Computing's Lost Allure 822
khendron writes "An article in the New York Times, describes how the number of students majoring in computer science in university has dropped off with the rest of the hi-tech economy. The bright side: the students who are enrolling are doing so because they love computers. Not like a few years ago when students were enrolling because they wanted to make a quick buck. I'll take quality over quantity."
Then why is it... (Score:5, Interesting)
"Oh, So you like computers too?"
"Nope! Know nothing about them at all!"
Google Link-- (Score:5, Interesting)
--Travis
Quality (Score:5, Interesting)
Interesting... (Score:2, Interesting)
Of Course CS Ph.D.s are just the opposite (Score:5, Interesting)
Nothing to see here, move along (Score:5, Interesting)
They never seem to think, for whatever reason, that the job situation won't be the same in 4-8 years..
That's one of the reasons teaching (I was married to a teacher, and have a number friends who are)degrees take such gigantic leaps from feast to famine and back. The news says "there's a shortage", and a few years later says "there's a glut"
The only thing new here is this is basically the FIRST time this cycle has taken place in the computer industry. The field has changed a lot, due to it's newness, but that also happens to every field going through it's infancy.
Quality? (Score:5, Interesting)
The truth is that most people who have an aptitude for a field will at least dabble in it. But that doesn't mean they will care much for it.
An example of this is simple: In high school I was very good at Biology. It came naturally to me, and I made excellent grades in my Bio class. None of that changed the fact that I hated it. To me, Bio is not very interesting or even especially challenging. So I avoid it, even though when I have taken courses, I have always gotten an A in the class.
How does this apply to Computer Science? Well just the opposite is true. I love it, but that doesn't mean that I am particularly skilled. Sure I can do some limited web deisgn, and I understand hardware and software concepts fairly well, but I know that many of the people on this site are much better at all of that than I ever will be. Why? Because I am not really a much at calculus, which is necessary if you want to be really good at Computer Science.
This is why career counseling is so important. People need to get a grip on what they are both good at and enjoy, and concentrate there. This is one of the major failings of American Education--we focus so much on the idea of going to school to get a better job that we miss the point that if you are doing what you enjoy and are good at, you can almost always find a way to make money--if you put forth the effort to be the best.
That said, I would definitely see people that are going into a field because they enjoy it, not because they think it will make them money. Any field.
This was to be expected (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:hopefully this will be for more than just uni's (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:hopefully this will be for more than just uni's (Score:2, Interesting)
Never trust a computer proffesional that doesnt list computer as a hobby.
I strongly disagree.
From my own experience, my computing skills raise when I manage to let computers a little bit out of my life. For in this spare time
- I can have life, and it makes me stronger to solve what computers are useful to (solving real-life problems)
- I can think about the difficult programming issues I could not solve sitting in front of the machine.
Re:Quality? (Score:1, Interesting)
Finally! (Score:5, Interesting)
Observations. (Score:3, Interesting)
Furthermore, consider the idea that CS students typically become programmers or software engineers somewhere. For those that "love" the field, they will still more than likely end up in a position where they not allowed to truly work in a free environment where the CS love is oozing and creativity is encouraged; more often, they are thrown into an environment where the salaries are mediocre, and where the deadlines and demands of marketing take precedence over the love of CS. 9 times out of 10, even the best get burned. Software companies don't tend to want the people who love the work; they want people who are drones who will just do what they are told. There are some serious misconceptions about how things work with regards to people who genuinely love what they are doing. It's hard to see any glory in this position.
Finally, I'd like to point out that there is nothing really that ties the American student's job to the US. I fully expect that most engineering and science jobs will be performed by immigrants, or by firms in India within the next 10 to 15 years. This further removes the glory of being a computer science graduate.
my experience (Score:5, Interesting)
Enjoyed that (although half the class were married or practically married and the other half had never said boo to a real live woman), drank lots, did some work, had a great laugh and came out with a BSc(hons) Computer Science.
Then started working.
Worked for a consultancy developing telemetry systems for big water companies. Suddenly I realised that what was my passion - translated into the worlds most mind-numingly boring job.
Sitting all day, every day at a computer looking at over a million lines of code written in C (with macros to make it look like ALGOL-86) not understanding how it all fitted together, not having anyone talk to me, getting boring work packages and generally hating every minute of it. I saw no fruit of my labours, got no recognition and whilst the company made record profit I got penuts pay-rises.
So I left, moved to management consultancy, worked with short projects, people and things that actually came to light. I did project management and operations management and ... enjoyed it.
I don't claim that all IT is like that, indeed it's not, but my initial experience of it put me completely off for life, and, if i hadn't left, could have completely put me off computers full stop.
Now I just tinker - but it's a damn sight more fun doing that, than for a job.
Kinda like those pre-law majors last decade. (Score:2, Interesting)
Glad to see the economic downturn has weeded out the wannabes who have no clue about designing or writing quality software.
Re:Ever Looked At the Current Job Requirements?? (Score:3, Interesting)
I actually talked to one of the HR droids at a "10 years of Windows 2000" job, asking them how anyone can have 10 years experience with a 3 1/2 year old OS. . .
Her reply: Our requirements are vetted by mamagement, and are thus realistic.
So I modded the resume to show "12 years experience with Windows 2000 and related systems". . .and was called for an interview 45 minutes later.
Needless to say, I wasn't interested. . .and recently saw they filed for bankruptcy. . .
All because I'd gotten a copy of Windows 1.0 as a door-prize
Re:Preach it brother (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Preach it brother (Score:2, Interesting)
I looked at that code...and my god... Why? was the only question I had for every line of code. I took her assignment and rewrote it for her. BUT, I didn't let her just walk away, I made sure she stayed there while I explained every little piece of the code. By the time she left an hour later, she had a much better understanding of programming, but I feel that she will never be good with it.
Re:Preach it brother (Score:2, Interesting)
glad I never ran into you when I graduated from college (with my degree in Public Relations). All of my skills are self taught, and now 10 years later, I'm a senior developer and consultant and I have worked with *many* CS grads who only knew how to do the things they learned in class, while the English majors (and the like) who all had side projects (real experience) were kicking ass at coding.... and understood the important concepts first hand because they were learned from passion and desire not theorized on in a sterile class room.
ugh... also... maybe this goes down into the whole "Don't judge a book by its cover?" concept?
Re:hopefully this will be for more than just uni's (Score:3, Interesting)
I work on mainframes all day and would list "PCs" as my favorite hobby. I soldered my first three Z80 motherboards together myself, starting in '79, and I guess I haven't burned out yet.
While not a true indicator of someone's competency, there is some face validity in the idea that someone who is passionate about something will tend to be more proficient at it.Re:Then why is it... (Score:5, Interesting)
"Oh, So you like computers too?"
"Nope! Know nothing about them at all!"
Yeah, I know the feeling. I have also had people say "Oh, you got into computers to make money huh?"
"No, I got my degree in '93, before there was even really an internet as you know it." That usually makes them think.
Oooo, I feel the ol' rant gun warming up...
What I would really like to say is - First off, a computer science degree is a lot more than learning how to use Power Point and Excel. I did a lot of programming, theory, hardware, OS, math, and many other things. I say I have a degree in "computers" because I don't want to explain all this to you so you can give me a blank stare. And just because you have a PC with a neon-lighted window in it doesn't mean we have some kind of bond between us. I don't expect you to understand what my experience is, but I do expect you to not ask me dumbass questions. "Oh, so you are the computer guy - I have a problem with mine crashing, do you know what's wrong with it?"
So I bite my tongue. Sometimes I give in and try to make conversation, and I still get stupidity.
Me: "So, I hear you are into computers. What do you have?"
Durr: "A Dell."
Me: "What is it, a Pentium 3, Pentium 4...?"
Durr: "I don't know, but it's fast"
Me: "Oh. What OS do you run on it?"
Durr: "Windows"
Me: "NT, 2000, XP...?"
Durr: "yeah."
Yarrrrghh.
Oh, but don't think this idiocy is just within the computer field. My wife gets the same type of answers when she talks about her job. "Oh, so you are a French teacher. I took Spanish in high school."
Hey, that's fucking fantastic - why would I care? What does that have to do with anything at all? Hey, you know that French and Spanish are both languages, you are a FRIGGIN genius!
Now I don't expect that people should know that programmers aren't the same as PC techs, and they aren't the same as network techs, etc. But I do expect that people shouldn't assume that all computer-related jobs are the same. I know that not all doctors are the same, even though they are all doctors. I know that all attorneys don't handle the same kind of cases. I don't ask a lawn maintenance guy if he thinks I should get my roof replaced.
*warning* rant-gun ammunition depleted.
So there are less people taking CS classes now? I haven't been in school for a while, but I have seen many of the people who have come out with degrees. Some have been really good, and some haven't a clue. I am sure the curriculum has changed since I was there, and nobody is learning assembly anymore, but even back in the early 90's there were too many people in the field. Of course, I'll bet that many of those people didn't make it through, or opted for the less technical computer related degress. Heck, now there may even be more types of "computer related" degrees. All I know is that in the mid-90s there was a flood of new grads who got very high paying jobs simply by coming out of school at the right time. I relate it to the dotcom boom, in that the IT sector isn't in a slump, we are about where we should be. We just experienced an incredible boom, took a dive, and now we have settled down. The anomoly was the boom, not the crash. We are just now returning to "normal". Our unemployment rate is high because the market was flooded for a couple of years. Unfortunately, in addition to the IT crash, we have a pretty bad economy to work in as well. For those who have weathered the storm, I hope that there are good times ahead.
This trend is a plus (Score:4, Interesting)
like many of the others in the high tech bust. The most threatening thing to the American high tech economy at this time is continuing economic globalization. Interestingly, this trend is now expanding to threaten other agendas that require higher education. Just this week I heard that CPAs are now losing jobs to India because the average college trained CPA in India makes $6000 per year.
Why have we become so vulnerable to foreign competition? In my opinion, it is due to the way that we have commoditized and dumbed down our higher education process. We've concentrated on creating a manufacturing line like education process to turn out droves of programming/financial/engineering/etc robots. OF COURSE THIS CAN BE COPIED!!!
The education process used to turn out thinkers who, instead of being brainwashed in the current mantra de jeur, solved problems without a toolbox full of fix-alls that never quite fit the problem. In creating the mass manufacturing style education system, we've neglected the necessity to continue to produce the thinkers.
A step back in volume might be a good thing to allow some of the education to return to a more renaissance approach.
Long term, if we hope to maintain our lead and not spiral into deflation across all sorts of technical areas, we need to look toward an education system that adequately provides for both types. The current prevailing CS curriculum is more of a tech school approach to education and should be moved to the tech schools. Then the colleges need to return to teaching the best of the best who have the special abilities needed to develop the technologies to keep us from being commodotized down to $6000 / year salaries. And their education should not be full of mantras but instead concentrate on teaching basic facts (instead of beliefs like OOP, structured programming, etc), and approaches to analyzing and solving problems in a manner that fits the problem, not the tools.
Re:Preach it brother (Score:5, Interesting)
I am salf taught as well, and it scared me to find out one of the guys in another programming group has a Masters in CS. He is slow at coding and writes poor code.
It's amazing, the majority of guy in my group are self taught and our customers (internal to the company) love us. We go out of the way to make sure that our systems do what they need to do, when they need to do it. The other group all have degrees, all are certified and write systems that routinely crash, are slow and bloated and take FOREVOR to be released.
I do know that not every case is like this. There are good people with degrees and bad people without degrees.
Maybe I am just bitter...
Re:I wouldn't recommend CS today... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:hopefully this will be for more than just uni's (Score:3, Interesting)
It's also can be a drag to manage the job-is-my-hobby set, as they want to have pedantic arguments over every last detail and over technology choices constantly. More than once I've had to explain to people that worked for me that a large group of people with broader knowledge than them (about politics, cost, other technologies, et al) had a made a decision on technology "X" and that "X" wasn't up for debate, but the best implementation of "X" was.
Some of these people are zealots for "Y", some of these people are zealots against "X", some of these people think that using a crossover cable between '386s in the basement makes them some kind of expert in computer systems generally.
While I value their opinions and their willingness to inform themselves, there are times where they need to stuff a sock in it and do the job, even if it means something against their judgement.
Well rounded people generally don't have this problem, but they can have the problem of not enough interest to obtain depth -- it's a two way street sometimes, but the well-rounded types tend to be able to focus on getting the job done rather than needless bickering.
Re:The great IT labor shortage of 2006 (Score:5, Interesting)
Have faith. There's an element of truth to what he said. The achilles heel of the indians isn't poor people skills, poor communication skills, poor hygiene, or 3rd world code, (to quote a few common complaints) it's their culture. In general, they're all climbing the ladder. I've noticed that a lot work as programmers for only five years or so before becomming managers. So there aren't many indians with 10 or 15 years of experience. To quote morpheus, they will never be as strong or as fast as you can be. This will be amplified by the lack of people coming out of college. It will be more expensive (because of low wages) to get to the 10 year mark. After that, you're employable again. You'll do the design and fix whatever 3rd world code comes back. That's your niche now. Exploit it. Avoid indian dominated technologies like oracle and java. Learn new technologies before they make it to the schools in india. I think things will return somewhat for the more experienced people. The new grads are still fucked.
Almost my turn to graduate... (Score:2, Interesting)
A view from academia... (Score:3, Interesting)
1. Most students we get in CS/CIS have no conception of what computing really *is*. They are not getting into the field to be rich -- because they don't really know WHY they are in ANY field at all. Some major in computing because their parents push them into it (they have a 6-7-year old idea that computing jobs are growing on trees, still) or because -- seriously -- they love playing video games and want to "do" video games as a career. Virtually none of our CS/CIS majors have any previous coding experience coming out of high school. There's very little sense of the breadth of the computing field, the major ideas and current issues in the field, or even that being a CS major means learning several computing languages and writing usable code in them. THAT side of computing never gets portrayed on TV, does it?
2. Most students in CS/CIS -- maybe because they don't have that sense of the meaning or depth of the computing field -- absolutely revolt when math or science are brought into the picture. For instance, I just taught a course on cryptography, and the idea that good cryptosystems (esp. public-key systems) are based on good (= hard) math problems, and therefore we need to understand the math to be good at the systems, was very hard for the CS majors in there to swallow. In general when math shows up in CS, a lot of CS majors suddenly become business or sociology majors. I can't help but think that the decline in CS majors is tied in a fundamental way to an overall decline in interest in math and science here in the US.
3. I see a general trend among all our students that, while they are generally bright and pleasant folks to teach and work with, they don't have much in the way of a big picture idea of who they are and what they want to do with themselves. In particular, a lot of my students don't particularly "enjoy" ANYTHING -- in the sense that they like to spend spare time working on or reading about something, like slashdotters with computers -- that could be remotely considered intellectual or academic. Their hobbies tend more toward passive things like sleeping, watching TV, playing video games etc. rather than computers, reading books, or even playing sports -- things that demand persistence, skill, and discipline.
So from my point of view the decline the article talks about is just symptomatic of a larger shift in the culture to which college students belong. I do think that the students who stick with CS will be the true believers (a lot like math majors in that sense) but every freshman class is going to be the same as it has been composition-wise.
But to end on a positive note, the whole reason I love being a prof is that I get to be counter-cultural all day long and get paid for it.
My Anecdotal Story... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Preach it brother (Score:3, Interesting)
Finally, I wanted to respond specifically to this post:
The schools shouldn't be going out of their way to graduate programmers who can't program.
I don't know of a single school that offers a Programming degree program. Some offer Software Engineering, but the vast majority only offer Computer Science. Many people fail to realize that Computer Science is basically a math program, and has very little to do with programming at all. A Computer Science program shouldn't teach programming beyond an intro course--you don't expect a math major to take much physics beyond basic mechanics and E&M. Academia is not yet prepared to admit that programming is a discipline unto itself. In my opinion, Computer Science really should be a graduate program for people who study Programming or Software Eng. in undergrad.
I don't know of anyplace in the world that you can go to and learn programming, except on your own with a book, a computer and a compiler (or interpreter, don't nitpick). Coworkers can be great--well, if you have somebody like me as a coworker. But you can't just go out and sign up for a coworker to look over your shoulder. My point being that when you need to hire somebody, you should actually think about what got taught in the program they graduated from. And, if you find somebody that's good at programming, that person *is* self-taught, even if he or she did the self-teaching while at a university while taking CS classes.
Re:Preach it brother (Score:3, Interesting)
> computers for nine years prior to starting my
> degree.
Catch-22 ahoy!!!
BTW, I just want to make one thing clear here. I have the highest respect for the institution of Computer Science as well as those who sweat blood and tears to join it out of love for said institution. It pains me to see it all destroyed by companies and universities that feel the need to hire/churn out individuals who can barely run a compiler. Growing up, I *wanted* a good education in CS, especially the more advanced topics like OS design, compiler design, advanced data structures, etc. When I realized the direction that schools were going, I made myself learn it and never turned back. Criticize me all you want for it, but I'm at least as capable as any CS grad, likely more so. But of course, it's practically a tradition when you're a home schooler.
* Okay, fine. Gold isn't all *that* rare. Replace it with your favorite rare isotope and continue. Not that most isotopes are worth much to your average person.
Re:Preach it brother (Score:3, Interesting)
I really wish more people understood this.
My employer has purchased several companies in the last couple years, and in every case I've run into at least one system put together by a self-taught guru. In every case they "solve" their problem with hard-coding, kludges, or brute-force. The crappier the system the more defensiveness and ego from the creator.
We all do crap work sometimes when working under extreme time constraints, but professionals will go back and spend the time to do it right when the crisis is past. The willingness to spend the time to do it right (as well as the recognition for the the need to do so) is more common amongst college grads.