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Why do so few people major in computer science?

danwang.co

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Re: Why do so few people major in computer science?

#351

Post by gareim »

Spooky23 wrote: post #330
simonsarris wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More people than ever, especially on HN. https://www.gwern.net/iq Nothing you say relates to IQ stats about the median grad. If CS enrollment was up, it would push the needle I'm sure. It's not. You may as well be saying, "What do you mean most wine is bad? I drink good wine all the time."

I'm getting a random lot of 20 kids from average schools. Surely, if IQ is dropping significantly amongst the general population of CS students, I'd be seeing that?

Is your company actually selecting 20 kids at random, or selecting 20 from the best of the ones applying?

Are you also comparing this over a long timeframe? 112 in the 70's -> 100 now means less than 1 point every 3 years. You probably can't notice a difference that small year over year.

Re: Why do so few people major in computer science?

#352

Post by lazyjeff »

theprop wrote: post #345

I'm not sure about that data. Definitely lots of engineers and physicists as it has been noted have programming experience. Beyond that, tons more people are majoring in computer science as of the last 10 years. It's become the most popular major at Stanford. At Princeton in just 5 years from 2011 to 2016 it grew 3x to become the most popular major from 36 to 130 majors. At Yale in those 5 years, the number of CS maj…

Likewise, this article seems to have no basis in reality. Besides Princeton and Stanford, it's also the most popular major at Brown University, a school typically known for its humanities and social sciences.

Everywhere I go, computer science departments are crying out how much enrollment has swelled, and they can't keep up. Intro CS courses are typically 400-600 students.

Every article that describes CS enrollment uses the terms "exploding" and "surge".

http://cra.org/cra-releases-report-surge-computer-science-en...

Even in 2014: https://www.geekwire.com/2014/analysis-examining-computer-sc...

This certainly feels like "fake news" to me.

Re: Why do so few people major in computer science?

#353

Post by PretzelFisch »

lordnacho wrote: post #107

The grief factor of learning to code is on a different scale to every other major. One missing semicolon will take your whole tower down, and you realise this in the first day of practical exercises. Even if you are of the opinion that CS is math, and coding doesn't come into it, you will hit a coding wall early on. In fact, every exercise in CS has this problem. You add a new thing (eg inheritance), and it breaks. B…

yes, I still remember never getting fortran to do anything. C++ was easy to pick up. funny how picking one bad class can kill a subject for you.

Re: Why do so few people major in computer science?

#354

Post by taphangum »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #326
jstimpfle wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing with instructions is always this: The first instant something goes wrong while following them you have to give up if you don't know quite a bit about what you're doing anyway.

I believe I'm not the only one who, when something goes wrong, I become more determined and think "I might learn something here" followed by searching the internet for things related to what went wrong.

This is basically how I learned to program.

Re: Why do so few people major in computer science?

#355

Post by PretzelFisch »

Guyag wrote: post #262
ashark wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's even the programming that's the problem. There's a ton of Stupid Computer Shit we all know, mostly from messing around on our own time, that makes programming or doing anything else with computers much easier. A set of skills for navigating and troubleshooting issues, and a hard-earned intuition for where and how to look for answers. My CS program was really easy and I still don't know how people w…

I think GP hits the nail on the head there with the homework analogy, and you with yours. Just talking to my friends in other careers about the work that I do makes me check time and time again just how many assumptions of knowledge I make when talking about anything vaguely technical (which is possibly a criticism of how I explain things, but also/even if so says lots about this issue). What surprises me is the lack…

My Cousin smart kid had to come over at midnight because he had his first java assignment outside the ide. Couldn't compile because class path was not defined right on windows. Things like that scare people or pop their confidence.

Re: Why do so few people major in computer science?

#356

Post by jacobolus »

ashark wrote: post #221
lordnacho wrote: post #107

The grief factor of learning to code is on a different scale to every other major. One missing semicolon will take your whole tower down, and you realise this in the first day of practical exercises. Even if you are of the opinion that CS is math, and coding doesn't come into it, you will hit a coding wall early on. In fact, every exercise in CS has this problem. You add a new thing (eg inheritance), and it breaks. B…

I don't think it's even the programming that's the problem. There's a ton of Stupid Computer Shit we all know, mostly from messing around on our own time, that makes programming or doing anything else with computers much easier. A set of skills for navigating and troubleshooting issues, and a hard-earned intuition for where and how to look for answers. My CS program was really easy and I still don't know how people w…

On the other hand, I took a theory CS course in college, and all of the pure math students found it extremely easy with predictable lectures and short obvious homework assignments, while all of the programming-since-they-were-5 but not too mathy students were in way over their heads, and really struggled a lot.

It’s all about what you know...

Re: Why do so few people major in computer science?

#357

Post by YZF »

Baeocystin wrote: post #348
ashark wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's even the programming that's the problem. There's a ton of Stupid Computer Shit we all know, mostly from messing around on our own time, that makes programming or doing anything else with computers much easier. A set of skills for navigating and troubleshooting issues, and a hard-earned intuition for where and how to look for answers. My CS program was really easy and I still don't know how people w…

>There's a ton of Stupid Computer Shit we all know, mostly from messing around on our own time This, I think, is the core issue. Like most of us here, I started playing with computers as a young child, from a Timex Sinclair 1000 as a pre-teen to a Commodore 128 as a young teen, then an Amiga and beyond. It wasn't work, it was fun, a hobby. And more importantly, by the time I hit college, I had literally thousands of…

I should have thought about beer money. But I was such an introverted geek.

I do remember watching other people trying to figure out how to use a mouse or the most basic stuff. I've already studied algorithms and data structures and had a paying programming job. Most of the CS work seemed trivial but I did learn some math. The math did get hard so the degree was definitely not a breeze. Even with CS there were areas that were less trivial like computational geometry or numerical methods but I had the advantage that coding was a non-issue so I could focus on the essence.

Many many many years later, I still often make the mistake of assuming things that look trivial to me are also trivial to others. It's just so hard to tell whether something is universally trivial or just trivial because you've done it so many times.

I wonder if the current generation's "playing" with their phone/computer/tablets gives them an advantage over the previous generation. I do work with quite a few sharp young people but I don't know whether they had programmed before going into CS or not, I guess I should ask...

Re: Why do so few people major in computer science?

#358

Post by danjoc »

_delirium wrote: post #106
simonsarris wrote: post #11

Slight note about Dan Wang picking 2005: That was the peak of CS degrees awarded because it's 4/5 years after the height of the dot-com bubble. So the upward bump in the mid-2000's is somewhat explainable as an anomaly. I think his point 1 is underrated. CS degrees are flat because aptitude is flat. You can compare CS degrees to other degrees over time at nsf.gov: https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/2016/nsb20161/#/report…

Re: the choice of 2005 as origin, if you rebase on 2009, then CS degree growth looks on par with other STEM fields. Thus I think is's misleading to say CS majoring is "flat". At a certain end-to-end view it is, but that obscures that it crashed, and is now rapidly growing, not that it's been stagnant and unchanging. In the early 2000s it was widely perceived as the economically smart thing to go into a technical fiel…

>mass outsourcing

winrar! Came here to say that. ctrl-f says you're the only other person to remember it.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=outsourc...

Re: Why do so few people major in computer science?

#359

Post by mathattack »

My 2 cents:

1) It's hard. Very hard. Unlike most other subjects you can't fluff through it. It works or it doesn't.

2) Every programming class is a ton of work. Even if you're great at the subject, it's generally your most time consuming course.

3) Because of #2, if you don't know from Day 1 that this is your major, it takes forever to get through the coursework.

4) More than most majors it's very hard to take even the intro classes if you haven't done it before.

Perhaps because of all this, most CS majors I know are people who just couldn't imagine majoring in anything else.

Re: Why do so few people major in computer science?

#360

Post by watwut »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #261
watwut wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although biology and organic chemistry are much harder then CS anything, they can be learned in school and from school resources only. No one expects you to already come in already knowing how to code or configure linux. If you are good students willing to work, you will learn them, period. With cs, you are expected to already know a lot that was not taught in school - meaning that all kinds of cultural and social ef…

Organic chemistry looks complicated but it is, by and large, just an enormous amount of memorization. The kind of complex systems reasoning you have with any non-trivial computer science isn't there. By contrast, even though it is the same subject matter, chemical engineering is (correctly) perceived as being vastly more difficult than chemistry because it requires reasoning about complex system-level behaviors that…

Most programming jobs are easy, it takes effort and luck to find one that is not. Things like system administration and configuration are largely about remembering thing. There are some aspects of it that are harder and require being good at math - by you dont need them on practical jobs and they are still easier then real math.

But realistically, a.) memorizing that much is hard b.) my friends who studied chemistry said that it becomes much easier when you understand how it works.

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