about what you do, you'll succeed.
I believe it when people say demand for IT grads is down. I wouldn't suggest anyone change majors, though, unless they have poor abilities to start with. - The marginal grads are the ones who will end up on the sh*t end of things..
Re:Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics (Score:4, Insightful)
Its a two fold problem. First there have never been enough good engineers and there are a lot of pretty so-so engineers. I have worked on too many projects where I was trying to design and do major coding while trying to hire and mentor new people.
Second, often this was complicated by my boss dictating that would have a particular number of people wether I needed them or not. Mostly so he or she looked good. The result was, as with so many companies, we got bodies.
I did my best to train them but programming, as with most engineering types, does require some natural ability and INTEREST. Those without it are of very little help down to a real drain on the rest of the project.
Any project of any size needs a leader, some top notch talent and a few worker bees. Too much at any end does not work. They must also each one be capable and willing to do the work.
Companies think they beat the problem by throwing cheap bodies at it offshore. Most of the projects will fail for the same reasons outlined above. They are mostly still just bodies.
Re:Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics (Score:3, Funny)
Projects get headcount and too often headcount means warm bodies, with or without interest or ability. We seem to keep hiring these people that got into IT for the cash. They typically have decent marks in school and present well, but once it's time to actually work things suck.
My favourite new-hire quote: "I don't really like programming. I plan to be a manager."
The new guy had been given his first "welcome-to-the-corp-lets-see-what-you-can-do" assignment a few d
Re:Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics (Score:5, Interesting)
I also know alot of excellent grad students, also out of top schools, who have to settle for intern like positions. They are so overqualified, companies seriously don't know how to fit them in. Companies want young guys coming in fixing bugs, not architecting major projects.
My ultimate advice in the new millenium is get a "real estate" related degree. Work for a construction company. Forget grad schools unless you are highly devoted to a research position. There is enough software in the world now to run for the next 10 years.
Re:Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics (Score:5, Insightful)
No offense, because maybe you're a genius - but most young people are really only qualified to fix bugs and work on small portions of a project. If a 22-year-old with a CS degree is qualified to architect major projects all I can say is run hard and fast to get another degree, because the party's over.
Re:Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics (Score:5, Insightful)
Ok, it adds a few years, but it doesn't change the bottom line. As a project manager I would take a BS with 2-years of good, real-world experience over someone with 3- to 5-years of graduate study any day of the week.
You apparently failed to notice that I did not limit the appropriate tasks to fixing bugs. However, even a graduate degree just is not sufficient experience to be architecting major projects, unless you're incredibly gifted.
Re:Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics (Score:5, Insightful)
You apparently failed to notice that I did not limit the appropriate tasks to fixing bugs. However, even a graduate degree just is not sufficient experience to be architecting major projects, unless you're incredibly gifted.
We have a problem in this country of confusing management with expertise.
A MS or a PhD gets you an expertise in Computer Science not project management. Whole other skill set.
If you need someone to figure out HOW to make Google Maps work in the lab, get a PhD.
If you need someone to get that work uniformly over 3.5 million square miles of maps while an ungodly number of people hammer on it constantly, managing a team of programmers and other professionals, and trying to meet some kind of budget and timetable (does Google even have deadlines?) then you want someone with proven experience, and I'd actually recommend an old-school engineer.
The guy who ultimately gets it done won't be the expert at the underlying nuts and bolts, but will be the guy who can protect the expert at the underlying nuts and bolts so he can do what he needs to do, and everyone else can as well.
Re:Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics (Score:4, Interesting)
There is experience of the specific subject matter, communication skills and most of all TRUST of the customer/client. If I had a new Doctorate employee and another employee whom I've worked with for 5+ years doing what I need, guess who I would choose.
This is especially important in the IT industry where years of experience is important.
You have to start at the bottom ... (Score:5, Insightful)
As someone with a Master's and someone with friends with Master's from different Universities I can safely say you are wrong. A Master's does not really add much to your qualification outside of the topic you did your research in. As for the project/thesis, it's a lot of work for school but not much compared to a job. Especially since it is generally a solo project. The real value of a job candidate with a Master's is that they have a greater pre-disposition to go research a complicated problem than just start writing code.
Also there are very good reasons to start recent grads doing maintenance. First, they generally have exaggerated opinions of themselves and their code quality is sometimes low ("big" fish in a small pond). Maintenance can help correct that, it can give them a broader perspective, exposure to larger scale projects, introduce them to the local coding and design standards, and possibly most important of all they learn the domain specific knowledge for the job. Once you have worked on a product/project you are better qualified to expand it or work on the next version.
In short, the University does not demonstrate you are qualified to do a job. It demonstrates that you are qualified to learn to do a job, that you are able to complete long and sometimes boring tasks.
Re:You have to start at the bottom ... (Score:5, Interesting)
A person's ability to architect depends on the area they studied. If they have a phd in software engineering, they'd likely be good at architecting. Also, if they studied algorithms, they could easily out design seasoned programmers.
Also keep in mind that research is not at all the same as doing mundane implementation. While people here seem to enjoy dumping on grads, they always forget to mention that while a cs phd or master can enter the job market without difficulty, someone from the job market is wholly inadequate to do research at a university level.
People with phds should be looking for research jobs, because that is what they are trained for. Many bigger companies offer positions that generally *require* a phd or masters. If you asked a nuclear engineer to program, they would not necessarily be steller at it. Please stop comparing cs phd's with programmers.
Re:Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics (Score:4, Insightful)
I've interviewed a lot of people with CS degrees from various universities and some of them gave me the feeling that CS was not right for them.
I'm not saying that's true about everyone with a CS degree that can't find a decent paying job but out of the people that I interviewed the ones that I felt didn't fit in CS the most were the ones asking for insane amounts of money.
The ones that I actually hired were willing to work for reasonable amounts of money and they clearly were more knowledgeable and more skilled than the rest.
Two types of CS grads ... (Score:4, Interesting)
Unfortunately my former lab partner is the exception not the rule. When hiring I look for those with an inherent interest in coding. One metric is to ask what they did outside of class assignments. I don't care how goofy or stupid their homebrew project was, and getting them comfortable enough to tell me about it can be challenging, but the fact that they sat down in front of a computer on their own time and coded something that worked merely to satisy their own curiosity or desire is telling. The CS grad who can only tell me about his/her homework assignments goes to the bottom of the pile.
Another way to get off the bottom of the pile is to do some kind of internship or co-op job.
Re:Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics (Score:3, Insightful)
I can tell you this... I've interviewed lots of guys who are coming out of university with a masters/PhD but no real-world work experience.
I can see the research work they did in university and it's always something very esoteric. I m
Re:Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics (Score:3, Insightful)
That's the dilemma with doing a Ph.D. You are required to do three things:
1. Produce at least 2 or 3 papers during the duration of your stay. The last paper will typically be produced while your are writing up your thesis.
2. Produce a thesis demonstrating new, original and unique research.
The problem is that between (1) and (2), if you do anything
Re:Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics (Score:3, Funny)
If you disregard the specific PhD, what exactly are you looking for that any non-PhD does not have?
Are you looking for a person who has the ability to do some research and then break it down into the greatest number of publishable papers possible? Maybe, since this trait would be good to patent something.
Salary is the Problem (Score:4, Interesting)
On a more grand scale, this phenomena is why the US is outsourcing and it's not even bound to college grads either. Teenagers these days want to make the easy cash or not even try and jobs go unfulfilled. Employers can't afford to pay the kind of money these people want so they find someone who will work for the money, enter foreigners that have a lower cost of living. There's just no honor in the afterschool McDonalds job anymore.
Re:Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics (Score:3, Interesting)
In engineering, the higher paying jobs seem to go to EE majors working on difficult integrated circuits. At least that's what the job ads indicate. Programming jobs earn 1/2 to 2/3 as much.
I agree about forgetting grad school. Grad school is for people who really care, not for people who just want another line on their resume.
Re:Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics (Score:4, Interesting)
Not to put too fine a point on it, but almost nobody coming out of school is qualified to do much at all. Schools rarely teach the things you most need to know in business -- even simple things like "using a version control system" and "scheduling", to say nothing of making significant changes to multimillion-line codebases without busting things.
It used to be much worse since even a decade and a half ago even the basic software tools used by business were typically not the tools students would have been exposed to. Thankfully broad availability of Windows and Linux and related tools has at least helped in that regard.
But strong knowledge of the kinds of things you find in a university environment is still not proper preparation for an architect role in a major project where you'll likely be piecing together a variety of proprietary technologies, many of which a university couldn't realistically afford to expose you to. So those graduates are not "overqualified" by any stretch of the imagination.
So business does more of an apprenticeship kind of thing: You come in working on shit projects and if you do well you'll get more and more interesting stuff to do -- and in the process of doing those crappy tasks you'll learn application structure and process that aren't taught at university.
How fast the move from lousy stuff to interesting stuff happens depends a lot on the kind of company you work for, but it's been my experience that the talented people shine so bright that they're hard to miss. So long as they aren't stuck-up assholes who are hard to work with (unfortunately you get a lot of that right out of school, especially from postgrads, until they figure out they don't know everything) people want to pull them into projects. There's more work to do than people to do it, always, in software.
If I were to give advice to an upcoming graduate, my advice would be to look at the company rather than the job. Good-paying jobs right out of school are probably going to be with larger companies who need to attract talent with money because the work is no fun. Challenging, fun jobs tend to come with smaller companies who don't have a lot of money and attract talent by doing cool things -- and these are the same companies that will advance you rapidly if you're capable because they can't afford to have talent sitting around doing makework.
The drop in CS degrees is coming about because people no longer believe it's easy money. But, really, it never was easy money, no matter the impression a lot of people got during the tech boom.
Re:Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics (Score:3, Informative)
I have many years of IT experience and recently finished an MBA. I really like operations management, but it's a real stretch to take my IT experience and make it look like operations.
I finally took a major pay cut (now just $17/hour) to work temp at a great company. While I have a great theoretical basis to undertand things from, I have tons to learn and really didn't know squat about how things really work in the industry.
My first few months have been pretty un-exciti
Re:Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics (Score:3, Insightful)
A term lasts 12 weeks. There aren't many projects a company can provide that can be completed in 12 weeks. After that, you would probably have complete turn-over of your staff (students). And it's not like these students can work "full-time" on the project because they have at least 3 other very demanding classes they have to complete as well.
Then consider the professor. Most are good at teac
Real, tangible consequences? (Score:3, Informative)
And these aren't just programmers-for-hire projects, either. So far we have done an assessment of the compliance of a financial institution with federal regulations, a inform
Re:Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics (Score:4, Interesting)
Likewise, the job market is picking up again, but it's a lot more sensible now; companies just aren't throwing money around quite like how they used to any more. Perhaps it's worse in the States than elsewhere, or perhaps the Slashdot crowd are still in broken-record mode.
I too am not short on job offers, and I'm far from sending off my CV to any investment bank looking for the next batch of graduates. Perhaps it'll all hit something of an equilibrium; fewer jobs available across the board than 5 years ago, but also fewer good graduates to fill the positions available which are appropriate for them.
Re:Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics (Score:3, Interesting)
I didn't even apply to defense firms.
Re:Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics (Score:5, Funny)
Recently, when I was looking for an EE position, I did look at defense company openings. The need to pay the mortgage and eat makes you cast a wider net.
One position at White Sands NM had a substantial list of specific skills that looked like a good match for me until I got to the last requirement:
Experience flying fighter aircraft.
Holy crap! Not your everyday combination.
I don't remember that course being available:
EE453 Fighter Aircraft Piloting
That sort of threw my search back into private sector.
Re:Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics (Score:3, Insightful)
I am not saying don't take it, but don't plan to stay there for more then two-three years. Get your chops in the big companies then look for a nice unstable startup with a good idea. That's one thing
Re:Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics (Score:3, Insightful)
Personally, I think a lot of it has to do with the perception of the quality of a program. Our CS program is seeing a drastic increase of the number of students enrolling, and one part of our program has a hefty waiting list. Right now, that part of the program has 100% placement and, I believe, the statistics I was told Friday was t
Re:Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics (Score:3, Insightful)
However, your numbers are VERY small relative to most universities, and almost any school could make those kinds of gains provided they're willing to make certain compromises.
What you don't see is that the number of applicants to your program are not up. I would independently argue that Oklahoma public university trends are far from the national norm. In fact, outside of TX, CA, and NY, where populatio
Re:Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics (Score:5, Insightful)
You're correct; the article's conclusions don't necessarily follow from the data they have, but they're still right
Re:Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics (Score:4, Insightful)
Add in common sense, and its pretty obvious that when everyone predicts doom and gloom in IT in the US as India and China take over the world, nobody's interested in sinking $100,000 into a university degree for a career that may not exist when they get out.
The big question though, is whether interest in these degrees are returning to pre-.com era days, or if they're dropping even lower.
Re:Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics (Score:5, Funny)
Throw in some Slashdot posts and it becomes an absolute metaphysical certitude.
Well... (Score:2, Funny)
IT != CS != Biology/Chemistry/Engineering/Etc. (Score:4, Insightful)
Does your software model chemical reactions? Then you should be someone who is good at chemistry who can also write software. Does your software lay out gates? Then you should be an electrical engineer who can also write sfotware. Does your software do people's taxes? Then you should be an accountant who also can write software.
Do you make sure the routers, print servers, and various computers all talk and play togetehr nicely, and that people's computers don't get infected with viruses? Then you're a network tech, and a CS degree was a waste of time. (Or you're a waste of a CS degree.)
The thing is, MOST people don't need a CS degree to be someone who is good at something else AND can write software. Many already know how to write software by the time the get to college, and those that don't would better spend their time becoming an expert in the field they're going to be writig software in than being an expert in software writing.
Might their software not be quite as fast as software written by a CS expert? Maybe not. But it will still probablybe overall better, as the person doing the programming will have a much ebtter understanding of what the program should do.
Anyway, if you're an IT worker (routers, printers, and no viruses) and you saw this article about CS majors and posted something about your job, you should be modded -1 Offtopic. This article isn't about you.
graphics whores (Score:5, Funny)
Anecdotal confirmation (Score:5, Informative)
What a bunch of bullshit (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What a bunch of bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
I've got a MSc from CS and after the novelty wore off I have found coding boring. But I'm a respected professional in my area, security.
Re:What a bunch of bullshit (Score:3, Informative)
Fortunately it's not, and the previous poster didn't suggest that it was. It's logically incorrect to jump from "programming exists" to "programming is all that exists".
Supply and demand (Score:5, Insightful)
By raising the price, it's basic economics. So this is a good thing for all you CS grads out there.
Re:Supply and demand (Score:5, Informative)
If you can find a link for your article maybe we can figure this out.
Good! (Score:5, Insightful)
Besides, if there's a an employee shortage, salaries are more likely to stay high.
With the offshoring of certain types of work, I must wonder if the number of IT jobs in the U.S. is actually going to shrink---at least in relative numbers, rather than increase over then next decade. It'll all be interesting, I'm sure.
Re:Good! (Score:5, Insightful)
TFA showed about 27% of BSCS degrees going to women---down from 37% in 1982. OTOH, the number of overall bachelor's degrees going to women is currently 58%---and has been above 50% since 1981. I guess the moral of the story is that the women are getting smarter, and guys are getting dumber, and that the guys who are getting smarter are going to be working for women.
Re:Good! (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm a woman, I'm (for now) a CS major, switching to math education soon. Why am I not staying in CS? No jobs, no money, no interest. While some men apparently would be happy to spend the next 40 years of their lives working on the next version of MS Office, I want to *do* something. It used to be that this was a field where you could really innovate and have fun with it; anymore, I don't see that.
I'm taking my AS in CS just for the love of it, but I don't want to ruin my hobby with work.
Re:Good! (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't you think that they are having fun at Google? At Flickr? At Del.ic.ios? At Red Hat? At Opera? Even at some of the more advanced parts of Microsoft? Sure, there are a bunch of boring jobs working on accounting and CRM systems. But CS always had its dull projects (COBOL anyone?). The situation is as exciting today as it has ever been. Consider trends like the rise in web-based services, open source software, the move to higher level dynamic languages, new devices, etc. Things are as exciting as they have been.
take another look at computer science (Score:4, Insightful)
I find what you said really rude and uninformed. There are literaly thousands of different types of jobs in the world of computer science. There are many more if you add electical engineering and information technology. There are computer scientists who "do" something everyday. What about the programmers who wrote the code to work through the human genome? What about the programmers who right code to simulate the effects of drugs to reduce the use of lab animals? What about the code that helps scientists find the cure for cancer? Isn't this doing something?
My resume is an example of moving around in different parts of computer science. In 9 years I have written financial software, device drivers for networking and storage, advertising software, network management software for high performance computing clusters, and now I work on software for radio controlled devices. My friends work in lots of other areas. Open you mind and then maybe your eyes will see what is really out there.
Re:Good! (Score:4, Insightful)
Any time you hear someone say "shortage" or "surplus" in a market economy, they are not talking sense. They are trying to manipulate the market for their own gain. In this case, the person that said there is a "shortfall" wants more IT folks at a lower price. Meanwhile, those of us who are in the field are saying that there are too many, because we want to be able to demand a higher price for our work.
Re:Good! (Score:4, Insightful)
I've worked with a lot of people who got CS degrees that have absolutely no apptitude or desire to excel in the field.
Re:Good!-The Wal-Marting of IT. (Score:4, Insightful)
If you actually love the IT field as it's currently constructed, I would say you are clinically insane. The long hours, the insane demands, the poor management. I love programming, learning new things and generally working with computers. And I'm good at it. I like the work, but I don't like the actual jobs. And at the end of the day it's still a job, plain and simple. We all do it for money on some level.
Anyway posts like that OP always crack me up. Reminds me of that one South Park.
"Ther taking er jobs!"
"Freshman" CS Majors? (Score:5, Insightful)
(Although in the first case, the designation is usually picked to land a high-paying internship, where the second designation is picked to get laid.)
Unless you're looking at people enrolled in 3xx and 4xx level courses, this article doesn't mean much.
($CS-- != $programmers--) (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't think that just because CS Degrees are in decline that it means there will be any less programmers on the field. Programming is context-oriented, and sure a CS degree can help a lot of people in programming, but at what cost?
Sometimes I feel that majors in the humanities, in communication, literature, critical thinking, psychology, philosophy, linguists, and financial planning are better qualified as developers, because they understand what is most often to be coded these days: interfaces to information, with the ability manipulate, display, and interact with said information. That information has context.
The closer a programmer is to context, the more likely they'll get it right the first time.
Not to say a CS degree isn't useful -- it is, obviously for the more hardcore programming and understanding of the bigger picture.
Re:($CS-- != $programmers--) (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, right.
While psychology, lingustics and financial planning are serious subjects and teach skills useful to programmers, they don't teach programming.
Communication, literature, "critical thinking", and almost all philosophy courses are pure fluff.
Give me an engineering graduate - civil, mechanical, electrical, chemical; I don't really care - any day. At least they understand maths and have learned that there is such a thing as a wrong answer. The concept of a wrong answer is anathema to most humanities students.
I'm sooo glad my job doesn't involve hiring programmers anymore.
Re:($CS-- != $programmers--) (Score:3, Insightful)
Proper project structure, data structures, access methods, com
Double major, if you can (Score:4, Interesting)
The best code is written by CS grads, it's true, but I'm not sure it's because of the CS degree. All of the best programmers I know were top-notch programmers before entering college. College gave them experience, and knowledge, but they had developed their craft from a young age, like any other artist.
Programming really is an art form when done properly, and good programmers rely on an aesthetic sense to avoid "hackish and ugly" code. So if the non-CS people are producing it, it may be because of the reason they avoided CS in the first place. It's the same reason I avoided majoring in art: I'm just not any good at it and didn't expect them to train me well enough to make it worth my time and theirs.
I'd like to see more CS majors at least minor in some other field of interest. There will be those who wish to do CS for its own sake, usually academic: HCI research, automata theory, networking, etc. But for CS majors who want to program computers for a living, and that's a majority of them, I think that they should learn something besides computers. Science, history, business, English: anything that will give them some idea of what it is that the people who are tasking them want.
If necessary, you hire one of those guys to be project lead, and hire cheaper, less experienced programmers to just bang out the code, but I think it all works better if the entire team can both code and develop a real understanding of the requirements, because the spec is never going to quite cut it. A programmer's job isn't to work with computers; otherwise we'd just write a spec-to-software compiler. The programmer's job is to interface between the computer and the client. That works best only when the programmer speaks both languages.
Re:($CS-- != $programmers--) (Score:5, Insightful)
My first year Intro to CS instructor put it this way:
"Computer Science is to programming as mechanical engineering is to operating a drill press"
Too many people think of a BS in Comp Sci as a degree in programming.
Re:($CS-- != $programmers--) (Score:4, Insightful)
At most schools, as I have seen, this is in fact the case. Students partially get this view from the way the school has set up their programs.
For example, software developing classes are advanced CS and graduate courses, for example. So you have to take CS to get into these useful programming classes. The only place you learn serious programming (i.e. practical) is in CS classes. Programming is not well integrated into other courses (generally they focus on specific applications, a real danger IMO), or if it is, it's the 101 tutorial of how to use the base API. In other words, not enough to entice the would-be programmers and near-useless for people who have a specific field they want to focus on (ex. physics, economics, biotech, etc).
This sends the wrong message about computer science and programming in general, but schools pushed this trend and now they need to rethink it.
Re:($CS-- != $programmers--) (Score:3, Interesting)
I've also heard this stated as, "Computers are to computer science what telescopes are to astronomy".
[i]Too many people think of a BS in Comp Sci as a degree in programming.[/i]
Too many colleges think they can throw a bunch of programming classes together and call it Computer Science.
Re:($CS-- != $programmers--) (Score:3, Insightful)
If you ask most people what "Computer Science is to programming as mechanical engineering is to operating a drill press" means, they might say "Well, it means that Computer Science doesn't teach you to be a masterful Programmer".
What it ACTUALLY means (or what it should mean, if most nascent Computer Scientists didn't misunderstand it) is:
Why aren't you checking IT Majors? (Score:5, Informative)
What about other IT majors (Score:4, Interesting)
Are college students getting smarter? (Score:3, Interesting)
Computer Science Not Surprising (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Computer Science Not Surprising (Score:3, Insightful)
Sexual Suicide (Score:4, Interesting)
A critical exemplar of these of those "leading luminaries" is someone with whose work most digerati are undoubtedly familiar:
George Gilder
What I see as George Gilder's primary failure is his inability to connect his work on "Men and Marriage" (aka "Sexual Suicide") with work regarding the high tech industry. The major result of this failure is his lack of credibility regarding outsourcing and guest worker visas for high technology.
Basically it boils down to this:
During Gilder's watch, what has been the cost of reproduction of a young American engineer vs the cost of reproduction of a young engineer from India?
My experience, working side-by-side with young H-1b visa employees during the latter part of the 1990s was that there is virtually no comparison:
While both a young engineering from India and a young engineer from the US must focus on his studies, career -- living like a virtual monk -- while working in the male-saturated ghettos that surround the engineering profession, only the Indian engineer has a social support network and the social status, frequently called "sexism" in the US (including arranged marriages), that provides him with a wife of similar background (crucial to reproduction in a larger sense) and the security to raise children within a marriage to such a wife.
Something Gilder should have done was figure out what a comparable marriage and family would actually cost a young US engineer.
Indeed, the reproductive costs, as well as resulting fertility rates and mating quality among US engineers are statistics that needs to be studied carefully if we are to come to any sort of understanding of the outsourcing phenomenon.
The strategy of encouraging women to go into programming makes sense from a few angles:
1) Corporations tend to discard programmers as they age. This means a woman, about the time her biological clock is kicking in, can exit to a second career as mother. This fits with lowering the cost of reproduction for programmers. Indeed, many Japanese companies have had a policy for sometime of encouraging young women, rather than young men, to enter software careers precisely because they are open about their "agism" in hiring programmers and saw this "second career as mother" as an honorable way of dealing with their employees who were programmers.
2) Since engineering is a male-saturated profession, it females entering the profession will have a lot less difficult time meeting a viable marriage partner of comparable background than will males entering such a male-ghetto.
3) Although many men "go gay" during stays in prison, and many may be cajoled into doing so during their stays in the male-saturated ghettos of western engineering, it really isn't a good way to run technological civilization to base either your penal system or your technology creation on "turning out" your most problematic _or_ your most valuable members.
4) Universities are increasingly female. Indeed, the University of Illinois, origin of the a lot of the key technologies going into computing, networking, the Internet and the web specifically, has gone from a male-saturated engineering school when I was working there to a much more female environment. Much of this can be attributed to the fact that young men simply are dropping out of society at a much greater rate but whatever the cause the fact
Re:Sexual Suicide (Score:3, Insightful)
Stop, my head hurts; I can't take anymore. American engineers aren't "dying off" because they can't reproduce. Your theory requires that
Re:its easy to call people stupid (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think it has as much to do with "communication" skills as it does with empathy, or the ability to appreciate the feelings of others and to respond appropriately. If you can't do that, you'll have a hard time in the dating game no matter how articulate you might be...
Re:its easy to call people stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
Those guys are sociopaths. They have the ability to fake empathy, and use it for manipulative purposes. They often become politicians.
Popularity of computer science. . . (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh thank God. It's about bloody time.
I don't suppose this means that the colleges can once again start teaching computer science to those who are actually interested in the subject and leave the application and HTML "programming" training to the private trade schools where it belongs?
Or would that effect their bottom line?
KFG
Specious & Self-Interested Reasoning (Score:5, Insightful)
That's just off the top of my head in a couple of minutes. I'm sure the reason the Computer Research Association found it "difficult to see" these reasons are that none of them are in the Computer Research Association's financial interest to promote as alternatives.
Personally (Score:3, Insightful)
That's fine by me. (Score:5, Insightful)
There's plenty of work for those of us already (or still) in IT... and plenty of competition as well.
Unlike many who saw the bursting of the ".COM bubble" as the arrival of apocalypse... I saw it as simply a time to separate the wheat from the chaff. Seems to me there were a lot of people who were in IT in 1999-2000 who had no business being there. I can't tell you how many times I heard fresh grads say "You mean I have to actually PROGRAM?!"
Not trying to knock anyone here, but if someone is trying to enter a field simply because they think there's money in it, they won't be there very long. Maybe that's what's going on here now.
Just my $0.02...
Re:That's fine by me. (Score:3, Insightful)
Cause and effect. (Score:5, Insightful)
Outsourcing (Score:3, Insightful)
However that's not a huge difference to bridge. I'm also not sure that this included the more hidden costs such as lost productivity because of time-zone differences, and language barrier issues.
Outsourcing isn't a panacea to everyone's problems, hopefully we figure that out before everything crashes in india too.
As one member of my
women? (Score:3, Insightful)
Um, wouldn't it work to just get male enrollment levels back up to where they used to be? What logic is there in saying "Less men are signing up, so the solution is to get more women interested." WTF? I mean, it's not like they're soldiers and they're dying and once they're gone they need to be replaced with women.
And no points for making easy jokes like "But getting more women into CS will attract men to the field! LOLOMGBBQ!!!11"
Computer science and IT workers (Score:5, Funny)
Why? Well any CS program worth its salt doesn't focus on teaching people how to admin Windows Server 2003, or Oracle administration. Rather, it focuses on teaching people about theories computation, algorithms, and, on the more applied side, best practices in software engineering. This kind of training will make some one a better programmer or software engineer, but it wouldn't necessarily be even that the relevant to the individual deciding which routers to buy or even the one installing set routers
<rant> Okay, so maybe I am little bit peeved when people ask me how to do such and such in Microsoft Word or Windows XP, and the looks they give me when I tell them I don't know. It's like they think it's so inexplicable that I don't know since some of the core classes for CS majors *must* be esoteric document formatting in Microsoft Word, and Windows XP - Why sometimes it can't connect to the network printer. </rant>
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
This is a good thing (Score:4, Interesting)
CS degrees are becoming irrelevent (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem is that the whole concept of CS is becoming increasing irrelevent as IT is such a diverse field. If you study chemistry, you graduate as a chemist, a mathematics graduate is also entitled to call himself a mathematician. But what about computer science? How many job ads have you seen that are calling for computer scientists? A degree that specialises in programming, networking etc would be far more valuable as the student would not be labelled a 'jack of all trades' which is exactly what we are turning out now.
Personally even though I don't have a degree I'm in a far better position with regards to my employment prospects than most of our graduates. My experience, together with a CCNA and MCSE (don't laugh, an MCSE backed up with experience is still valuable), puts me in greater stead than someone who has only studied a wide range of concepts and quite frankly, has mastered none of them.
All the employers we liase with talk about is a candidate's experience and not what pieces of paper they may possess. The job advertisements I now see reflect this too, very few seem to call for CS degrees and the ones that do only see it as a benefit, rather than a requirement of employment.
A Story of a Recent CS Graduate (Score:5, Insightful)
Hi there. I graduated with a degree in Comp. Sci. a couple of years ago. Like many other people, I started CS because I liked computers and I was pretty darn good with them. I participated in different computer clubs, learned how to program and do other fun things at an early age. Given that and the fact that IT provided stable and well-paid careers in the past, it was a no brainer! But had IT sucked in terms of pay, I would have never gotten into it to begin with. You heard me correctly. If I had to choose a major in 2002, Comp. Sci. would not be on my list.
See, I was poor all my life. I could not major in Liberal Arts or English because I had to support myself and think of supporting my parents and relatives in the future. I had to choose something that I liked and that paid good. This is a fucking no-brainer and I know that 90% of you would do the same thing. Would you study your ass off to find out that your jobs are moving to India and that you get shit for pay? I highly doubt that.
Comp. Sci. was a perfect major for me. I thought of going to a medical school, but my parents could not afford that. I thought of doing science, but then I saw what most of research specialist brought in terms of income and I said "fuck that." Business and Economics were okay; however, I did not like them as much as I liked Computer Science and that is why I majored in it. After four years of pain, I got out of college with no job, a butt load of loans and no chances to find a good job. It took me a while to find one and I went through a lot of pain to get where I am right now. Not everybody can do that.
Anybody with more than two brain cells saw that IT got fucking smashed and that it was harder to get jobs in the field. With that in mind, who wants to take a risk? How many people would like to study one of the hardest fields and then end up without a job and a load of student loans? It is not pretty; take my word for it. For some people it does not make sense to get into a field if they can't earn good money. This is just a rational thought because there are individuals, believe it or not, who want to be financially secure. Why would I pay to go to college if four years down the road I am going to be unemployed?
Of course, there are people who can afford doing what they like regardless of financial benefits. I know a person who pissed through four years of Ivy League education majoring in some useless crap that can't get a her a job that pays more than $25K/year. She can afford loving what she does for living (whenever she has a job) only because her daddy supports her. In theory, she does not even have to work to be well-off. For me, it was not an option. It was either boom or bust. I had to choose a discipline that satisfied three criteria: a stable career and income while being interesting at the same time. If a career did not fit any of those three parameters, I'd pass. Would not you?
I assume that Comp. Sci. can no longer fit people in my situation; hence we have a drop in enrollment.
Re:A Story of a Recent CS Graduate (Score:3, Informative)
Re:A Story of a Recent CS Graduate (Score:3, Informative)
Re:A Story of a Recent CS Graduate (Score:3, Informative)
Most students don't take these as majors either. True, CS is easy compared to the pure sciences and math, IMHO. But compare it to the crap most college students really take: medical, communications and business students are everywhere. Those of us in the tech/science field are fairly few in the overall scheme of things.
it comes and goes in cycles... (Score:5, Insightful)
years later, by '98 (the second computer boom-time thanks to the 'net) the CS classes were back up to over 200 / year.
now, they're dropping again.
i would put it that the reason is that there's no major "popularity" in Computers right now. they're just there, rather than being full of new and interesting things. the two peaks of CS student-hood were at times when there were tons of new things to do and discover. related to that was the idea that if one was into it at the time, one could get a guarenteed high-paying job fresh out of school.
the valley i was in was at a time of staticness. DOS hadn't changed in 5 years, windows was unheard of, "IBM-compatibility" was taking over the world, the mac was too expensive to become a hacker box, and most people getting into CS had never heard of "unix" before (much less VMS or the AS/400s where the real work was still being done). at the time, nothing looked like it would change. many in my class got into CS from other degree programs (physics in my case) because we discovered we were decent programmers first once exposed to real hardware.
today we're in another valley. the 90s saw a ton of good stuff and a ton of junk get made in a very short time, but right now there's little being done that a high school grad could recognize and go "hey, that's something i could be doing in 5 years". yeah, there's lots of stuff in XML -- but would a high school kid really know what it was or how it was useful to them?
its kinda like getting into open-source programming: having an itch to scratch, a peek of curiosity. the peaks of CS student-counts happen at times when there's so much going on that's obvious to anyone outside of the industry, enough to get kids to go "i wonder how they did that?" and get into the degree program to find out.
the valleys like now or like the late 80s to early 90s happen when what is going on in the industry is really only of interest to those within the industry.
we're back into a gadget world (digital cameras, mp3 players), and gadgets are known for being "black boxes" outside the industry. contrast that to the early micro- world where everybody had "BASIC", or the internet world where anybody could hack together a page of html, gifs, and perl scripts. you can't look at an iPod and go "i could make my own" the way you could some trendy web page or early 6502 game.
so really the downtimes comes down to being in a time where you can't see what you would do with a CS degree, compared to other times where it seemed obvious what you could do with one.
Who really needs CS majors? (Score:3, Insightful)
Xerox PARC is gone. DEC SRL and DEC WRL are gone. HP Labs is dead. Interval Research is gone. Bell Labs is a shadow of what it once was. Sarnoff Labs doesn't do much. IBM Almaden is being dismantled. SGI is in tatters. Apple R&D is very limited. And DARPA is going to stop funding CS research.
Who's doing advanced work? Google and Microsoft seem to have the only big remaining CS research labs in the US.
The cycle continues (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not surprising. It's a repeating cycle in the computer professions. We are now near the end of the doom and gloom phase. CS enrollments drop, less new IT professionals enter the field. Salaries stabilize. IT spending goes up, shortage of IT workers drives salaries up. Freshmen read about high salaries in IT and flock to CS. HR depertments hire any warm body to fill IT positions, then wonder if being dead might be OK if the mortition did a good enough job.
The party phase lasts a year or two. With salaries about as high as they will get, companies resort to other benefits to get enough IT workers. Suit and tie required becomes just try to make sure the holes in your shorts don't show the naughty bits and wash your flip-flops occasionally. Have a manicure and a massage!
Then the bubble bursts again. Queue massive layoffs. The corpses and warm bodies wash out of the field again. The swollen ranks of CS majors graduate at just about the worst possable time. Freshmen hear about the out of work graduates and choose nearly any other major.
Who cares? As a programmer, I think it's funny. (Score:3, Insightful)
I remember when the mechanical engineering field collapsed, back in the nineties. Auto manufacturing had gone overseas and thanks to NAFTA, to Mexico and Canada, so there weren't many jobs available. On top of that, the defense industry in California dried up, putting hundreds of thousands of experienced engineers out on the street. At that time, Mech.E was being called "the new liberal art".
Computer science is going through that right now. The computer science major is now just like an art or physics major -- no prospects. The only people who'll study computer science nowadays are people who LIKE it, career notwithstanding.
Think about art majors, for example. They know they're not going to get a corporate job or make a lot of money. They know they're pretty much in for the whole "starving artist" thing, that they'll end up working some joe job to pay for their materials, and that the likelihood of their making it big is pretty minimal. They do it anyway, because they see majoring in art as an end in itself rather than a career path. If they hit something just right, they might make it big. Even if they don't, they'll probably be able to make a little money on the side here and there and supplement their income.
It's going to be exactly the same for computer science majors, with one (beneficial) difference: computer science majors will usually be able to find a computer-related job that pays their bills, and they MIGHT be able to score something in civil service or academia and even be successful.
This isn't that important. It's mostly going to be used by corporations to justify increased outsourcing, and by colleges to justify increased advertising and the pursuit of federal grants.
It's bullshit in other words, not in the sense that enrollment ISN'T dropping (it IS) but in the sense that they claim it matters (when it doesn't).
CS is not understood (Score:3, Insightful)
If people really do feel that a shortage of computer scientists, electical engineers, and information technology folks is coming, they should do something about it! I feel that schools don't offer nearly enough grants for these areas. I also feel that years of success in industry have drained away many of the good teachers.
People who work in these fields need to try to spread the word about just what is that we do. I know folks who make software for video phones, rc cars, navy ships, stock traders, and massive computer clusters. There are so many things that you can do in this field. Many of them help people (like medical products) are innovative (music/video players), artistic (video games/web sites), etc.
I think if people really understood what is done in these fields more would be interested in it.
As for salary...I know quite a few software and hardware engineers and they all seem to be doing pretty well. CS is like any other field where you have to work hard to do well and move up.
Re:CS vs CE/EE (Score:5, Insightful)
Except for the fact that they get it wrong. There should be no difference in the comp sci program and the math program for the first two years.
. .
And they're welcome to it, but they should still learn their math. It is the basis of engineering and compute-ers.
No, I'm not ensconced in the ivory tower. I've been out in the real world for decades, banging my head against the wall dealing with all the problems that "engineers" create with their "practical solutions," that ignore even the most basic of mathematical "theory."
KFG
Re:CS vs CE/EE (Score:3, Insightful)
Comp Sci is a diverse discipline. While it may be true that math plays a huge role in your specific type of work, it's a mistake to force that model on everyone. Large scale software engineering projects have very little to do with mathematics.
The tight collusion between math and CS only pertains to a limited domain of theoretical work. One can learn the math n
Re:Women's participation is critical (Score:5, Insightful)
Obviously if the conclusion is people aren't doing CS because there's no money in it (which I do think is a valid conclusion, judging by the falling engineering enrollment from my own former school as well), there's a bigger problem than gender disparity.
Want more women in tech? Quit teaching them as zygotes that math is nerdy and for boys. If you look around it's really all over, in kids shows, in those pre-teen girly detective shows etc. Always the strong female character who is "not good at math, but very good with people". I notice it a lot at least, I'm sure there's more to it.
Unlike liberal arts subjects, math and science build on each other from the very beginning. Start with a weak foundation and you won't build a very tall building.
A female prospective (Score:3, Insightful)
Long, boring account:
I have a strong background in studio art and interpreting literature. I also happened to be good with people. My father looked at me and said, "Okay. You're good with people, you like to write, and you're creative. Now, get good at math." He showed me how I could still keep my love of art and yet get into a field where I could have a real im
Re:Women's participation is critical (Score:3, Interesting)
My last girlfriend definitely was strong at math, and math definitely was one of the technical subjects with a higher women percentage than other technical fields (although I would consider math more to be a philosophical field than technical).
But there are others who shy away. If the percentage of woman who cannot cope with math is really higher I dont know. But one thing I know for sure, women in their teens are much more influenc
Re:Women's participation is critical (Score:5, Interesting)
>types of play offered to infant males vs females
Amusingly enough a recent Scientific American article on gender differences mentioned an experiement dealing with the young and toys. They offered some baby monkeys/baboons their choice of various toys. The male babies preferred things like cars and balls that involved motion. The female babies preferred dolls. So maybe babies are given particular toys because that's what they like, not because that's what is being forced on them.
The article actually had a lot of other good material on the differences between the sexes. Apparently different areas of the brain take up proportionally different amounts of space in the two sexes (they use a ratio since women tend to be smaller). Since different parts are responsible for different functions, it makes sense this would lead to differences.
Re:TOO much calculus (Score:3, Insightful)
Any CS program I've seen also teaches the math that is directly related to CS. I at times thought the math sucked but I stuck with it, opened my mind and tried really hard and really learned a lot. Much of the calculus has helped in courses such as computer graphics.
My program has you take some elective math as well but they rece
Re:TOO much calculus (Score:3, Insightful)
Calculus? What if you need to make an application that keeps track of chess-style ratings? You'll have a much better understanding of what you're doing if you've learned calculus.
I'm reminded of kids in algebra I, asking "How are w
Re:TOO much calculus (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:As a college student (Score:3, Funny)