College Students Are Rushing in Record Numbers To Study Computer Science (nytimes.com) 242
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.
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.
Deja Vu (Score:5, Insightful)
I swear I saw this exact same thing happening in 1999.
And then a year later the bubble burst.
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and people say Y2K was a myth and nothing crashed. lol
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The market was doing pretty damn well in the first quarter of 2000
Indeed. NASDAQ peaked on March 10th, 2000.
In reality, the actual Y2K computing event didn't have much of an impact, and was pretty much forgotten about 72 hours after midnight.
Y2K was mostly a non-problem. Some companies expended a lot of effort, and avoided problems. Other companies did absolutely nothing, and they didn't have any problems either.
The story was, that to save memory, programmers would store the year in two bytes instead of four. But this was mostly nonsense. In the olden days programmers would store the year in ONE binary byte, and add it to 1900. So the real crash will happen on January 1st, 2156.
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Binary coded decimal. Two digits in a byte. How things were done, back in the stone age.
Re:Deja Vu (Score:4, Informative)
False. Lots of companies expended lots of money fixing the issue, making it a non-problem. People that didn't, often only seen minor issues (year 19100, computers that wouldn't boot because the BIOS wrapped, etc). There were plenty of real world non-computer Y2K issues as well, often with date fields that pre-populated "19" in the year.
And also false that one binary byte was used - dates are almost always stored in a form of BCD. This is exceptionally true if you had a mainframe computer because BCD was its primary mode of operation. In fact, Y2K issues cropped up in the 70s, because banks tried to issue 25 year mortgages and found out their computers gave errors trying to arrange the mortgages. So the financial industry was long aware of Y2K issues for decades before everyone else and they often had them fixed well before everyone else heard of them. Even industries like insurance would've ran into issues in the early 90s when term insurance started extending into the 2000s.
About the only issues were infrastructure and utilities who had little need for long term planning in their computer systems and thus would run into things only in real time. But they managed to survive, mostly because the issues lay within the billing and logging systems and not generally within control systems. This was also pre-smart meter era so even if the billing computer said you haven't paid in 100 years, they wouldn't cut your electricity off automatically.
Re: Deja Vu (Score:2)
Says someone who clearly wasn't involved
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I did a bunch of Y2K work for a Fortune 500 food manufacturing company in 1998 as new college grad. Learned COBOL and everything. Most of their internal systems were running on MVS and I had to fix the date on several on them. So at least for this company the issue wasn't nonsense. The problem for me was verifying the fix though, as I spent 90% of my time building sandboxes for the program because I couldn't roll the time forward on production servers. I think in the six months I worked there (before going
It never stopped. (Score:3, Interesting)
Over the years I've been to a few graduation ceremonies and every time when graduates of the school of computer science and math (or engineering in some cases) is asked to stand up, half the class does. And about four kids stand up for the school of liberal arts and humanities. There was a lull in the early thousands because of the dot.bomb crash but it picked right up again.
For the last 20 years, the only companies that think there's a "shortage" of Comp Sci grads are the ones who insist on only recruiti
Re:Deja Vu (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [usnews.com] 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 (Score:2, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
That is only if the new language is a "normal" computer language that consists of statements executed sequentially, with loops and branches, and the only new thing is a change in syntax.
If the new language, such as Prolog or Verilog, doesn't fit that paradigm, many programmers will struggle, and the "years of experience" can actually be a detriment. Some will never "get it".
Re: Deja Vu (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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I spent a lot of time doing thought experiments along these lines. By the time I wrote my first pr
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But stop trying to nerd-splain programming to programmers.
Never try to explain anything to Programmers.
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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.
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Right... but we are talking about college level learning, that costs a huge amount of money and takes years. These people are clearly serious and should grasp the basics after three years.
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Experienced programmers don't use those books. It would probably take more than 24 hours that way. Those books are for beginners to get the basics.
The technique is to just read the documentation that comes with the language. It is already targeted at experienced people who can understand technical words. No purchase necessary.
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Yeah, that's what we tell people when we're trying to get hired, but it's a gross exaggeration. Every language is a little universe of it's own that takes time to understand-- in a well established language, just knowing what libraries exist already and how to use them can take years to begin to understand.
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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 act
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University is supposed to give you a solid foundation and the skills to learn more. Employers need to understand that graduates will need mentoring and training.
A lot of this complaining is really them saying that they wanted experienced employees for graduate wages.
Re:Deja Vu (Score:5, Interesting)
There was the popping of the Tech bubble, mostly because Y2k fixes have been applied, or most organizations have upgraded their systems to newer ones.
But what else was the Clinton Administration opening the H1B Visa which had begin to flood the market with Cheap IT workers too.
This created a double whammy. A lowering demand in IT goods and services with a rising supply of IT workers. This really caused the bubble to pop.
Back in the late 1990's Front Page "Web Developers" were being paid 70k a year, and real programmers were getting paid 6 digits out of college.
Tech workers were at the C table suite, with power and authority.... Then it kinda just popped, so as their pay lowered because there was so many more options and less demand, their power rolls have decreased too.
Tech jobs started to pick up around 2009 or so, while the economy is recovering, tech was needed to work smarter and with less resources. Which made tech workers one of the few Middle class jobs. No where near like it was in 1999 but a good solid career.
So now that the old guard boomer tech workers are retiring, we are seeing a new generation wanting a decent quality of life studying classes that will bring them there with rather clear job paths.
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I swear I saw this exact same thing happening in 1999.
And then a year later the bubble burst.
The demand for big data is yet another bubble.
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The demand for big data is yet another bubble.
In 1999, the demand for CS grads was from unprofitable VC funded startups. Most were bound to fail.
The current demand for data wranglers is mostly from big obscenely profitable multinational corporations. They aren't going away.
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Echos old times (Score:3)
Back when I went to college, there was a similar rush - to the extent that one college I applied to, said I couldn't get in because the CS major I had chosen was full! Lucky that wasn't my first choice, but it was a big state school so it was quite a surprise as that was one of the backup choices...
Hopefully this is a more sustained rise in CS interest, which does need good people that understand most CS principals.
Re:Echos old times (Score:5, Interesting)
Back when I went to college, there was a similar rush - to the extent that one college I applied to, said I couldn't get in because the CS major I had chosen was full! Lucky that wasn't my first choice, but it was a big state school so it was quite a surprise as that was one of the backup choices...
Hopefully this is a more sustained rise in CS interest, which does need good people that understand most CS principals.
And hopefully it is actually learning CS principals of logical math and algorithms, rather than just learning how to compile Java/C#/Python/whichever the most popular language is. Rushes like this concern me a little that the schools wont take the time to teach properly.
Re:Echos old times (Score:5, Insightful)
Learning principles would be even better.
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Learning principles would be even better.
I think it becomes confusing because the logical math, or mathematics logic or something course in my college was not like Boolean logic math but more of the logical thinking math. You have a problem, don't give the answer, write down the process that would be used to find he answer. The sort of thing that programming is really based around, not writing code, but coming up with the optimal process to solve a problem. I'm also not talking about algorithms where you find the fastest solution to a problem,
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Woe to the CS program that forgets that CS is also a craft.
Enlightened code monkeys also bring a lot to the table.
Commanding officer: Build this!
Sargeant: How to not get yourself killed when the giant edifice collapses around you in smoke and ruin.
I find that a little bit of theory goes a long way. There's an awful lot of keyboardi
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Woe to the CS program that forgets that CS is also a craft.
Enlightened code monkeys also bring a lot to the table.
Commanding officer: Build this!
Sargeant: How to not get yourself killed when the giant edifice collapses around you in smoke and ruin.
I find that a little bit of theory goes a long way. There's an awful lot of keyboarding practiced in the trenches where command of deep theory is not your primary calling card.
And the theory doesn't need to be deep. Just teaching a student enough theory that they understand the structure of how to develop a program, irrespective of language. As opposed to the simplified here is problem, solution is these lines of code method of teaching, that leaves developers confused later in life when they have to create something different from what they've done before.
Re:Echos old times (Score:5, Interesting)
I once heard one of my own CS teachers say the only reason they agreed to teach Java, besides the mandate from higher ups, was because it didn't require teaching the students about memory management. I.e. RAM usage and and making sure you have enough allocated memory to flush working data to disk safely if the system craps itself.
Java is a quite reasonable langues to start teaching in. My school started with Scheme, for mostly the same reasons (pre-Java), though the department did have a hard-on for functional programming.
I don't have any problem with students learning to program in Java. What causes problems is students only learning to program in Java.
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I'd avoid object oriented languages to start with. OO is something you want to learn later, after you learn how computers and software actually work.
Otherwise they really seem to struggle with things like pointers. Going from non-OO to OO is much easier, no effort at all really.
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It is only the people who were indoctrinated in functional programming ideology who feel this way, and they're the least productive faction in a non-academic setting.
The computer itself is procedural, and the use cases for computing are entirely about side effects. (eg, output)
If you learn things from a procedural perspective you can be productive using anything, from ASM to C to Scheme or whatever.
The point is about learning the basics without ending up inside a faction; then you can do anything, including
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The computer itself is procedural
This stopped being true with the advent of Multi-Core and FPGAs. If the world is still clinging to this belief, then no wonder most programmers cannot code multi-threaded programs.
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I have programmed in quite a few languages over the years, and Java is fantastic for teaching mostly because it is very generic. Pretty much every other language out their has some major weird quirk that is completely unlike all other languages. Sure, learning Scheme will teach you many basic programming skills, but will not teach you how to actually code in any other language at all. You will hardly be in a better position than a Math student to program in Java or C after being taught in Scheme.
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And yet, I can web search the error message and figure out what the problem is most of the time, and very quickly, but idiots whose noses are held too high for that would spend an hour chasing things around in a debugger to figure out they had a typo or an incorrect dependency version.
There is no just cause to get snobby about that stuff, I get called in to clean up messes at both ends of that spectrum. And idiots who didn't know what they were doing and tried to paste their way out of a hole waste time and
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Seriously? When I search on an error message I tend to find half of the hits are other people asking the same question I am, and the other half are out-dated answers to a similar question that I'm not actually trying to ask.
But then, this could be because I'm one of those idiots who tries to figure out things for myself first before I do web searches.
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Don't get your hopes up. What you'll get today is the same kind of people you got at the turn of the millennium: People who don't care whether they study CS, BA or law, what they care about is money and where they go to is whatever promises the most of that.
And they'll be facing the same problem as those back at the turn of the millennium: That CS is fundamentally different from BA and law in that simply hoovering up the book's content and barfing it onto the test isn't enough to pass.
Many rushing in but... (Score:5, Interesting)
How many are dropping out when they find out whats involved with the major or don't make it through the weeder classes? I got my degree in 2002, at the time UMass had about 300-400 incoming CS majors and graduated 50 students a year.
Many many people who come in without pre-existing self interest and self exploration find the subject too dull or too hard to make it.
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That basically never changes.
But when it's a goldrush (85, 99, now) , there are even more unqualified/unprepared freshman.
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UMass has in the past 20 years made the program a little easier. You only need through calc II now. You don't need to take physics 1 and 2, you can take your choice from several electives. The grumpy old emeritus that used to fail everyone out of the first 200 level class has long since retired..
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When I did EE, calc and physics 1 did most of the heavy lifting with regard to getting students to 'rethink their major'. It didn't take long at all.
We were down 20% in less than a week. 50% by the end of the first semester. A few of those might have dropped the class and kept the major, but that was just their ego holding them back. Most of the 'fails' switched down to CS, then failed there as well. (CS lacked rigor, they could get away with taking 'baby calculus'/'calc for business majors', which of co
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Colleges are addressing that problem by dumbing-down the criteria.
I have interviewed candidates for programming positions, who have college degrees, and who cannot solve basic problems. All they can do is write scripts, provided they don't have to think anything through.
I talked to some of them about what their courses covered. One person had passed an "algorithms" course in which the only code they wrote was code that ran an algorithm and tracked its performance. They didn't code a single algorithm them
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There have always been many _terrible_ CS programs.
CS is a mixed bag, it's generally taught out of one of three schools/departments. In descending order of desirability: Engineering, Math, Business.
Often CS is it's own 'department' but it can always be traced back.
Once you've identified local schools where CS is in the business school. You can just stop interviewing those graduates, they suck.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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True, but a little bit of structured education goes a long way. These days there are lots of good online classes, of course, but almost no one figures out both pointers and recursion from hobby coding.
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*almost no one waves back at you*
eh (Score:2)
For someone with those two motivations (pay and status), seems like law or medical school would be a better option. Particularly the latter.
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The have any hope of getting into med school they have to have a 4.0 in premed (on a 4 point scale). If they didn't have a 4.0 in HS and their counselor lets them major in pre-med, they have been ill served.
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MD = Memorized Degree.
Med school has been like that forever in the USA.
Dad taught med students chemistry. When he gets a few drinks into him, he will often brag about the number of 'memorizing morons' who he stopped from becoming physicians by giving them a B (mostly general chem, before they got to the memorize fest that is organic.) His claim is that it was _common_ for pre meds to not be able to balance a RedOx equation, a subject they all got As in during HS.
I smell bullshit (Score:5, Interesting)
br. Then again maybe this is folks gunning for jobs that didn't used to need a college degree because companies use degrees as leverage to get H1-Bs and skip training costs.
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High status? (Score:5, Interesting)
Wait, I'm supposed to be high status? As in people are supposed to look up to me, or listen to what I have to say?
The reality seems more like I'm just an "IT Guy", which apparently some kind of code monkey or help desk guy. Either that, or I'm just born with all the knowledge of the whole IT world in my brain, and if I don't know something, I'm somehow an idiot.
But this status thing sounds nice. Like I'm a doctor or lawyer, and have reached some kind of god-like level. When does that come into play?
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It is just a matter of having a guild/association. Those organizations raise the perceived value of their members. That's the reason doctors and lawyers are praised to high heaven (even though they can be complete and utter trash), while us "IT guys" are looked down at like nothing more that glorified plumbers. Everyone deserves same kind of respect, but that is another story.
That's Only A Paper (Super Blood Wolf) Moon (Score:2)
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if in_bag == true Return(success);
Save $$ (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think so (Score:2)
Fools - chasing jobs that will be replaced by AI before their work careers are probably 1/2 over.
A lot of jobs will be replaced by AI, but frankly AI cannot handle how illogically real computers behave well enough to take over programming.
The day you'll know we are near to AI being able to handle programming well is the day the search for "Robot arm to slam keyboard" does not come up empty handed with real keyboard-slamming action.
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Zero jobs will be replaced by AI. Only parts of jobs will be replaced by AI.
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Re:Save $$ (Score:4, Insightful)
You know those jobs top out around $18/hr right? (Score:3)
As for plumbers, well, again unless you're running your own company it doesn't pay well. It's less skilled than electri
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Internet says average pay for journeyman electrician with 5-10 years experience is $25/hr.
Here in Oregon wages generally, and cost of living, are low, and yet looking at listing right now today, there are listings $35-50/hr.
Even a lighting technician starts at $17. You probably just assumed that nothing changed, maybe you were watching fox news for 10 years or whatever and didn't know?
A journeyman electrician is qualified to do HVAC work, if they're not too snobby for it that pays $20-30/hr.
You show me an e
it was $18 when I was in the biz (Score:2)
Moreover to put all that into perspective when my kid graduates from college she's start at around $30-$40/hr (depending on what she wants to do as a RN) and it'll go up from there, eventually topping out around 60/hr.
If I may digress a bit: Electricians without certs, experience and extra training make $13/hr. I know several. A
Union jobs got "jacked" by automation (Score:3)
I know you're just trolling, but my point stands. We're running out of work most folks can do. Want to see what happens to people that nobody needs and nobody wants? Go look at an Indian reservation before the Casinos. Or Africa. It's a whol
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I know 5 times as many housewives and office workers with bad knees and bad backs than Trades people, and most of the people I know are in Trades.
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Sort by merit (Score:2)
Who wants to study and can show they could study in the past.
Good thing I think - like the new kids (Score:2)
Programming ( as I like to call it ) is a great career. Afraid I came of generation of hackers at early days of mid 90's on the web front.
Dodgy CGI Perl scripts , SVN as version control - if any. Proud to see it mature over almost 25 years.
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Glad to see I'm in the thundering horde.. (Score:4, Informative)
After being out of school for 25+ years I just started my masters in CS. Should be done in about 28 months.
This explains why the classes are ALL 100% full with students sitting on the floor.
Make sure you have the dedication for CS (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Being a carpenter before the invention of "stick-built" houses was exactly the same; every building was different!
With a traditional "frame-built" structure, you might indeed need a custom tool to finish the job; you might even need to design a custom tool so that you can! Even just getting the materials into position required custom levers and weird pulley contraptions. Can you imagine a modern carpenter without power lifts and winches?!
And it isn't like they had been trained as engineers; they had to lear
I did smell this coming ... (Score:2)
... didn't you? The hype will be over in two years once agian and the market will be cleaned once again.
I however, will continue to program, CS degree or not, Job-Hype or not.
Young Fools. (Score:4, Interesting)
If you REALLY want to be rich become a Car Mechanic or a Plumber.
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I assume you're joking, but at the one end of the spectrum, the owner of the most successful auto shop in town makes less money than a successful independent plumber, and the owner of a successful plumbing business might be making seven figures.
The average owner of an auto shop makes similar money to a journeyman plumber, but has to invest a huge amount of money into tools and equipment.
The only reasons anybody works as a mechanic is because they
A) really enjoy working on cars or
B) hate having to do what a
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Bah. My son was a car mechanic for seven years. Each new job paid less than the last one. If you work for a dealership, you get paid shit for mechanics work.
- Necron69
Comp Sci, eh? (Score:4, Interesting)
It seems to me there really is a strong demand for certain computer-related fields, but "Computer Science" gets thrown out there as a college major far more often, as kind of a "catch all".
Correct me if I'm wrong, but back when I was in college in the early 1990's, Computer Science was essentially a math degree, where you learned a lot of theory of how computer CPU's work along with the other circuit level internals that make up a computer. As soon as I told my guidance counselor that I had an interest in computers, she immediately tried to steer me that direction. That's when I pushed back, because I'm not even very good at math and that's not at all what interests me about them. I was more fascinated by the growing ability to network computers together and use them as a next generation communications tool. (Once I said THAT, they put me in some telecom courses that were really about nothing more than analog telephony over copper wires. So that was a waste too.)
In hindsight, I think I was really searching for a good MIS career path, but it barely existed back then. I wound up focusing on creative writing instead, and learned the computer ins and outs on my own.
I see data analytics as "the next big thing" right now, if you're math inclined. There's BIG money in finding experts who can crunch big data collections and interpret their meaning for everything from politics to marketing. It's also a pretty good bet to get specialized in distributed, cloud-hosted databases, if that piques your interest. I suppose there's some demand for a computer scientist who can grok the upcoming quantum computing revolution too. But all in all? I can't see it being that worthwhile to invest in a Comp Sci degree right now, vs. some other options?
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There is very little math involved; especially compared to something like accounting.
There are also very few circuits.
It is mostly just writing high-level code in an IDE.
The reason there are math requirements is because it is a BS degree; almost all the non-programming requirements are the same as for all BS degrees.
Of course, actual programming, including data analytics involves almost no math skills; the computer does the math for you! Very few people will ever be writing a compiler or something where the
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Thanks... That makes sense, but also sounds like some of it has changed since way back when I was in college. (I knew Comp Sci majors were doing coding, but there was kind of a separate track if you wanted to become a programmer. I remember more of them explaining it to me as learning the math and theory that you'd need if you were, say, to get hired by AMD or Intel to help design the next new GPU or CPU?) Of course, our programming classes used to involve signing in to green screen dumb terminals connect
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Correct me if I'm wrong, but back when I was in college in the early 1990's, Computer Science was essentially a math degree, where you learned a lot of theory of how computer CPU's work along with the other circuit level internals that make up a computer.
It was true then and still is true now.
People that write good code understand the process of good design. Rarely does a computer science department even offer such courses, at least at the undergraduate level. What they do even less often is require students take any of these courses to graduate. The process of good design is, however, required of all engineering students. Back then, in the 1990s, the words "software" and "engineering" rarely appeared together. It was certainly possible to graduate in
Bots will take their jobs before they are finished (Score:2)
I'm a seasoned senior dev and even I am just doing maintenance 95% of the time.
And most of that I can do because I got mad *nix and CLI skills.
Fake STEM shortage paying off handsomely (Score:2)
Remember this?
https://slashdot.org/story/191... [slashdot.org]
These people will only be soldiers in the reserve army of the unemployed. I had it bad enough going into the workforce between the dot-com bust and the great recession, and I went into IT/compsci because it was something I liked and was good at, not just as a get-rich-quick scheme like many of these suckers likely did.
Where is the software engineering degree? (Score:2)
Computer science as a bachelors needs to be dropped like the dead subject that it is. Keep the master and PHD programs though for those pursuing academic careers. How about computer systems engineering? Data analytics? At least systems administration is still relevant but hardware design should probably be spun off though I suppose that's covered by systems analyst. Generally the names of all the computer degrees need to change to make them relevant to careers.
Re: (Score:3)
"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."
Given that white males are the only ones who face institutional discrimination on college admission and women and minorities are given explicit advantage and automatically beat out equally qualified white males how is this an issue?
Breaking News! Extinction-Event Meteor Approaching Earth! Women and Minorities at risk!
Re:hmmmm (Score:4, Insightful)
I didn't get that either so I did the unthinkable - I skimmed the article and found this (before I gave up)...
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).
Re: hmmmm (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
"from being so toxic that the girls don't want to take classes with them"
It's high school. The boys are far more toxic to other boys to the point of literally beating them. It doesn't stop the boys taking the course.
Has it occurred to anyone that girls just aren't particularly interested in CS? Billions of dollars have been spent by tech companies providing these courses to women and minorities, much on efforts that don't merely target them but explicitly exclude white males.
Re: (Score:3)
So many sheep who don't realize the entire point of this giant diversity push is just to flood the hiring pool and dilute down wages. These companies pushing diversity and this agenda don't actually care about women and minorities they care about making more profit by cutting or at least slowing the growth of wages.
Re: (Score:2)
Such as? By all means tell me just one concrete thing a poor white kid from a broken home gets when he tries to climb out of his government assisted housing and go to college? I mean other than discriminated against for grants, funding, and admissions?
Re: (Score:2)
Stop making excuses and get your fucking ass to the Community College and talk to a guidance counselor, fuck-an-A this is just too stupid to read, it hurts my eyes.
Re:Great more LISP weenies and ML professors. (Score:4, Interesting)
I went to University of Connecticut, and I can tell you I had a mastery of C++ and Java before leaving school as those were the focus (1999-2004). My job has *not* been outsourced, went from Junior to Senior, to Manager now Director of my software division. Learning how to learn is probably the most important things you can comprehend in school. I started contracting in web development while I was in school. Even though my school days were post 1999 bubble, people at the time could still make money programming, especially discount rate college students.
Do you have to be driven? Yes. Do you have to work hard? Absolutely. Is CS an awesome career? Yes! If a piece of paper is needed as the entry fee, then I would insist that its totally worth it. Total cost for me was $70k (tuition and housing), 100% financed as I had no financial support -- and I would do it all over again.
Disclaimer: CS is only a good choice if you have a genuine interest and love for electronics and/or software. If you're came here just for the promise of money, you will suck at it.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: I agree! (Score:2)
LOL seriously? Out of those only Brainfuck is difficult. And I have never seen anyone use it for anything serious.