The Continuing American Decline in CS

abb_road writes "America's recent dismal showing in the ACM Programming finals may be more than just a bad year; a BusinessWeek article suggests that the loss is indicative of the US's continuing decline in producing computer scientists. Despite the Labor Dept's forecast of a 40% increase in 'computer/math scientist' jobs, planned CS enrollments have plummeted from 3.7% in 2000 to just 1.1% last year. Other countries, particularly China, India and Eastern Europe, are working hard to pick up the slack, with potentially serious long-term effects for the US economy. From the article: 'If our talent base weakens, our lead in technology, business, and economics will fade faster than any of us can imagine.'"

Good

More demand for me! I'm raising my rates!

Re:Good

More demand for me! I'm raising my rates!

This is your boss, I demand that you lower your rates or I'll hire less-expensive overseas developers.

Re:Good -- or not

As a long-time computer professional and contractor, when I went to grad school to get a masters in computer science, the tax law gave me no break whatsoever. I cannot deduct my tuition as a business expense. On the other hand, if I took some vendor-specif

Re:Good

Maybe us old fuckkers (30+) will have a chance.

Re:Good

More demand for me! I'm raising my rates!

Haven't you been following the illegal immigration issue? The fact is, market forces yeild to firm preconceptions about what different jobs are inherently worth. If the going rate for a job is more than The Man thinks he should have to pay, then he simply changes the rules, either by promoting outsourcing or allowing illegal immigration to drive down the cost to fill a job.

If a CEO makes $147,000 per day, well that's market forces. If technical people start to break into 6 figures annually, well that's a threat to our global competitiveness which must be remedied.

Re:Good

I don't want to argue about whether the perception is true or not, but rather how the preception affects the issue. From what I have heard (anecdotal eveidence, but we all have it) many people in th US are shunning CS because the perception is that you won't be able to get a job. As I said, I am not arguing reality, just perception. A lot of people assume that you will maybe get a job for a couple years before you have to train your replacement in a third world country who will make $2 an hour.
I would solve this by making companies show that there are NO Americans at all who can do the job before getting an H1B. Also, I would love to see companies that are shipping jobs away boycotted.

Re:Good

"many people in th US are shunning CS because the perception is that you won't be able to get a job. As I said, I am not arguing reality, just perception. A lot of people assume that you will maybe get a job for a couple years before you have

What is there to say...

Counterstrike is old.

Blame it on the .com bust and hype

I graduated in 2000 when life was sweet for Computer Science majors. When the bubble burst, there was a false impression that computer related fields were doomed. I always found that amusing because our whole society is based on technology and will always need people to run it. Media reports and articles on websites like this didn't help either. They gave the impression that Computer Science wasgoing the way of the dinosaur when it truly was healthy.

http://religiousfreaks.com/ [religiousfreaks.com]

Re:Blame it on the .com bust and hype

Its a sad comment you are making here. The worst part is that, yes, this is the belief. But I believe that following in the wake of CS as "uncool" jobs is engineering, I mean the moneys just not in it for engineers right?

While business "believes" that CS workers are foundry workers. Most CS workers are creating new things every project, they don't forge the same hunk of steel over and over. As much as business wants CS to be a production job, its really a creation job, and the business leaders don't get it.

All this reverence in this country for business degrees is going to really come back to bite us. Innovation and invention is on the decline in this country, and without the new things and the technological innovation, all those business people will be left with nothing to manage, because eventually with all the creation going on overseas, enventually overseas companies will take all the companies (and their management) with them.

Re:Blame it on the .com bust and hype

You are basically right. Unfortunately CS and engineering jobs have always been uncool, there was just an anomaly during the bubble where you could get rich at CS if you landed in the right place. You can still make an OK living at it and its better then roofing, or assembly line worker, but the fact is if you want money, power, and women you are going to go business, marketing and sales or you are going to start a business of your own. Starting your own business is hella hard though, and it requires skills and abilities many geeks don't have. You also have a high probability of complete failure. People who start and run successful businesses deserve a lot of compensation, though unfortunately a lot of top executives are just leeches that walk in to already established companies and get huge compenstation whether they contribute anything substantive to the success or not.

If you are a programmer chances are you are going to be blessed with long hours sitting in the same cube day after day, death marches everytime a delivery needs to happen, and chances are your management chain is going to forget you when they are handing out the party trips, options and bonuses, because they get theirs first and the less they give you the more there is for them. I think they will be of the opinion that you should just be glad that they let you keep your job for the next round.

This is just how the food chain works in capitalism. The nearer you are to the top the better off you are and this is trending worse with each passing year. The disparity in compensation for executive versus workers has exploded in this country and it will ultimate lead to some form of collapse or rebellion. The new trend where executives can threaten to, or actually will, offshore your job, gives them further leverage to drive down worker's compensation and increase their own. There will eventually be a tipping point where a few percent will be filthy rich, everyone else will be hovering around the poverty line and eventually that 90+% will realized they've been had and they outnumber the rich fat cats.

If you like programming and like sitting in front of a computer, you don't want to get rich at it, and you can find an employer that doesn't suck its probably an OK career choice for you. Most people realize that in fact its not a career path with a lot of future in it and that is why more and more college students are rejecting it as a career path.

The fact that China and India are turning out so many CS grads is in itself a reason to reject it as a career path since it means the globalized market is being flooded, they can work for a lot less than you can thanks to cost of living disparity, and that means wages and working conditions are probably going to get progressively worse, not better.

-- Ed

Re:Blame it on the .com bust and hype

"The Chinese government is completely corrupt and ineffective."

True but they are, for example, going to great lengths to acquire long term contracts to secure critical mineral and fossil fuels reserves in the future because they have a MUCH longer view than America does. America's fatal flaw is incredible short sightedness. The U.S. also thinks market forces will solve all problems and they do in fact cause as many as the solve.

The Chinese also have a huge influx in U.S. dollars due to huge and exploding trade surpluses which gives them a lot of money to play with on the global stage. The U.S. by contrast is struggling to just borrow enough money just to keep its budget and trade deficit afloat. As that borrowing continues the interest needed to maintain it will slowly suck the economic life out of the U.S. It is almost never good to be a long term, habitual debtor.

Fascist governments suck in a lot of ways but they can be VERY good at propelling economic growth. One such government took Germany from destitution to global power in under a decade.

"They need to slash the minimum wage, make unions illegal except for a single 'state' union, slash environmental regulations, provide massive subsidies to corporations, and regularly confiscate land without any sort of due process and hand it over to corporations."

Uh the U.S. is slashing the minimum wage by never raising it even to adjust for inflation and worse by massive and governmentally condoned importation of easily exploited illegal aliens which are constantly driving down wages at the bottom end of the economy.

Environmental regulations are certainly damaging U.S. economic growth but the Bush administration has relaxed them and the Republicans will continue to relax them every time they can get away with it. There is a HUGE resurgence of the use of coal in this country, cleaner than it used to be, but still very damaging to the environment. This makes the U.S. a lot like China which is the biggest, dirtiest user of coal on the planet.

"provide massive subsidies to corporations" uh yea like the Medicare drug bill, massive farm subsidies, transportation bill to subsidize construction companies, energy bill to subsidize energy companies at a time they are posting record profits, Iraq reconstruction contracts that benefited a host of Republican friendly companies, massive defense and intelligence spending subsidizing defense contractors. The only big ticket subsidy missing is to redirect Social Security in to private accounts to buoy Wall Street.

"regularly confiscate land", the Supreme court just authorized this last year to seize private property for a drug companies new office complex. The ball just needs to get rolling to do it on a regular basis and the U.S. and China will be the same in this regard.

The U.S. and China really are a lot alike, both leaning heavily to Fascism, China is just a lot more brutal about it, but it is a difference in degree and not substance. China just has a huge advantage in that its cost of living is much lower and it has a huge surplus of workers so it can easily out compete the U.S. in a globalized world with cheap telecom and container shipping.

More H1B cap lobbying

This is just more of the H1B lobbying to raise the cap on IT staff which is wanted to keep the price of IT staff depressed.

If you look in USA, everywhere but the Valley has an oversupply of IT people, my own employer just recruited a load of experienced staff in Portland, many excellent programmers too.

Re:More H1B cap lobbying

And that 'good' is very much a relative term, not an absolute. These days 'good' is often defined as a top quartile CS student who's had 5 years of on the job experience with a top level team. Er, what about the other 75% of the workforce HR assbags?

ACM finals aren't correlated with general CS edu.

I participated in the ACM World finals when I was in college. Take it from me, the contest has exactly zero to do with the general state of CS education in a country. 3 kids are picked from each college. Each World finalist team is almost always very smart and quite capable of winning it. But the winners, of late, have overwhelmingly been Chinese or Russians or East Europeans. What differentiates them from the rest is that they actually prepare very hard for it-- with actuve faculty and school encouragement-- because they think it's a big deal. Most others just show up, expecting to have fun. You see, ACM finals require you to have a lot of practice in certain idiomatic programming problems and an ability to code map any new problem to one of the standards and code it up quickly. So you can be very smart and good at CS, but you might still lose.

ACM contest is fun but that doesn't mean that the winners are the world's best CS people. Nope.

Re:ACM finals ... correlated with general CS edu.

Hear, hear!

I have also participated in the ACM programming contest (only got to regional competition, but it was fun). I had the unusual experience of having a programming-related job while I was still in college, and I can certainly confirm the parent's description of ACM programming contests being far from real-world earning-an-income coding. It's clear when you realize that an 8 to 5 desk job is much different than you remember from the contests in college, but it's really clear when you've already got a programming job and you go to an ACM programming contest.

The really successful coders are the ones that can learn new APIs and languages over a weekend. They're the ones who can communicate with non-technical people. They're the ones who can write a design for an application that will take a team of twelve developers a year to implement. The ACM programming contest compares to real-life CS work in the same way that a lumberjack competition [kentuckylumberjack.com] proves a person's suitability for work in the logging industry. In both cases, the two sets of skills (contest vs. real life) overlap very little.

Re:ACM finals aren't correlated with general CS ed

ACM contest is fun but that doesn't mean that the winners are the world's best CS people.

Certainly true, but then again, that could also be said about almost all other such and similar competitions. Nevertheless, trying to discredit those people by simply

Re:Preperation is preperation

The *only* thing I leared from preparing and winning the regionals was dynamic programming. But I actually learned that in class.

The problems are such that there are two skills involved in winning: 1) writing bug-free small programs and 2) understanding t

job pressure

I majored in computer science, but I don't feel comfortable entering it as a career field. I spent five years in the military, so I am not as cutting edge as I should be, not to mention a complete lack of experience despite being 27 years old. I buy books and keep up with things well enough to be a good hobbiest, but it is rough being in the tech world post-boom. I will go to law school, and hopefully provide a much needed technical viewpoint to the legal system that is currently strangling technological innovation in this country. I think some of the first things that law makers could do would be to reduce restrictions on people who want to study technology, such as the DMCA. As long as India and China can provide competent coders for less money, we will continue to lose jobs. That is part of globilization, and is no different than factory workers losing theirs in the last century. The key is to find the jobs that Americans can do for less opportunity costs, or that other countries can not do at all yet. Globilization is a good thing overall, as the standard of living will rise throughout the world, but it is very painful now, especially for people in the computer industry.

Re:job pressure

I would encourage you to find a niche. Someting hard to send over seas. In my case it is programming, databases and business process modeling for an Env. Engineering firm. If fact, you should take some project mgt. courses and business process modeling cou

Recruit Them

I know I'll get flamed to hell, but screw it. If we truly* have such a shortage of computer scientists, then let's recruit the foreigners and bring them in as immigrants. Remember all of those European scientists came to the U.S. before/during WWII? How much of the American technical supremacy of the 20th century can be traced back to their contributions? The best way to develop/maintain technical prowess as a society is to secure the best intellectual capital.

*Of course, this is assuming that the U.S. has an actual shortage and the study isn't some ploy to get cheap code-monkey labor for Microsoft, Intel, et. al. I'll let my fellow slashdotters belabor that point.

Re:Recruit Them

Remember all of those European scientists came to the U.S. before/during WWII? How much of the American technical supremacy of the 20th century can be traced back to their contributions?

While I agree with the overall attitude of your post, I am just remin

Re:CS from the inside

I've got news for nerds. CS matters. But not in the way you want it to. No one cares if you can do reduction proofs, they want CODE. They want APPS. They want UI that is easy to use.

Like many other people, you're confused about this subject. The things you mention are not, and will never be, CS. They may be software engineering, or various other disciplines, but they are not CS. There's no reason to change the definition of CS just because we need more technical colleges teaching people how to write code.

The sky is falling!

Isn't everyone else getting a little tired of this chicken little stuff? First it's "OMG, All the programming jobs are being outsourced!" then it's "OMG, there aren't enough computer science majors!".

It can't be both that the programming field is in danger because we're outsourcing all our programming work, leading to no jobs for programmers, AND be that we're in danger of not having enough new programmers.

Let's see.

1. People still smarting from the tech-bubble popping? Check.
2. New home machines much less accessible to proto-hackers than machines like the C64? Check.
3. Popular culture that denigrates "geeks" and "nerds" and makes it a social crime to get A's? Check.

And people are confused about a decline in the number of student engineers?

Re:Let's see.

How about:

4. Grade inflation, and a public-school system that rewards attendance (and effort) far, far more than actual knowledge and learning.

5. Touchy-feely political correctness which demands the elimination of all sense of competition of any kind.

6.

Re:Let's see.

I think maybe you missed the point of grandparent's point #3. Even with the admittedly dumbed-down environment in many schools, it's still socially unacceptable to be a high achiever. It's regrettably true that in many school districts, a kid can pass an

Hmmmmm

Software programmers are the seed corn of the Information Economy, yet America isn't producing enough. The Labor Dept. forecasts that "computer/math scientist" jobs, which include programming, will increase by 40%, from 2.5 million in 2002 to 3.5 million in 2012. Colleges aren't keeping up with demand. A 2005 survey of freshmen showed that just 1.1% planned to major in computer science, down from 3.7% in 2000.

Let's see if we can figure this out. American kids aren't going into CS -- why? Perhaps because:

1. Tech jobs are being outsourced overseas in a great number of cases, so getting a CS degree is not some automatic ticket to a job like it used to be and doesn't mean long term stability if you can find a job
2. By the age of 18, kids have been using/learning about computers and using the Internet for a while, many have developed some level of technical skill, and are possibly getting jobs without having to go through 4+ years of drudgery
3. Unless you're working for the biggest companies, programming is a grind. It's not glamorous, seldom exciting, and while the paychecks are nice, you sometimes end up working crazy schedules which don't allow you to enjoy the money

Did I leave anything out?

On the decline of CS students...

As a graduating computer science student (and long time professional), I was interviewed [broadsideonline.com] on this topic by George Mason University's student newspaper. I also wrote a little piece of my own on the declining number of CS students [swisspig.net]:

I have two perspectives on this -- one, as a veteran software engineer, and two as a computer science student.

I chose computer science because it seemed to make sense, given my job as a software engineer. However, many years of interviewing and hiring have shown me that a computer science degree is not necessarily going to be of any use to a software engineer. The position "software engineer" could mean any number of things. At my company, it requires a wide domain knowledge of different applications, almost none of which are addressed in GMU's computer science program. The computer science program teaches programming at the most rudimentary level, and is not even remotely adequate for a job that requires programming. However, a computer science degree does introduce important concepts that are necessary for understanding the underlying principles of working with computers (even if it isn't presented that way), and also teaches logic and problem solving, which are fundamental to any technical job.

As far as students not choosing computer science, I think there are a number of reasons. At GMU (and my previous university) I used to hear all the time, "oh, there's too much math required for a degree in computer science, I'm switching to a degree in information technology or business information systems, because there's not as much math." Also, when the Internet "bubble" burst, I think a stigma developed, where people don't think they'll be able to find a job in the computer industry when they graduate, or that they won't be able to get the kind of pay that they would like, or have job security.

I think it's a sweeping generalization to say that the US is lacking computer science students. What the US is lacking is individuals who are sincerely interested in developing their technical skills and solving interesting problems for their own sake, rather than people who are trying to find the easiest way into a high paying position that they care very little about -- having worked with both, I'd choose a British Literature major who does programming on her own, just for fun, over a Computer Science major who hates computers, but just wants a high paying job.

--brian

Mediocrity

I think this is a direct result of our colleges encouraging mediocrity and making it very difficult for advanced students to, well, "advance". Colleges are built around helping out the most mediocre students get a passing grade, and just letting the gifted students learn on their own. It is the same thing that happens in our high schools.

My girlfriend is just finishing her degree in Education, and it is horrible just how bad it has gotten. They have dozens of programs designed to helping out disadvantaged children and poor performing students, while the gifted students are left to their own devices. My boss is from Europe, and their schools (at least in Sweden in the 1980s) encourage their best and brightest. The gifted students are the ones that are going to make the biggest difference in the workplace, while the struggling students are simply going to fill up the jobs that dont take much skill.

If we want to keep up in a technologically advanced world, we have to start caring about our gifted students, not just helping the below average ones pass school.

--

Academic Majors

As a student at a major university (the University of Michigan), I must say that our CS department is extremely lacking. Computer Science must be taken either in the form of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) - where CS is combined with EE (lots of useless info) or through the School of Literature Science and Arts (LSA) where the CS program is more direct, but students are required to take the EECS classes. One of the biggest problems is the use of the most basic programming class as a 'weeder' class instead of an actual learning tool. The class is made excessively difficult to weed out students (even though the students may simply take more time that 2 weeks to get acclimated to programming). The problem might be with curricula.

No CS Degree needed

I am not sure what some will think about this but I think one of the reasons that there are not as many CS degrees being given out is people are realizing they do not need a degree in CS to get a job in computers. As one poster already put, he did not even finish his degree because he did think it benefitted him, I will not argue that just point out that there are not many other "professions" that you do not need a degree in to get into the business.

I do not know how many people I've met in my 7 professional years that either a)said they did not have any degree at all or b)said they got a degree in some other program and many of them not even in a technical profession. I think this is the larger problem. Our industry is one of a few where they want highly talented individuals, but also want a break on price. Easies way to do this is let anyone in which drives cost down because it is not specialized. For those of us that are CS Majors think how much more we could demand if someone from outside of the degree program could not come in and take our job. Also think how much more weight might be given to us in project management as well. If someone knows that this person really knows what they are talking about because of his education and experience perhaps those ridiculous deadlines might be fewer and fewer.

Don't blame us. This what we've been told.

I studied CS in college and got my BA. I got out school and was immediately bombarded with hundreds of requests for 3-6 month, low-paying contractual positions for programming/systems administration/etc. What wasn't being offshored was being outsourced at ridiculous levels. I took a look around and realized the only people with truly stable positions were IT management. I talked to others and they agreed. So I went back for my MBA. When I graduate I'm going to be looking to leave the programming/administration side entirely.

When you're faced with poor, unstable job prospects and declining salaries due to offshore competition, what do you EXPECT us to do? The smart ones are realizing management (unfortunately) is the way to go. The rest will wither and die, unfortunately.

A few observations

Computer Science != Software Engineering. CS is more research oriented, basically an applied math degree. CIS, IS, Information Management and Software Engineering are more where your day-to-day programmers should be coming from. Unless they are lumping these areas under CS then the statistics may be meaningless. Are we looking for researchers or people who will apply the technology?

Stalin said "Quantity has a quality all its own", which may have been valid in an industrial economy. What is not apparent is whether it is valid in a service economy. I strongly suspect, and some of the numbers I have heard about the best programmers being 10x more productive than the average programmer reinforces this, is that it is not valid to use an industrial paradigm in a service industry. But I think most managers, political leaders, economists and average Joes just don't get this. Too often projects fail beacuse to save money the work is given to the lowest common denominator in programmers and managers. Whether in-house, out-sourced or off-shored. And make no doubt about it, software is a service industry.

Finally I say, good riddance. This is as good a way to filter out the riff-raff as any. Let those who love the field be the ones who enter it and stay in. They are the ones more likely to develop the tools needed for the next generation of development, both in terms of process paradigms as well as actual software tools.

The Best Job in America!

It's kind of funny that Computer Science is on the decline, despite the fact that software engineer is considered the best job in America. [slashdot.org]

Us Companies will not Pay for CS People...

...I am sure it will be said in this thread many times, but I bears saying for reinforcement, just incase some corporate type actually sees the thread.

Its damn simple why go into CS when most CS jobs are getting outsourced/offshored for cheaper rates. This is causing a Glut of talent in the market and cuasing the rates that a company will pay for CS talent to go down. It sucks as a job course in life.

If US companies cut the crap and word gets out that they are willing to pay for talented CS people at decent rates and the workers don't have to be concerned with having the job cut out from underthem, then the enrolements will go up.

Job growth =! Entry-level job growth

Out of the small May, 2005 class of ~20 computer science students at a small state university in the midwest, I know two that are still working part time in unrelated fields, looking for work related to their degree. The only people I knew that were working immediately after graduation were the ~50% that were working before they started the degree program and three students that grabbed the only three internships in the area.

There are tons of listings for sysadmin and programming jobs in Indiana, Kentucky, Illinois, etc., but you almost never see any entry level positions. It took me six months to find something, and that was a fluke.

Are there any places (other than Cali) where recent graduates are quickly hired? I'm certainly not aware of any.

Re:Job growth =! Entry-level job growth

The job market seems to be fine here in Columbus, Ohio. I graduate from OSU this spring, and I've had three job offers (with a solid salary for around here) and more interviews that I had to turn down already. My fiancee, who will also graduate this spring

Bad Profs

Disclaimer:: this is purely anecodotal and from one univeristy...

I was a computer science major for 3 years, but was always taking classes outside teh department "for fun". Half of my profs were non-native speakers which made difficult subjects even more difficult. For example, a friend of mine went an entire semester of assembly trying to figure out what the hell a regis was. The professor was simply referring to registers, but never bothered pronouncing the whole word.

In computer architecture, the book came with a cd full of power point review slides. Because the prof couldn't converse in English, she just read the slides offered by the CD. OK, great. But when you don't get what the book is talking about, the review slides/therefore class notes are in the direct language of the book, and the professor can't converse in English-- you are screwed.

My point isn't that CS profs have accents. My point is, Universities aren't hiring based on teaching skills and the students pay for it. I don't need fluent speakers, but I do need someone who can explain difficult concepts in understandable terms.

NEEEEEERRRRRRDDDDSSS!

It's certainly never been "cool" to be a programmer, but for a while there it looked like that was the way to go to earn massive $$$. Dot Com crazyness was in full swing and many of the students who would normally get MBAs tried the CS route instead in the hopes of getting some of that fat venture capital and possibly ride the bubble.

Those days are over (for now) and those students have gone back to pre-law or MBA courses. Also, the fact of the matter is that in a CS cirriculum (like engineering), you're going to work twice as long as your English/History/MBA friends who are always out partying and never seem to study. You'll be taking the "hard" math courses while they're learning how to draw graphs incorrectly in Economics. They'll have plenty of time for shmoozing with girls while you work on two projects until late in the night. When you graduate, they may very well make more money than you (or they'll end up broke and living with their parents, depending on how good their network is by the time they get out of college).

On the other hand, you'll be creating something that will be useful to people. Those guys will often only manufacture bullshit for the rest of their life.

Offshored?

How about off-northed? I'm a 22 year old Canadian working on my Business degree (switched from Computer Science, and find it incredibly more interesting and valuable), and I have been working for several development firms in NYC and surrounding for several years now. I have never travelled there for work, and the pay is great. So why is it that an American company seeking a developer would hire a young chap from Canada (for $50/hour) as opposed to someone from their own country? Surely my rates are on par with thousands of other folks, so I've been struggling to figure this one out. Is the quality of your education system lacking, or are job seekers simply expecting too much?

The latter notion reminds me of the book Bait and Switch: (The Futile Pursuit of the American Dream) [amazon.com] by Barbara Ehrenreich. In it, she fluffs up her resume and goes searching for work that pays a minimum of $50,000 with benefits. She attends workshops, seminars, coaching clinics, and other things to improve her likelihood of finding work. Months later, she fails to reach this goal and in turns calls the American Dream a pointless pursuit. I realized this is not true, but that she was just too damn picky. Nobody can realistically expect a job paying $50,000 annually without qualified skills and plenty of experience.

Is this a reality of American developers? Perhaps indicative of why fewer students graduate with CS because they are not as qualified as they could be if they graduated in other disciplines?

We deserve it

I look at the garbage that passes for entertainment and I can't help but think how stupid we've become. I look at how everything in our lives gravitate around the pursuit of pleasure and think how lazy we've become. People can't even be bothered to use their turn signals anymore - why should we expect them to want to understand anything technical? I look at how people vote ("Bush says he's a christian - that's all I need to know when I go to the polls") and I wonder why we go out of our way not to have to think. I watch the news and the top story is continually about how much we're paying for gas and say "Damn straight!" and then piss and moan about how much it costs to drive our SUV's to work.

If we can't be bothered to do difficult things then we deserve to lose the rewards that difficult things reap. Now watch as the "Move to France then!" rebuttals start pouring in - underscoring the whole point of my post.

Numbers from 2000

I wish people would stop using statistics exclusively from 2000, whether they be CS enrollments like here or related stats. In 2000, we were at the height of the tech bubble. Lots of people and money went into tech that should not have. In the case of people, that meant (among lots of other things ... don't want to oversimplify) lots of CS majors who had no aptitude for CS. It's not a realistic number.

What I'd like to see are multi-year numbers that give us a better idea of the trend, both pre- and post-bubble. 2000 was an anomaly. 2000 was unsustainable. 2000 was when things went kablooey. We don't want to go there again in a hurry, so quit talking about it.

The paradox of Soft-Eng supply/demand

It seems that a lot of the comments here see a massive paradox in the (employer) stated lack of supply of CS practitioners, and the (employee/student) stated lack of demand.

Having been through the job search process a few times (and having read the recent academic articles on the subject), it seems the problem is this. Employers in North America are no longer willing to help develop software professionals. In other professions, we see employers taking an active interest in professional development from the entry level up.

Lawyers article for a year, and have a well understood progression from articling student to partner. Throughout the process, the contributions made are appropriate for their level of progression and an appreciated, relevant part of the practice's business. As a result, the legal field has a downstream supply of experienced lawyers, and even students and fresh grads can find work.

By contrast, the tech industry seems to expect experienced developers to appear out of thin air. Industry participation in internship programs is down. Postings for entry-level and early-mid level positions are practically non-existent. Yet demand for 10+ yrs experienced developers is high. Well, guess what? Experienced developers don't just pop into existence. The industry recognizes that much of the innovative work (that they need experienced developers for) isn't amenable to offshoring. They need to recognize that by offshoring the entry-level grunt work, they are starving their future demand for experienced developers (and ultimately rendering future innovation far more difficult).

Re:Its Simple - Pay CS Majors More

What do you think motivates those Chinese, Indian, and Eastern European CS students, who, according to the summary "pick up the slack"? Love of humanity? Yes, it is money -- and the hope to be able to earn and spend it in America some day.

You can't reall

Re:Its Simple - Pay CS Majors More

Doctors? Lawyers? Try business majors. Someone smart enough to major in CS and willing to do the work might as well just get an MBA, and start out making 30-50 percent more than they would with the technical degree.

Add to that the fact that a CS degree does NOT imply a career in development, and development isn't what it used to be, and you have a bunch of people thinking hard about something completely different.

Re:Its Simple - Pay CS Majors More

Damn, where do you live? Im thinking of moving my company to your town if people actually only expect to make $20k a year doing programming work. We pay between $30k-$40k for relatively inexperienced programmers, and that is in a small town of about 30,000 people where you can buy a big house for $200k. I worked for $21k for about a year while my friend and I were starting up the company, but that was only because of the growth potential of the company we started.

You can surely make alot more than $25k if you really looked. For gods sake just find some kind of niche software, program it yourself in your spare time, and start selling it online. That is what I did, and I do not think that I am a rare genius. I didnt even have much freetime, but you can make $25k working part time at a factory while you are doing it.

Only people with no motivation or no skill make $25k a year for any extended period of time. You claim you have the skill, so it must be a lacking in motivation.

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Re:Its Simple - Pay CS Majors More

"...have you ever SEEN the pay rates for Defense sector jobs?"

"Yes. The opportunity for great pay, IS there. IF you have Security Clearance, Clarence."

Yep...one of the last vestiges of good pay jobs is the DoD contracting circuit. But, pretty much no o

Re:Yet on the same subject

Maybe the reason people are not going into CS is because most companies in the US are farming off the stuff a comp sci major whos starting out in the field would do to these 2 dollar workers because its cheaper.

This is a common popular belief, but wh

Blah blah blah.

You have the wrong perspective on the education. CS is applied logic and mathematics. Read this carefully changed copy of your post if you don't understand:

"Because the field is undefined. What is a mathematician? What do they do after they graduate?

I earn my paycheck doing accounting, in all that encompasses. I went to college for a year and half before I realized that the education I was getting wasn't going to prepare me for my chosen profession.

The schools get math majors ready to be theorists ( bad ones at that ). That's it. There is a huge gap between what the schools teach and what businesses need from their accounting personel.

I'm more valuable now than I would have been had I stuck around and graduated."

Now, you can't teach problem solving, but it's hoped after 4 years in school you have some idea of how to be useful. Learning technical trivia is easy; anyone can do it. It doesn't take a genius to change an oil any more than it takes a genius to administrate a small network. However, understanding the deeper concepts (CSMA/CD!) and other principles is very useful if you are a computer scientist.

The difference between a degree and a certificate from a trade school is exactly what you mentioned; people go to a trade school to learn how to do 1 job. People go to University to learn how to solve a superset of problems, which they can apply to any job they want from a particular perspective. I can attack problems of compiler theory, networks, operating systems, programming language theory, etc, because I'm well grounded in the theory behind these concepts, and have experience (both in class and with jobs and projects I've worked on around school).

In 20 years, the tools you use will have changed dozens of times. In 20 years, Dijkstra's algorithm for finding the shortest path on a network will likely be just as useful for link-state routing models as it is now. So your final sentence, "I'm more valuable now than I would have been had I stuck around and graduated." is probably wrong, because you didn't understand why the education was useful. Maybe you weren't cut out for it, or maybe you just wanted money now. That's ok. Just don't preach it like it's the gospel truth on Slashdot.