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Students flee field as computer 'fad fades' (1987)

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Re: Students flee field as computer 'fad fades' (1987)

#101

Post by rejectedandsad »

happyhardcore wrote: post #97
quickthrower2 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh yeah 2001! 6 months and dozens of applications to get a job offer. I would have done 100s of applications had their been that many to apply to. Low points was being rejected from a job maintaining access databases in a small town. Being rejected from another job because I hadn’t suggested manually unrolling a loop as an alternative solution to a problem and I said “oh yeah you could do that I guess” (feedback: bad…

FWIW £18k in 2001 is ~£30k in today's money which is on the upper end of graduate starting salaries even for today

Im especially glad I’m not British - in America my $150k TC out of undergrad was mediocre.

Re: Students flee field as computer 'fad fades' (1987)

#102

Post by vkou »

fuzzy2 wrote: post #72
lordnacho wrote: post #64

My biggest issue with education is the whole "study this, get a job doing that" idea. It's plainly wrong, and it sucks in people who drink the koolaid and think there's an easy route to work. Very little is learned in college that is necessary for general employment. By general I mean just about everything that isn't licensed, like being a doctor. What college does is it throws a bunch of hard but irrelevant subjects…

I agree that university isn’t vocational training. However, the knowledge is relevant. If you don’t know that some data structure/algorithm/whatever exists, would you know to look for it or what to look for? Sure you can learn all this by yourself, but you can also learn it at the university.

If university isn't vocational training, why do employers prioritize hiring people with university degrees?

They seem to think it is.

Re: Students flee field as computer 'fad fades' (1987)

#103

Post by quickthrower2 »

rejectedandsad wrote: post #101
happyhardcore wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW £18k in 2001 is ~£30k in today's money which is on the upper end of graduate starting salaries even for today

Im especially glad I’m not British - in America my $150k TC out of undergrad was mediocre.

Yeah America seems to have the nice combo of reasonably price places to live and high tech salaries. Since “remote, but US” is common I do t see why you can’t take your $150k and live off a quarter of that somewhere and save most!

Re: Students flee field as computer 'fad fades' (1987)

#104

Post by qsort »

lordnacho wrote: post #86
fuzzy2 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that university isn’t vocational training. However, the knowledge is relevant. If you don’t know that some data structure/algorithm/whatever exists, would you know to look for it or what to look for? Sure you can learn all this by yourself, but you can also learn it at the university.

Maybe the way I'd phrase it is the knowledge you learn at university, to the extent that it's applicable, is actually just indexing. So for instance I figured out that numerical methods are a thing that you can use to approximately solve differential equations, which often don't have a nice analytical solution. Can I solve differential equations? Not anymore. Can I solve one by the end of this week? Definitely. What…

I largely agree with your points, but i'd say it's more "intuition building". To make a silly example, I don't know C# at all, in fact I have never written a single line of C#, but I'm very confident I could get up to speed relatively quickly because I know Java fairly well. This is simply due to the fact that after a while you just "get" how things work.

Similarly, even though I'm by no means a mathematician, I feel, at least to a limited extent, like I "get" math.

This kind of intuition, innate feel for how things work in a certain field of study lasts way longer than the details of a specific proof or the code for a specific algorithm, and I feel it's the actual output of higher education.

Re: Students flee field as computer 'fad fades' (1987)

#105

Post by lordnacho »

vkou wrote: post #102
fuzzy2 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that university isn’t vocational training. However, the knowledge is relevant. If you don’t know that some data structure/algorithm/whatever exists, would you know to look for it or what to look for? Sure you can learn all this by yourself, but you can also learn it at the university.

If university isn't vocational training, why do employers prioritize hiring people with university degrees? They seem to think it is.

Because the training in "deep diving into something" is evidence that the person can learn some other thing over the next few years.

It is a tenuous connection at best. It works somewhat in STEM because of the mentioned deep trees: some people are just naturally curious and will get to the bottom of anything, be it DS&A, circuits, complex analysis, or accountancy.

Re: Students flee field as computer 'fad fades' (1987)

#106

Post by tonyedgecombe »

madaxe_again wrote: post #53
anonu wrote: post #13

Was this the actual feeling at the time? Or just one reporters perspective, spun into a story. I feel like the ad for $7.95 prime rib is probably a more relevant data point from the past than this article. Edit: Gourmet House: https://www.bismarckcafe.com/blogs/260/remembering-gourmet-h...

In the 80’s and 90’s in the U.K., in my experience, definitely. My parents were always hugely dismayed by my interest in technology, said it was all just a flash in the pan, a waste of time, it’ll rot your brain. My boarding school from 7-12 (‘90-‘95) banned all computers and electronics because they were considered a distraction. You wanted to use a BBC micro, you sat on the now-imprisoned geography master’s knee, a…

I started my career in the eighties and it did feel rather dismal in the UK. All the interesting stuff appeared to be happening on the other side of the Atlantic. There were pockets of development going on but most of the programmers I knew were writing COBOL on IBM mainframes.

I remember reading an article about employment rates for different degrees. Computer science was at the bottom of the list.

This is why I'm always sceptical when I hear people here talking about the current high demand for programmers carrying on forever.

Re: Students flee field as computer 'fad fades' (1987)

#107

Post by chii »

snapetom wrote: post #74
donatj wrote: post #49

I don’t hear much about it these days, but circa 2004 when I was going into computer science I had multiple teachers and a guidance counselor warn me that all the jobs would be going to India and tell me I should pursue something else. This seemed to be very much the prevailing wisdom of the time. I pursued it anyway as it was my passion. I was one of five students in my program that had been a huge multi-campus prog…

Yep. And everyone was afraid of all these drag and drop tools that generated Java code. "You just have to know UML!" was the promise. I'm reminded of that today in the rare instance when I run into the decision makers that are convinced GUI data engineering tools are the future.

> the decision makers that are convinced GUI data engineering tools are the future.

The same train of thought leads to the idea that you can produce good software with mediocre developers by using processes, coding rules and checklists and "development methodology" like agile.

Re: Students flee field as computer 'fad fades' (1987)

#108

Post by chii »

krige wrote: post #93
lordnacho wrote: post #64

My biggest issue with education is the whole "study this, get a job doing that" idea. It's plainly wrong, and it sucks in people who drink the koolaid and think there's an easy route to work. Very little is learned in college that is necessary for general employment. By general I mean just about everything that isn't licensed, like being a doctor. What college does is it throws a bunch of hard but irrelevant subjects…

That's entirely not the point of college. College isn't supposed to give you job skills. There are other educational avenues far superior for that purpose. College is supposed to install you with broad and reasonably thorough knowledge base in the general direction you chose as well as shape your perception of the world and the underlying mechanisms. It wasn't ever supposed to be a required qualification for the mode…

> It wasn't ever supposed to be a required qualification for the modern world emplyoment

but somebody who had been through college (in the early days) is a good proxy for being intelligent and capable. It's easy to check for this qualification, rather than an indepth vetting or trial period.

But as soon as this is found to be a metric being measured, it ceases to be a good metric.

Re: Students flee field as computer 'fad fades' (1987)

#109

Post by rob74 »

donatj wrote: post #49

I don’t hear much about it these days, but circa 2004 when I was going into computer science I had multiple teachers and a guidance counselor warn me that all the jobs would be going to India and tell me I should pursue something else. This seemed to be very much the prevailing wisdom of the time. I pursued it anyway as it was my passion. I was one of five students in my program that had been a huge multi-campus prog…

Plus, there's also the "pork cycle" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pork_cycle) aspect to consider: few CS graduates -> better employment chances/higher salaries for developers -> more people study CS -> (after a few years) more people graduate (if you're unlucky, coinciding with a recession) -> worse employment chances -> fewer people study CS and so on...

Re: Students flee field as computer 'fad fades' (1987)

#110

Post by flomo »

haakon wrote: post #94
flomo wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a different time, when most of those new things came out, they were more expensive than whatever proceeded them (in a sense). Individuals weren't buying $10,000 Macintoshes, $20,000 NeXTCubes, and $30,000 UNIX/RISC workstations. My communist professor was bragging his SPARCstation was more expensive than a Mercedes! The low-end got cheaper only very slowly. In 1990 you could go into a computer store and drop a…

Home computers in the eighties weren't that expensive. That was the whole point – you could actually have a computer in your home now. Kids got them for Christmas.

Yes and no. "Computers are the future", so middle class parents felt like they HAD to buy their kids a cheap Commodore or something. I think 80% of them ended up in the closet, most of them were used like game consoles and maybe 1% of them created assembly language programmers. I know successful engineering people who had no interest in atari/commodore video game stuff.

Meanwhile, college students needed real work computers which were still quite expensive then. PC-XT/Mac Plus computers were not cheap in the late 1980s.

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