The Changing Face of Computer Science

For another facet of CS education, HangingChad writes "MSNBC is carrying an interesting article on the changing demographics of IT workers and education. The upshot of the article is that older, working adults are taking IT related courses for advancement while comp sci continues to slide as a career choice in college, which the researchers in the article attribute to perception issues." From the article: "In fact, as the technology-dependent United States struggles to stay ahead of the Bangalores of the world, the Higher Education Institute at the University of California-Los Angeles found significantly fewer students at the college level -- 60 percent fewer -- wanted to study computer science in 2004 as opposed to the year 2000. "

Trend

I thought education and career are like stock exchange, you should always buy low and sell high, but most people tend to buy high and sell low.

Now that everyone's talking about CS skill shortage, this is the worst time to start studying CS, because everyone will be doing the exact same thing, just like they did on "multimedia" courses in 1998/1999.

If you started studying CS right after the dot-com bubble burst (around 2000, "worst" time to get into IT), you will be very popular right about now.

I agree!

Obviously there is a much better career choice. [popealien.com]

Choose wisely for maximum income!

Re:Trend

I thought education and career are like stock exchange, you should always buy low and sell high, but most people tend to buy high and sell low.

And most people that have been working for a while (I haven't worked that long, so I can't speak for the truth of it) say that you should find a job you enjoy. You are likely to spend 40hrs a week at work, if not more. Not including mundane tasks like commuting, eating, sleeping, housework etc., there's really not enough hours of spare time to make up for a job that sucks. Even if it pays well the best moments of my life were far from the most expensive ones. That (apartment, car, computer, tv etc.) is for the inbetweens. The best moments are made by people.

Re:Trend

And most people that have been working for a while [...] say that you should find a job you enjoy. You are likely to spend 40hrs a week at work, if not more.

I confirm this.

I worked hard during the dotcom bubble and did good on it, both in terms of salary and stock, mostly because a wise person, older than me, told me it wouldn't last and that I should save the money I earned.

With that money, I started studies in a totally different field. Now, I'm paid a lot less, but I don't have crazy hours, I don't worry about stress and future heart problems, I do a job that I like, and my quality of life is much better.

So it is true what they say. Money isn't all there is in life. You can be a lot happier with simple things, like starting and quitting work every day at the same hours (instead of working insane overtime), having free weed-ends for the family, and (in my case anyway) having the satisfaction of producing things that people instantly appreciate, instead of hidden code that nobody cares about once it's compiled.

And the pay cut isn't a problem, it's just a matter of understanding what's important in life, and leaving the world of silly consumerism behind. If the job pays the bills and leaves enough do have disposable income for the usual pleasures in life, and not worry about next month, that's quite enough for me at this point in my life.

Re:Trend

I think more are not looking to go into CS not because there are not companies wanting to employ CS people, but because said companies want to employ CS people at unamerican wages.

Best people and the value of money

... the best and the brightest... the folks who create innovation... have a tendency to value money pretty highly

Colour me extremely skeptical. "Value money highly" is not the same as "want the highest paying occupation". It's been my experience that the best and brightest [won't say "innovative" since that seems to be a Micros**t trademark these days] don't just follow the money. As an example (warning: anecdotal evidence coming up!) what do you think the median salary is for Nobel Laureates? Compare that to the median salary and brightness of, say, lawyers.

It may be that "the best people" form a bi-modal distribution: those who feel the road to happiness lies in having more money (money == equipment [toys] for cool things), and those who feel it lies in having more time (time == freedom for cool things).

I feel working in software is the best of both worlds: being paid lots of money to do the things I want to do anyway, i.e. tinker and hack. I still recommend CS as an undergraduate major to smart people who like to tinker.

Overall?

At my university, there's The College of Computer Science, and under that, you can major in CS (Computer Science), IT (Information Technology) or IS (Information Systems). So is it all of the included majors affected, or is it just the CS majors that are affected?

Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

So the news in this article is that MIT, Cal-Tech etc don't churn out
the most CS degrees? Did anyone even think that? Top tier schools
have never been known for quantity, they are known for quality.
That's what has always separated them from other schools, not how many
graduates they produce. High quantity schools generally don't have a
good reputation, why do you think the MCSE is worth so little, because
everyone has it. So the fact that DeVry is churning out more
graduates than MIT is hardly news worthy imo.

Next they are comparing the number of people entering CS in 2000 to
the number entering now? That comparison is farcical at best. In the
year 2000 there were still many people entering the CS field because
of the boom years, when working in the IT industry was the equivalent
of the gold rush. Of course there are less people entering now than
in the year 2000. A more legitimate comparison would have looked at
the number of people entering CS during the pre-boom years rather than
during the boom years.

While I agree that we should encourage more people to enter IT related
fields, I don't agree that using misguided statistics is the best way
to go about it.

Personal experiance

As an ex-CS major let me tell you one reason people are leaving. Even though I plan on going into a CS related field the courses offered by my college (UCI) were very poor. Also there was no way to test out of redundant courses. Many of my classmates left for similiar reasons, and some even abandoned CS altogether as they weren't sure they would be able to compete with outsourcing and get a job

Like that is a shock.....

With all the jobs being shipped out of the United States and reports of massive lay offs in the IT sector. The recent announcment by HP is a perfect example of this.

Why invest in a career where you have little confidence of supporting yourself?

Re:Like that is a shock.....

Funny how successful people have a chronic case of good luck.

Funny how you rewrite history to suit the outcome. OF COURSE SUCCESSFULL PEOPLE SEEM TO HAVE A CHRONIC CASE OF GOOD LUCK- because the people who have bad luck aren't successfull.

In reality- when people have actually done studies on this- what you really have is two main things going on. Successfull children of successfull parents are usually successfull because of networking- a birthright. Successfull children of unsuccessfull parents are gamblers- risk takers who lose on about 2/3rds of what they try- but they keep trying and never quit, and thus become successfull because they raise the number of times they try. Unsuccessfull children of successfull parents are idiots for the most part- skilless wonders who never learned to fend for themselves to begin with. Unsuccessfull children of unsuccessfull parents have risk adversion tendencies- they want to be "safe" rather than "rich", and since they don't have the opportunities of the upper class.

But I've also seen successfull people make mistakes- and end up bankrupt- so don't get to cocky.

Good riddance!

Goodbye to all those who just wanted to get rich quick. I look forward to working with you brave students who are chosing your career based on a love of technology.

Re:Good riddance!

Not me. I'm in it for the chicks!

It's not perception, it's real.

attribute to perception issues

It's not a perception issue. It's a real issue.

90% of the people I know in the tech field have been laid off once in the last 4 years. I only know of one mid-sized technical company that hasn't laid off employees, and everyone there hates their job. I quit after 6 months.

Granted, this is just from my own perspective. But look, the tech job world is slowly creeping out of a multi-year massacre, now the tech world is being run by business people who don't know what an IP address is, but spend a million bucks because IBM said it was good (and promised a trip to Hawaii!)

Sure, there's opportunity here, but students are going to have a hard time competing with we techies with 6+ years experience.

Re:It's not perception, it's real.

I can corroborate this.

I work in Telecom and every few years one of the various companies that employ engineers, programmers, etc. in the area flushes its staff in a major downsizing or closes up shop entirely and the newly unemployed disperse and wind up in the same role elsewhere, if they manage to find work at all. A few years down the line the new employer will fire a chunk of its staff or close up entirely and the cycle continues. People may even be fired by and subsequently hired by the same company as its fortunes change. It creates a pretty wide network of nomadic professionals who all know each other, assemble in familiar patterns and relative positions at various companies and thus never seem to advance in job roles.

It seems like every single person at my place of employment has had at least three jobs in the past ten years and that many have been unemployed for more than a year during that time period. I've been at the same place for around three years now and have managed to survive several "scares," which leaves me wondering whether I'm playing the role of Damocles. I guess you could qualify the past ten-odd years as anomalous and make a good argument for your case, but I'm not entirely sure.

We don't need as many computer scientists

Back in the day when code needed to be efficient at a theoretical level, when compilers and related research was at the forefront of technology itself, and when the computer was the target of research, there was a need for a lot of computer science. Nowadays, there is not as much of a need for true computer science as there used to be. Instead, there is a greater need for people who know other types of science/engineering and have the programming skills to use a computer to solve non-computer problems.

Re:We don't need as many computer scientists

I feel this post being greatly disturbing.

That's like saying "We don't need to teach the kids art in kindergarden anymore, because we already have had plenty of great artists in all of the different art forms, and now we need applied artists, like archetects". (excuse the downcast).

Computer and Software Engineers THRIVE off the sciences created by Computer Scientists. Too many people think CS is all about writing source code, but really, it's just like any other science; it's research, research, research.

Breakthroughs are still left to be found in all the fields, and new fields are just now being created (bioinformatics anyone?), and if we just give up on the science now, we won't have engineers implementing it later.

Don't believe I don't see your part about needing other sciences to migrate to using computers, but who do you think design the algorithms for integrating other sciences into Computer Science, the Engineers who build solutions, or the scientists in other fields who haven't had the training in mathematics or the algorithms to make things more efficient. And before you give me that crap about "computers being fast enough and having enough memory these days to deal with shitty programming", think about this; the *simplist* of protein folding implementations requires hundreds and hundreds of CPU hours, even cutting a dozen off of it means massive cost cutting for the organizations using it.

Face it; telling people to stop moving to CS is like telling people to stop moving towards Physics, or any other discrete science; it's stupid, short sighted, and just plain wrong.

The brutal truth is,

"significantly fewer students at the college level -- 60 percent fewer -- wanted to study computer science in 2004 as opposed to the year 2000. "

most of these younger folks think they were born gifted hotshots. Most of them think they don't need no steenkin education because they already know it all..

There is a large number of young people that grew up with computers, someone 20 years old now has probably had a home computer all his life. Someone old enough to be his parent did not have a home computer when they were his age.

PR moves

This is complete bullshit. Look at how all the CEOs are complaining about lack of CS graduates here in US. Its quite simple. When they move the jobs to india/china they can say that they we dont have enough people here. Just look at the layoffs. This is a delibrate attempt by these people to keep putting out these kinds of reports.

Comparing it to 2000!?!

A lot of people were taking CS majors in 2000 because the perception (somewhat true) was that being a CS major alone was enough to get recruited, then you could quit school and make a load of cash.

Now of course you have actually finish your course work, and even then there's no overpaying job waiting for you, even though I'm sure you'll find a job.

A lot of guys at my school picked CS because they figured they'd get rich quick, they didn't love it. I've always thought that if you love what you do and you're good at it, you'll do alright in life.

What is computer science?

Is it the computer science I learned, ie how to turn an undergraduate into a graduate student? Where everything is theoretical because that's how they like their graduate students?

Or are we talking about a DBA? Or someone to make sure your Exchange Server is up and running?

Computer Science at MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, Berkeley etc isn't about learning how to be a DBA, its about acquiring the tools necessary to do research at a higher level. Who needs an algorithms class when you can just use the sort functions available in VC++? Or who needs to read a research paper about ISAM or BSTs when its already implemented and ready to use in SQL Server?

I'm reminded of "Profession" by Asimov. Is the purpose of higher education simply to show people tools and how they work so they can have a skill or to teach people why the tools are they way they are and (hopefully) help them to make the tools better? To me CS has always been the latter.

Note, this is not a put down to DBAs, sysadmins, etc. They have their own creativity and processes that I admire and respect.

Look at the job market

As a recent graduate (okay, I graduated over a year ago) and as someone who works at a software company, I have to say that if I could do it all over again I'd do anything but CS. Most universities offer MIS programs, etc, that will put you into the tech field without nessicarly being a programmer, etc. But, heck, if I had skipped the four years of college I'd probably be a junior manager at walmart by now.

With jobs going overseas, and the supply of programmers heavily outweighing the demand, I don't see any reason for anyone to be intrested in CS at all.

When I hear Gates talk about lack of tallent within the US, I really have to say "who cares". The bottom line is that less than 1% of CS majors are going to be of the caliber of programmer that Gates is talking about, but what about the rest of us 99%ers? We have the joy of fighting tooth and nail for a job, then we have the joy of not getting the dream salaries that were touted in the 90s, and then to top it off we get to fight off competition for overseas that can do our work at a third of the cost because of living expenses overseas.

Back in the day it use to be cool to be a programmer. Now when someone says that I have to feel a little bit sorry for me.

Do they really mean "computer science"?

Having recently graduated from a rather rigorous undergraduate institution with a degree in CS, and planing on going into the Ph.D. program at another well-respected school this fall, I find myself taking the "science" part of "computer science" pretty seriously. Somebody more famous than me once said, "Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes, biology is about microscopes, or chemistry is about beakers and test tubes." That might not be strictly true, but it's the right idea. In my mind, being a computer scientist implies that one is engaged in real scientific research. A degree in computer science should come with an understanding of the history and theory behind the actual systems we use every day, an awareness of the open issues in the field, etc.

Somehow I get the idea (and feel free to correct me if you know better) that a "CS" degree from DeVry might not match my understanding of the term. That's not to say that there isn't a place for this sort of education -- I'm all in favor of competent entry-level programmers, web designers, DBAs, whatever it is that DeVry actually trains one to be. But to use a (probably flawed) analogy to other disciplines, this sort of education is to CS as auto repair is to engineering. It takes a not insignificant amount of skill and knowledge to be a decent auto mechanic; I'm not trying to knock DeVry graduates. But I wouldn't expect a mechanic to be able to do fundamentally new things in the space of automotive design any more than I would expect a DeVry CS major to do real computer science.

(Yeah, I have some idea of how pretentious and condescending that sounds. Go ahead and mod me down.)

Re:Too many IT workers

"Why would you pursue IT at this point in time?"

Especially when it's so easy a nine year old can do it [slashdot.org]!

Re:REAL ANSWER

Computer Science as an industry is following that of the TV and VCR repair men. When TVs and VCRs are expensive they get em fixed....Early on there was Computer Science. Now they have splintered into various factions like various specialized sciences following certain areas, (MIS,IT,DBAs,Programming, etc.)

And then there are people who still do real Computer Science as opposed to programming or "Computer Related Work". There's a nice quote by Dijkstra to the effect that Computer Science is as much about computers as Astronomy is about telescopes. Computer Science is still going quite strong, and there is active and intersting research into a variety of fields.

I am a mathematcian, so I am not really all that up on all the various interesting areas of CS are these days except for the odd bits that cross my path. One of those is Algebraic Specification, which is an effort to formalise the design and specification of systems (software) using algebraic techniques. In practice this could mean vastly more reliable software down the line. For now it means a lot of hard slog involving a lot of pure math (universal algebras, category theory, etc.) which doesn't involve a computer in any way shape or form. You can get some idea of the sort of thing they're doing here [ucsd.edu], or here [acm.org], or just google Algebraic Specification. It's pretty exciting stuff from the mathematician's point of view (some very lovely mathematics finding practical application).

Don't misinterpret what CS is, and what it offers.

Jedidiah.