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Sure the interest is high, but what's the dropout rate for people, and what is the rate of people switching to other majors?
Let's be honest, money cannot motive you enough to try to learn for a job for which you have no passion.
Or will we never have enough programmers?
What I'd be interested in, if anyone has a perspective to share, is whether we should be worried? Will the job market change? Will our salaries stagnate or fall?
- First job: Getting the first one is always the hardest, the whole needs experience, but where do I get experience if no one gives me the chance scenario. Luckily programmers can have highly visable projects.
- Job markets do change: It's about supply and demand. US programmers makes more, especially in the SF Bay Area than anywhere else. Just read recently that we hit the point where we're graduating more nurses now than job openings for them. I think that's a very similar case where there was a huge push for the profession and now supply is more than demand.
- The best: I see people complain about VISAs in a lot of articles. The best in the profession all demand high pay no matter where they come from. I haven't met many highly skilled/sought after candidates from outside the country that demanded less than their Amercian counter-part.
What I'd be interested in, if anyone has a perspective to share, is whether we should be worried? Will the job market change? Will our salaries stagnate or fall?
Totally unscientific opinion, but wouldn't increase in CS graduates and programmers mean lower salary for those newly minted graduates? Or will we never have enough programmers?
Totally unscientific opinion, but wouldn't increase in CS graduates and programmers mean lower salary for those newly minted graduates? Or will we never have enough programmers?
How about "Possibly, they see people making ridiculous amounts of money in tech and want a piece of it?"
See business school graduate placement numbers too. Declines in finance and huge upswing in tech (particularly the huge web software companies) Follow the money! (I think it's wise for students to be doing this.)
This is evidence that programming has become a skill akin to literacy. The migration seems similar to the hypothetical situation in which universities and society had primarily been based on an oral tradition of communication, and then this fancy new technology called "writing" appeared (at first only in "Departments of orthography science"). Some of those who majored in "orthography science" would go on to study it,…
Considering how relatively recent our cultural conversion from orality to literacy was, and how quickly society shifted, your metaphor becomes even more rich and meaningful.
Shakespeare stands at the border between the worlds of orality and literacy. Kind of makes me wonder who the Shakespeare of today will be in five-hundred years.
I didn't understand this: "10% of Princeton’s students are computer science majors Far more at MIT 10% of Princeton’s faculty are unlikely to ever be in computer science! Ditto" It's the last two lines I don't understand. 10% of currently existing faculty are not likely to work in the CS department? Or it's unlikely that in the future 10% of Princeton faculty will work in the CS department? And the 'ditto'? Far more…
I think he's saying that "it's unlikely that Princeton will ever have 10% of its faculty dedicated to computer science". Despite the demand, universities want to remain balanced and avoid becoming trade schools. "Ditto" means "same for UW"; Ed Lazowska is the department chair at UW.
Take a look at Matthew Reed's Confessions of a Community College Dean as well. There are other factors at work:
1. Tenured faculty can remain until they die. Almost every school still has tenured faculty from popular areas in the 70s.
2. It can be dangerous to chase trends, thanks to tenure: if the school tenures a bunch of CS professors today, and then something else comes along tomorrow, those profs can remain for 50 years.
3. Mandatory retirement ages were eliminated by the Supreme Court in the late 80s and early 90s (again, see Reed's discussion), which lends extra importance to points 1 and 2.
Totally unscientific opinion, but wouldn't increase in CS graduates and programmers mean lower salary for those newly minted graduates? Or will we never have enough programmers?
Yes. Unions and associations address this by lobbying and legislating such that someone who isn't part of the union or association can not legally perform the job. This is how they control the labor market to the benefit of those who are already in the organization.