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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?

#381

Post by erikbye »

mempko wrote: post #102
romanovcode wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is also the only career which people try to inject diversity just for the sake of it. Maybe I just live in developer bubble and don't know any better, but I've never seen a movement like "Girls do Plumbing!", "Black girls construction bootcamp" or "Mining for equality!".

It's not "for the sake of it", diversity brings insanely great benefits. Lack of diversity is likely why most software produced by this industry is, well, shit.

Doesn't Sturgeon's law apply to most industries? To everything?

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

#382

Post by erikbye »

david-cako wrote: post #37
romanovcode wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is also the only career which people try to inject diversity just for the sake of it. Maybe I just live in developer bubble and don't know any better, but I've never seen a movement like "Girls do Plumbing!", "Black girls construction bootcamp" or "Mining for equality!".

This is an argument that make on a regular basis and it never seems to work for the people on the other side of the argument. There's always some excuse that boils down to: A, I only care about the demographics when it's convenient (i.e., the career is prestigious) or B, "yeah well I support men in nursing and women in construction too!", despite there not being a similar effort in the known universe to force demogra…

Why should demographics be forced? This insane obsession with having a 1:1 ratio male/female, and now ethnicity-based as well, is not healthy.

It's weird that the politically correct opinion seems to be that it can't be accepted that a natural gravitation towards certain professions or acts based on gender is real.

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

#383

Post by rjprins »

azakai wrote: post #238
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…

One of my professors actually made the opposite point: that in CS, the compiler will give you an error. You can fix it and move on to the next. While in math (he was a math prof), the paper doesn't object to your writing nonsense. If you have an error early on in your work, all the rest might be nonsense, and you only find out much later after a human grades it. tl;dr at least in CS you get immediate negative feedbac…

Indeed very often the problems people encounter are described well in the error message and/or stacktrace that is printed. But many, many people find it very hard to correctly read and understand those and it's because that is also a hard skill to learn.

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

#384

Post by sodabeest »

azakai wrote: post #238
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…

One of my professors actually made the opposite point: that in CS, the compiler will give you an error. You can fix it and move on to the next. While in math (he was a math prof), the paper doesn't object to your writing nonsense. If you have an error early on in your work, all the rest might be nonsense, and you only find out much later after a human grades it. tl;dr at least in CS you get immediate negative feedbac…

i sometimes wonder if a single line of code I wrote was ever run/checked by a TA or professor

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

#385

Post by benchaney »

noobermin wrote: post #163
_delirium wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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". No, what you described is called "misleading with data" at best and "lying" at worst. There is a clear dip in CS on that plot that is suffered but none of the other points. Moreover, the growth is below the rate of increase in college graduates.

Did you read the post you are accusing of "misleading with data"? He describes that exact phenomenon the sentence after you quoted. It's completely ridiculous to cut out context and then him out for not mentioning the context you just cut out.

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

#386

Post by erikbye »

NotQuantum wrote: post #39
romanovcode wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is also the only career which people try to inject diversity just for the sake of it. Maybe I just live in developer bubble and don't know any better, but I've never seen a movement like "Girls do Plumbing!", "Black girls construction bootcamp" or "Mining for equality!".

Counter point: You can reason that women wouldn't go into other fields like plumbing, or construction because those are also male dominated. The biggest distinction is that Computer Science can be a path climb the socioeconomic ladder. > I think it is also the only career which people try to inject diversity just for the sake of it. Well when you think about the reach of software in the modern world, it can influence…

> having different points of view on a programming team can mean the difference between having your product take off, or fail.

All teams have different points of view. This has nothing to with "diversity" or gender. If there's a female or two on the team, great, but don't force it, and her opinion has no more value than the opinion of her male colleague.

Forced diversity (of what? be specific, ethnicity? skin color? religion?) is not a requirement for multiple points of view.

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

#387

Post by froindt »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #104
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…

What's interesting to me about that data is the high rate of biological and agricultural sciences grads, relative to all other sciences. CS grad rates seem to fall right about where they should on XKCD's Purity Scale [1] (if CS had been included in it). 2004 was an outlier for CS, but it has reverted to its mean since. But bio and ag sciences are beating out Psychology, which is a bit of a reversal. Biology isn't eas…

As someone who graduated with an engineering degree from one of those large Midwestern universities, yes. There are millions of acres of farmland and tons of ag companies who are making developments to eek out another 1% yield. At my university, the ag and life sciences college was only recently overcome by engineering to be the largest college.

In Michigan the universities have a lot more focus on automotive because that's what runs the state. Agriculture runs a huge portion of Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, and other nearby states.

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

#388

Post by sodabeest »

gms7777 wrote: post #343
flexie wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The premise of the article is wrong. From 2009 and until 2015, the number of CS grads almost doubled and any of those economics majors could have seen that in the graph, even if their essays are "basically bullet points" and their field is dead simple. They could also have told the blogger that causality might go the other way; Salaries are high precisely because demand is bigger than supply. If (or when) high salari…

Yes, I'm sure there are other factors but the graph tells a pretty simple story. Numbers declined from 2005-2009, which means students that entered college around 2001-2005 -- students that were in high school during the dotcom bubble burst and aftermath. CS may not have seemed like an attractive field at the time. Over time the state of the field has recovered, and as you point out continued to grow and get more int…

right on the money. I graduated HS in 2004. I originally was into making websites in HS. the farthest I got was a little ASP and ColdFusion. But it didn't seem like a safe industry at the time so I went another direction. (but what did I know, I was a kid)

I never really made the connection of "building websites" to actual computer programming, so CS didn't even come up for me.

but now its 2017 and I went back to school and just graduated with a degree in CS.

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

#389

Post by erikbye »

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…

Hmm.... Many CS101 courses are extremely easy; have a look at something like Harvard's CS50, which many people also take online. There's always somewhere to start for people who's hardly used their computer for more than just browsing.

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

#390

Post by xor1 »

jdietrich wrote: post #254
walshemj wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

novice programmers should not be starting a CS degree

Given the gender skew amongst high-school programmers, this is almost equivalent to saying "women should not be starting a CS degree". It also further entrenches the advantages of people who come from affluent backgrounds. Given the success of some short coding bootcamps, it isn't inconceivable that novices could be brought up to speed within the first semester. We don't expect law students to have been amateur lawye…

>Given the gender skew amongst high-school programmers, this is almost equivalent to saying "women should not be starting a CS degree"

What makes you bring up gender over race or class ? There are more middle-class Asian and White women in the field than lower-income African-American and Hispanic men.

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