Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Computer science has one of the highest unemployment rates

newsweek.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 130 posts

Re: Computer science has one of the highest unemployment rates

#41

Post by giantg2 »

paxys wrote: post #30
cs_throwaway wrote: post #3

CS professor with 15 years experience. The massive boom in computer science enrollment over the last 20 years has been driven mostly by people chasing tech salaries, not by any real interest in computing itself. These students often show up completely unprepared for how difficult CS actually is, and universities have responded by dumbing down their programs to keep everyone happy and enrolled. If this weeds out the p…

Even 20 years ago back when I was in college you had a sizable portion of kids who came in to study computer science thinking it would be fun and games. They were then made to study formal logic in their first semester and debug segfaults in gdb in the next, and by the end of the first year pretty much all of them had switched majors. Anecdotally I've heard that very few CS programs even use C++ anymore, and schools…

There seem to be relatively few C/C++ jobs, so they went with what the market wanted (Java). They still exposed you to other other types of languages such as assembly, JS, and even COBOL. I really don't think going with python except for an into/cross-major class is a good idea since it's so simple and there aren't that many jobs with it.

Re: Computer science has one of the highest unemployment rates

#43

Post by ghaff »

paxys wrote: post #30
cs_throwaway wrote: post #3

CS professor with 15 years experience. The massive boom in computer science enrollment over the last 20 years has been driven mostly by people chasing tech salaries, not by any real interest in computing itself. These students often show up completely unprepared for how difficult CS actually is, and universities have responded by dumbing down their programs to keep everyone happy and enrolled. If this weeds out the p…

Even 20 years ago back when I was in college you had a sizable portion of kids who came in to study computer science thinking it would be fun and games. They were then made to study formal logic in their first semester and debug segfaults in gdb in the next, and by the end of the first year pretty much all of them had switched majors. Anecdotally I've heard that very few CS programs even use C++ anymore, and schools…

There's definitely this disconnect between programming and computer science. For better or worse, a lot of top schools don't even really teach programming in their computer science programs. It's something you just pick up on your own.

But not sure that using Python as the specific tool is so bad--based on the MOOC that's what MIT uses in Intro to Algorithms. May be better than spending a lot of time on the vagaries of C++ which are certainly relevant to system programming (though that's probably slowly switching to Rust) if your focus is on algorithms and other design details.

Re: Computer science has one of the highest unemployment rates

#44

Post by rwmj »

hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #33
Maro wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you get a job at McDonald's while having a civil engineering degree That would be under_employment (vs un_employment). Un_employment refers to people actively seeking work but unable to find it, while under_employment encompasses individuals who are working but not fully utilizing their skills or working fewer hours than they would like

Bad term. If I get employed as a quantitative trader on Jane Street after completing a philosophy major am I underemployed because I'm not writing papers on ontology? Why do other people get to say what my "full utilization" is without even knowing me? Underemployment as "not working as many hours as you'd like" is the standard definition, and that one actually does seem to respect people's interiority.

It depends if you want to be a philosopher or not. The surveys do actually ask this question, see questions #93-95 here for example: http://gpiatlantic.org/pdf/communitygpi/communitypart2b.pdf

(I think you are right to ask if a survey can accurately capture "underemployment", there are many problems with the definition and how to capture the right information to measure it.)

Re: Computer science has one of the highest unemployment rates

#45

Post by bilbo0s »

paxys wrote: post #30
cs_throwaway wrote: post #3

CS professor with 15 years experience. The massive boom in computer science enrollment over the last 20 years has been driven mostly by people chasing tech salaries, not by any real interest in computing itself. These students often show up completely unprepared for how difficult CS actually is, and universities have responded by dumbing down their programs to keep everyone happy and enrolled. If this weeds out the p…

Even 20 years ago back when I was in college you had a sizable portion of kids who came in to study computer science thinking it would be fun and games. They were then made to study formal logic in their first semester and debug segfaults in gdb in the next, and by the end of the first year pretty much all of them had switched majors. Anecdotally I've heard that very few CS programs even use C++ anymore, and schools…

I think that's what the professor meant when s/he said that schools are "dumbing down" curricula. The amount of Python being taught is a bit concerning even from the perspective of personal economics. If I was paying all that money every term in tuition, I'd want them to teach me the hard stuff. Not the language I can learn in a weekend while I'm shirtless on the couch watching GameDay. It's like no one ever stops for a moment and says, "Wait? Why am I paying this much money to learn a language that's so easy my English Lit friend knows it inside out already?"

If I were at a school where they are teaching JavaScript or Python, you kind of already know that program is more "money grab" than "study of computing technologies".

Re: Computer science has one of the highest unemployment rates

#46

Post by Borealid »

giantg2 wrote: post #41
paxys wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even 20 years ago back when I was in college you had a sizable portion of kids who came in to study computer science thinking it would be fun and games. They were then made to study formal logic in their first semester and debug segfaults in gdb in the next, and by the end of the first year pretty much all of them had switched majors. Anecdotally I've heard that very few CS programs even use C++ anymore, and schools…

There seem to be relatively few C/C++ jobs, so they went with what the market wanted (Java). They still exposed you to other other types of languages such as assembly, JS, and even COBOL. I really don't think going with python except for an into/cross-major class is a good idea since it's so simple and there aren't that many jobs with it.

I recently heard someone say "I've never had a job that didn't involve at least some Python". I think that's true of almost all computer science jobs in the current market.

Python is the primary language for scientific computing and the secondary language for a good number of other tasks.

Re: Computer science has one of the highest unemployment rates

#48

Post by ghaff »

lazide wrote: post #39
ghaff wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Skills shortage" isn't BS. But minimal front-end learnings aren't the fix.

‘Skills shortage’ is similar to complaining about STEM shortages. It’s mostly BS. The complaint isn’t about n people not being available, it’s about n people not being available for x low price, or z terrible working conditions. No matter how cheap or how widely available, some folks will still complain because for some folks, even if they had to pay $0, it still would be ‘too much’ if people also demanded human righ…

STEM is fairly meaningless in an employment context because biology/chemistry/math undergrads are generally in a different category than at least some engineering grads. And it's actually reasonable to think that those engineering grad salary expectations should be roughly in the ballpark of other professionals. They certainly used to be.

Re: Computer science has one of the highest unemployment rates

#49

Post by giantg2 »

msgodel wrote: post #40
sofixa wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While C++ is unquestionably still widely used, outside of legacy and some niches (like embedded) it's not in the top 3 "best" choices. Why teach a more complicated language with a poorer ecosystem and toolchain than is actually needed? I think there's still value in starting with C and C++, to see where it's coming from and see how much tooling and DX has improved, but I can't really blame courses jumping directly to…

Maybe it's selection bias because I'm an above average C++ programmer but all three large tech companies I've worked at used C++ very heavily.

The first real language I learned was C++ and I was decent at it (best in class but mostly stuck with console based programs, nothing advanced like GUIs that year). I have never used it at work. If you look at job boards, it's overwhelmingly stuff like Java, JS/TS frameworks, etc. Why teach it when it seems like less than 10% of postings are looking for it? Might as well teach other languages and just learn it if you need it.

Re: Computer science has one of the highest unemployment rates

#50

Post by vintermann »

dpflan wrote: post #13
cs_throwaway wrote: post #3

CS professor with 15 years experience. The massive boom in computer science enrollment over the last 20 years has been driven mostly by people chasing tech salaries, not by any real interest in computing itself. These students often show up completely unprepared for how difficult CS actually is, and universities have responded by dumbing down their programs to keep everyone happy and enrolled. If this weeds out the p…

Thanks for sharing. Is this similar to what was attracting students to medicine/doctor (guaranteed position with high salary)? But the med-school-to-full-time-physician pipeline is long and can weed out. CS is a difficult subject, certain ways of thinking are difficult but certainly can be learned, like recursive thinking. Did colleges expand their computer science departments or even just create them to meet the dem…

Salary isn't traditionally what motivates people to study medicine. It's prestige. The difficulty is part of the prestige, which is probably why they still do things like memorize long lists of cranial nerve names. I haven't heard that they have a problem with dropout rates.

A good CS education only gives you prestige with fellow nerds.

Post reply on HN