261–270 of 305 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A couple of my friends in the CSE program (not at texas though) had to take on a 5th year due to the poor scheduling. Doesn't help that you have to apply to the program after you are already a freshman, so if you bomb a tough math or physics class your first semester you are set back pretty far and have to build up your GPA to even get into the major.
That sounds reasonable.
If CS is so popular right now, how can it possibly command high pay by the time these people hit the job market? Do they all expect to compete against each other for high paying positions? How is that a good bet? Do they expect that there will be a ton of jobs that will all pay well?
There's an information delay that causes these trends. Remember that the people making decisions on their college majors are 16-18 year olds. They're basing these decisions on $$$. The university encourages these decisions because of $$$. The new students aren't looking at the job market and recognizing that they're pushing it towards a glut (as a cohort), as individuals they're making a sound decision in that moment…
Why do US colleges over-admit like this? In the UK you apply to do a computer science course, and they have 50 places or whatever for that course, and so they admit 50 people. You can't get into the college and then be told that actually it's full. If they do accidentally over-admit it's their problem to solve, not yours.
Where I did my CS degree, any student in the major was always going to be able to get their core courses on a proper schedule that allowed for on-time graduation. Sometimes that meant the college would add entire extra courses if there were more people needing something than expected.
Did I get every elective (not all electives were taught every semester, some were only taught once every year or two, there was a large rotating selection - You had to take a few from different areas) that I was interested in? No, but I got most of them.
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However, if you were a non-major looking to take some CS classes (beyond an intro one specifically intended for non-majors), you would have a tough time getting in. You were only allowed to register for those after all the students majoring in CS registered.
If CS is so popular right now, how can it possibly command high pay by the time these people hit the job market? Do they all expect to compete against each other for high paying positions? How is that a good bet? Do they expect that there will be a ton of jobs that will all pay well?
There's an information delay that causes these trends. Remember that the people making decisions on their college majors are 16-18 year olds. They're basing these decisions on $$$. The university encourages these decisions because of $$$. The new students aren't looking at the job market and recognizing that they're pushing it towards a glut (as a cohort), as individuals they're making a sound decision in that moment…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's an information delay that causes these trends. Remember that the people making decisions on their college majors are 16-18 year olds. They're basing these decisions on $$$. The university encourages these decisions because of $$$. The new students aren't looking at the job market and recognizing that they're pushing it towards a glut (as a cohort), as individuals they're making a sound decision in that moment…
I'd be curious to know whether there's a good way to avoid this. As someone who's currently in high school and looking to major in CS, this really worries me - am I actually going to be able to find a job a few years from now? Should I be planning to study something else instead?
The best way is to choose to do it because it actually interests you, not just because you want the money. You can get a job with the degree despite the glut of graduates. Just accept that you may not always be getting the $150k/year starting salaries you sometimes hear about.
But if CS is only of passing interest and you have other majors you're considering:
I wish more people would minor in CS, rather than major in it (NB: Not all schools have a good CS minor program even if they have a good CS major program). I have a lot of engineer friends (from my professional career or my time in school) who have little programming skill, but find themselves increasingly needing to program. Even the first 5 CS courses in most programs (versus the first 1-2, at best) would make them 10-100x more effective in their jobs.
A former colleague (EE) wrote test analysis software (we were both doing verification and validation work) that took minutes to analyze the data. My slightly improved version resulted in getting execution time down to seconds in the worst case (500MB file being processed). The improvement didn't need more understanding of programming than a 2nd year CS major would have, but he didn't have it because he'd taken literally one programming course (and never programmed again, except for small matlab things). I've seen similar things from aerospace and other engineers. Their code is usually correct, but often inefficient. Or they lack an understanding of the underlying memory model of a language like C and try to do impossible things (that, again, a 2nd year or so CS major ought to know).
So: Stay the course with CS if it is of real interest to you. Otherwise, look to double major or minor and use your CS skills to stay ahead of others in your discipline.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had to write a script to constantly monitor my school's class scheduling system to get into a couple of classes. It was an interesting script because the system was an IBM 3270 style mainframe.
How did you test such a script? I always thought about doing this, but since class signups only opened twice a year (once per semester), and that was the same time I needed to actually sign up for the classes, I concluded there would never be a time to debug and refine such a script.
In short, you gave the school a list of the classes you wanted to take. The school loaded everybody's information into the computer and had it make the first set of assignments. Then you got back the schedule and discovered that the computer had put you in classes at 7AM, 11AM, 4PM, and 6PM MWF and only one class on TTh so you had to go in and shuffle your classes around until you got a reasonable schedule. Or you would discover that all of your electives filled up before you had a chance so now you're in a fight to get into the classes.
It sounds all Mad Max, but the schedules were in such flux that it was usually possible to get the classes you wanted. I only remember getting screwed once, on a mandatory class with only two or three timeslots and one of which was highly undesirable (7AM MWF) and the other two timeslots never had an opening. Worse, the professor for that class had a heavy accent and tended to drone slowly in a monotone.
>Aafia Ahmad, a sophomore computer science major at U.T. Austin, had hoped to take an elective course in computer security this semester. But when she tried to sign up during early registration in November, the course was already full. I know this doesn't refute the point the article is trying to make, but it doesn't seem that unreasonable to me that an underclassman might not get into a highly sought after elective.…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How did you test such a script? I always thought about doing this, but since class signups only opened twice a year (once per semester), and that was the same time I needed to actually sign up for the classes, I concluded there would never be a time to debug and refine such a script.
I've written this type of script before - I didn't need too much in the way of debugging. Mine (similar to GP, it seems) didn't actually do the registration, just save the current state of known divs or even the whole page. Then it would send me an update if that changed. So, I didn't need to debug what happens when the class shows "open" - I just saved the div that said "closed" and sent myself an email/text any tim…
You basically had to just send the correct number of arrow key presses to get the cursor to the correct field, send the digits, and then send the enter key. Parse the data that comes back, and add the routine to cursor over to the "add course" prompt when it says there is an availability. The script was totally gross looking but it worked.
"The university is looking to hire several tenure-track faculty members in computing this year, he said, but competition for top candidates is fierce. I know of major departments that interviewed 40 candidates, and I don’t think they hired anybody." That doesn't sound like fierce competition if they were able to interview 40 candidates... Did they give them all high-paying offers and they all rejected?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A couple of my friends in the CSE program (not at texas though) had to take on a 5th year due to the poor scheduling. Doesn't help that you have to apply to the program after you are already a freshman, so if you bomb a tough math or physics class your first semester you are set back pretty far and have to build up your GPA to even get into the major.
That sounds reasonable.