What is the biggest reason for this growth?
Money and prestige.
Responding to the Explosion of Student Interest in Computer Science [pdf]
41–50 of 201 posts
Re: Responding to the Explosion of Student Interest in Computer Science [pdf]
#42This 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,…
I completely disagree.
Having everyone knowing how to code is the opposite of specialisation. It's inefficient and pointless. If a certain profession needs a piece of software, it's much more efficient for specialist developers to consult with domain experts, write that software, and sell it into the industry. Having every (for example) doctor being able to code adds negligible value, and I would argue the opportunity cost is awful. If my doctor has a choice to become a very mediocre coder or a better doctor, I would hope they choose the latter.
As for the comparison to literacy, there's simply no comparison. Illiterate societies are unable to progress past agrarian economies because illiteracy precludes specialisation, prevents the dissemination of knowledge, and makes it almost impossible to learn new things except by imitation or direct instruction. Literacy is a necessary skill in order to do much beyond dirt farming. Illiterate people can't, for example, even follow a moderately complex checklist. In contrast, I see no negative impact on society if most people can't code.
I don't spend my time studying anatomy; my micro-surgeon shouldn't spend his time studying coding, and I don't see how it would do anything but make him less effective if he did.
A society of part-time coders would do nothing but produce a lot of badly-written toy programs. What's the point?
Re: Responding to the Explosion of Student Interest in Computer Science [pdf]
#43We have almost recovered to the number of CS degrees issued in 1985.
Re: Responding to the Explosion of Student Interest in Computer Science [pdf]
#44Sure the interest is high, but what's the dropout rate for people, and what is the rate of people switching to other majors?
Exactly this. In my university in the first year there was 2750 students. After first semester only 323, second year 107, last year 82. Let's be honest, money cannot motive you enough to try to learn for a job for which you have no passion.
What do the graduation rates look like, or is it too soon to tell?
Re: Responding to the Explosion of Student Interest in Computer Science [pdf]
#45How about "Possibly, they see people making ridiculous amounts of money in tech and want a piece of it?"
When I started college in 1982 as a CS/EE double major, the big-money major was petroleum engineering. If I remember correctly, they lost a lot of people who had done well in high-school when they hit the calculus for engineers classes.
Similarly, when I started in '83, we had a bunch of gonna-be computer scientists at my school. I think about half of those people were gone a year later.
What I don't know is if the proportion of people who stick with it is about the same from year to year, or if the years with massive enrollment increases have much higher attrition rates.
Alas, that graph shows a big peak of CS graduates around 86/87 or so. I didn't get out until 88, after the wave - and the 87 market crash-let. I had to work too much to do my upper division work in 2 years, so it took me 3 - but I got to learn "dBASE" in my intern-like job, which was largely obsolete by the time I finished school. Glad we learned some C in school (even if I liked Pascal better).
Re: Responding to the Explosion of Student Interest in Computer Science [pdf]
#46What is the biggest reason for this growth?
A lot of commenters referred to money being the biggest driver but I think that's only a half truth. Rather, job security seems to be the most logical reason to study computer science. No matter who you talk to, in any field, there's a huge consensus that having knowledge and experience with computers increase your employment prospects (I'm sure this could be proved by scanning job boards). Combined with the current…
Anecdotally, my experiences confirm this. My brother, who before, had never even tried to program, is currently a CS major. Most of his friends are too. They don't care about startups or startup jobs, they want secure jobs at big companies.
Re: Responding to the Explosion of Student Interest in Computer Science [pdf]
#47Totally 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?
Increase in supply, yes, but the question is if the demand will grow more quickly than the supply. If it does then salaries will keep rising (though probably more slowly). If supply growth outpaces demand growth then salaries will drop.
I don't think we really know enough about programming demand growth right now to make a call either way, we also don't know the scale of the CS graduate expansion.
In any case, this is a terribly simplistic view of things. Not all graduates are created equal, and not all jobs demand the same programmers. Neither programmers nor programming jobs are fully interchangeable widgets.
In reality there are multiple buckets to programmer supply, and multiple buckets to programmer demand. This is sort of the nice way of saying that there is a gradient between "has a CS degree but can't code out of a wet paper bag and probably never will" and "has a CS degree and knows how to solve truly hard problems and has the right foundations to be an excellent engineer".
IMO when people are entering a field purely for the cash, the latter pool won't expand by that much, but the former pool will expand greatly. This will depress salaries on one end of the industry but the impact on the other end won't be extreme. A dramatic expansion in CS enrollment IMO will cause a crunch in low-mid-end programming salaries while leaving high-end programming salaries mostly intact.
My main concern is if these college students are being sold a lie. Schools are holding up Google and Facebook engineers (and their salaries) as templates, but in reality most of them will end up writing enterprise code for a megacorp somewhere for $60K a year, and in fact the bulk of programming jobs in this country are much closer to that than they are to your archetypical Silicon Valley $200K job. This concern goes double for the Hacker School phenomenon, since they smell more opportunistic and get-rich-quick-y than traditional 4-year programs.
Re: Responding to the Explosion of Student Interest in Computer Science [pdf]
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.)
The big money is still in finance, unless you manage to build a successful business.
There now exist options in engineering which are comparable with those in finance, and importantly, there is now a credible case that engineering is one of the best median outcome career paths for a bright student who is willing to push whatever lever and turn whatever knob required to get to professional success. Stanford undergrads with their degrees still wet are getting $1X0,000 offers from AmaGooFaceSoft. That's roughly comparable to management consulting or the anticipated returns to early-career finance majors.
When I graduated, back in the mists of history in 2004, you'd be crazy to assume that a 5th year engineer salary package would be approaching $300k. There was a huge salary gap in finance's favor on day one, it got bigger every year, and it exploded once the financiers started to hit their 30s. That gap has narrowed considerably, at least for folks on that trajectory in their 20s. (I'll confess to not having a great understanding of what it looks like to be a 32 year old at Google. I mean, any 32 year old at Google who was with them in 2004 is now a multimillionaire several times over, but I don't know what the reasonable modeling is for expectations for being 32 in 2024.)
The folks who think they're going to be in the top 10th of engineers AmaGooFaceSoft hire this year in terms of career success 10 years out now have a reasonable expectation that that will be as lucrative as a top 10th finance career.
Re: Responding to the Explosion of Student Interest in Computer Science [pdf]
#49What 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?
Experienced engineers will still have an advantage in a job search. Few things to consider: - 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 a…
"First job"
That's an outstanding point, especially in today's economy.
It sucks that a conventional programming career generally ends at age 35-40, but for someone not wedded to a programming career, and who has a modicum of talent and interest in the field, yeah, that'll get them started.
They will then have plenty of time to arrange their first transition into another career, and they will have learned a lot of generally useful stuff in the meantime.
Re: Responding to the Explosion of Student Interest in Computer Science [pdf]
#50Do these trends hold in universities outside of the US? Because from where I come from at least, computer science is still as un-sexy as ever.