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

61–70 of 130 posts

Re: Computer science has one of the highest unemployment rates

#61

Post by giantg2 »

ramesh31 wrote: post #11
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…

Thank you for saying this because it feels like these people entering the industry in such numbers over the 2010s completely killed what made this job fun in the first place. I call them "ticket completers". Sure they can mechanically perform the minimum requirements of the job, but there is zero interest at all in what is actually being done; just following PM directions to the letter with no further thought. The wh…

"The hackers and nerds will be just fine. They are like gold when we find them now."

This is not at all my experience. One of the problems I face is many of those PMs and companies in general want mindless ticket completers. My current job just wants us to grind through the Jira backlog. They have no interest in anything else and crush it from your will too.

Re: Computer science has one of the highest unemployment rates

#62

Post by ghaff »

bilbo0s wrote: post #54
ghaff wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Well, essentially you have the language used in the class match the subject being taught. Python gets language difficulty out of the way of learning a given algorithm. Bonus points for exacerbating the time issue when trying to introduce Big O timing notation. The kids can actually "feel it" in an in your face kind of way. Systems, it's different, as you say. Compilers. Different AI courses. And on and on. Each you m…

No argument. 6.001 I think it is goes into sort algorithms, Big O, etc. And Python seems a pretty good match especially as an ostensibly into course. Rust (or C++) is clearly a better match for other purposes and would probably deserve some sort of class for some of the associated concepts even if the student sort of knew how to "program."

Re: Computer science has one of the highest unemployment rates

#63

Post by mrkramer »

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 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.

Python's ecosystem is massive and there are lots of use cases[0], basically data analysis, machine learning, deep learning and all the rest of AI run on Python.

[0] https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/keep-bbsk/AFgXFlJPnxraSopK...

Re: Computer science has one of the highest unemployment rates

#64

Post by giantg2 »

dpflan wrote: post #20
ramesh31 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for saying this because it feels like these people entering the industry in such numbers over the 2010s completely killed what made this job fun in the first place. I call them "ticket completers". Sure they can mechanically perform the minimum requirements of the job, but there is zero interest at all in what is actually being done; just following PM directions to the letter with no further thought. The wh…

> The hackers and nerds will be just fine. They are like gold when we find them now. But if this makes CS "uncool" again, I am all for it. Think about how AI can help students cheat nowadays. You could still cheat previously, but now a CS-degree seeker can have an AI do the entirety of school work for them (with exception of say pen-and-paper tests). Imagine how the quality of new graduates drops with regard to the u…

When most jobs just want you to be a ticket completer, the cheaters will do just fine if they can do it faster. The rest of use will be considered slow and discarded. It's happening to me.

Re: Computer science has one of the highest unemployment rates

#65

Post by dagw »

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…

I think CS departments are at least partially responsible for this development. They know that most of the students applying care nothing about Computer Science, have no interest in Computer Science and will never learn Computer Science, yet they keep accepting (and graduating) them. If CS departments actually wanted to teach CS, then they would advocate for setting up a new series of departments/degrees with names like Software Development and Engineering or Application Design and UX, and send most of the students there. Then those who want to learn/teach Computer Science can learn/teach Computer Science without having to deal with a classroom full of people who really don't want to be there.

Re: Computer science has one of the highest unemployment rates

#66

Post by dpflan »

giantg2 wrote: post #64
dpflan wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The hackers and nerds will be just fine. They are like gold when we find them now. But if this makes CS "uncool" again, I am all for it. Think about how AI can help students cheat nowadays. You could still cheat previously, but now a CS-degree seeker can have an AI do the entirety of school work for them (with exception of say pen-and-paper tests). Imagine how the quality of new graduates drops with regard to the u…

When most jobs just want you to be a ticket completer, the cheaters will do just fine if they can do it faster. The rest of use will be considered slow and discarded. It's happening to me.

Yes, they can be ticket punchers more easily, kind of trained to do that. But there are certainly levels of achievement that are not as possible with such a foundation that lacks grounding and true understanding.

Do you mind elaborating here on what is happening to you? It seems worthwhile information to add to the discussions ongoing for this post.

Re: Computer science has one of the highest unemployment rates

#67

Post by giantg2 »

mrkramer wrote: post #63
giantg2 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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. Python's ecosystem is massive and there are lots of use cases[0], basically data analysis, machine learning, deep learning and all the rest of AI run on Python. [0] https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/keep-bbsk/AFgXFlJPnxraSopK...

The ecosystem is massive, but most CS jobs when looking at job boards either don't use it or use it just as a secondary (similar to SQL).

If you're saying that all of AI runs on python, then what's the problem here? Implicitly students will need to learn python as part of their AI class.

Re: Computer science has one of the highest unemployment rates

#68

Post by leereeves »

bux93 wrote: post #4

The source is here https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:... I don't read too much into the fact that unemployment for nutrition science is at 0.4% - that doesn't mean those people are all working as nutritionists or even in a job that requires a degree. You can see this clearly in the underemployment rate which is 45%+. Likewise, the top unemployment rate (9.4%) of those with an anthropology ma…

> So what to make of IT grads having high unemployment rates (but low underemployment rates! bottom 5 in those)?

That's a very important observation. It's much better to be in a field with a 6% unemployment rate than a 60% underemployment rate (like criminal justice, performing arts, and, surprisingly, medical technicians).

Re: Computer science has one of the highest unemployment rates

#69

Post by coderatlarge »

paxys wrote: post #10
zettapwn wrote: post #2

[flagged]

It's mainly #1. For 20 years now we've been hearing non-stop about how computer science is this magical major where anyone can sleepwalk out of college into a 150k job. Parents have been pushing their kids into it whether they are interested or not. Colleges have been taking advantage by pushing sub-par programs and boosting graduation rates. The end result is a large number of CS graduates who can't write a for loop…

i just spoke with a chem prof who said that a lot of phd students in the degree sign up not because they want to do science but because of the salary bump the degree provides in industry.

i guess that is a natural dynamic in our economic/belief system in which all central planning must be inherently bad so we must always pay the on-demand price instead of the bulk price and every mis-timing mistake has to cost a lifetime of being wrong afterwards…

Re: Computer science has one of the highest unemployment rates

#70

Post by giantg2 »

Moomoomoo309 wrote: post #60
Borealid wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I work at a fintech company doing Spring Boot, and the only python I've seen here is in some CI scripts (which I can see but do not have access to edit, we have a team that maintains CI). Everything else is Java, Kotlin, or JS for some websites, that's about it. I've heard the AI teams use python, but while pretty much all the devs in my team know python, we don't use it at all.

Similar here. One exception is that we had some Lambdas written in Python. Now there is a push to replace them with Go because of the potential money savings from faster execution times.
Post reply on HN