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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)

#111

Post by tonyedgecombe »

tkgally wrote: post #40
chrisco255 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always wondered why the desktop revolution didn't really take off until the 90s after seeing that the Mac was released in the early 80s.

One reason was the rise of the Internet. While there were a lot of neat things you could do with a personal computer, it wasn’t until you could connect easily to others that it really became fun and useful for most people. I got my first computer, a Mac, in 1986. That was exciting for me, but I really felt that the revolution had happened when I got a modem in 1992 and connected first to a local BBS and then, a coupl…

Yes, before that the only reason normal people bought a computer was to run Quicken.

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

#112

Post by rejectedandsad »

geofft wrote: post #12
Syonyk wrote: post #4

> "It's not a video games major." If it was true in the 80s, it was certainly true in the early 2000s when I was getting my CprE degree. I met quite a few people who were studying ComS or CprE for reasons that can be summed up as, "I built my own computer, I like video games, people said I'm good with computers, so I should be a Computer Science/Computer Engineering major!" They rarely lasted more than a semester or…

I have an MIT degree with coursework in operating systems and a lot of ring 0 experience and my well-paying job has me writing Python and JavaScript. As far as I can tell I'd be taking a significant pay cut if I went into embedded dev. Supply is higher for "basic coders" but demand is also much higher. There are a whole lot of images that need to be slid across web pages; there aren't that many CPU architectures that…

This is correct. At a hedge fund (ostensibly one like HRT given the pedigree you mentioned) geofft makes on the order of $500-700k or more, unlike mere mortals like me that went to a state school that make just $200k. Of course, I didn’t take any embedded classes and got an A- in my C class so perhaps I deserve nothing to begin with.

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

#113

Post by nivenkos »

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.

Literally anywhere that isn't the US really. Being the world's greatest empire has its benefits.

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

#114

Post by AussieWog93 »

kristopolous wrote: post #28

I wish this were the case now. The field has eternal Septembered. Tools no longer empower, they constrict and patronize developers, setting up ceremonial barriers that are merely performative while restricting and shepherding users away from creativity independence and ownership into proscriptive systems. The other disciplines actually take systems of qualifications seriously. Doctors, mechanical and civil engineers,…

I agree with your complaint about tools being designed to constrict and patronise us (my old manager used to always make reference to "hardware obstruction layers"). Perhaps software development as a whole is in an Eternal September, even, but don't think that using qualifications as gatekeeping tools will solve this.

I come from a "real" engineering background (EEE), as does my old man (Chem Eng) and things are no different there: the companies that care more about whether or not you're 6 Sigma certified than what actual, real experience you have at the coalface tend to repel highly competent problem solvers and attract the Process Eng equivalent of the "Microsoft Certified Solutions Developer".

The SWE "hacker" ideal where your code speaks for itself and they don't care what idiotic courses you've completed is one of the things that attracted me to the role.

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

#115

Post by IQunder130 »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #92
jasonkester wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, 2002-2003 would have been a pretty rough time to graduate as a developer. The industry hadn’t yet recovered from the whole dot com thing and there were still a million “converted business major” developers on the market who hadn’t yet got the hint that they should go to law school. The advice you got might not have applied to you on the way in. But it certainly applied to all the students those professors…

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…

>6 months and dozens of applications to get a job offer.

I honestly can't tell if this is supposed to be good or bad. Graduated in 2020 and spent over a year looking for work with several hundred applications sent. Ended up enrolling in a masters because of it, only got a job last month.

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

#116

Post by chii »

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…

> numerical methods are a thing that you can use to approximately solve differential equations

indexing of knowledge is useful for certain fields, but without in-depth understanding, you can never apply this knowledge in ways that hasn't been imagined before.

I am reminded of the story of Feynman and the Connection Machine, where there was a need to figure out how much traffic CPUs would generate for the router they designed. If you weren't fluent in differential equations analysis, you would never have thought of using this method to perform the analysis.

Search for "By the end of that summer of 1983, Richard had completed his analysis of the behavior of the router" in https://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-machin... to find the relevant section about this.

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

#117

Post by zozbot234 »

chii wrote: post #107
snapetom wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To be fair, Agile is not about leveraging mediocre developers - it's about enabling a handful of your best, most experienced hackers and architects (the fabled "two-pizzas team") to work under the best possible conditions, because the proponents of Agile had internalized the lesson that trying to scale up large teams of mediocre devs is a fool's errand.

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

#118

Post by rejectedandsad »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #103
rejectedandsad wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

I recently got an offer that was $175k base, full remote and felt comfortable enough declining it (though most of that is because Im optimizing for liquid total compensation so….) $200k total compensation liquid is still mediocre for a mid level engineer but at least I don’t pay London real estate prices.

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

#119

Post by Negitivefrags »

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…

I had the exact same thing when I arrived at university in 2004.

There was a big Compsci building that had been completed a year or two before I arrived (started being built before the dotcom crash). It was scoped for the massive growth in students that they were expecting in computing.

By the time I arrived the thing was practically a ghost town. Student enrollment had cratered. I remember the huge fields of desktop computers available for students on multiple floors, and it was basically empty the whole time.

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

#120

Post by thundergolfer »

fnord77 wrote: post #80
jasonkester wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, 2002-2003 would have been a pretty rough time to graduate as a developer. The industry hadn’t yet recovered from the whole dot com thing and there were still a million “converted business major” developers on the market who hadn’t yet got the hint that they should go to law school. The advice you got might not have applied to you on the way in. But it certainly applied to all the students those professors…

...and now every business major knows Python

…knows enough to make a half-working ball of mud.
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