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Why do so few people major in computer science? (2017)

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Re: Why do so few people major in computer science? (2017)

#121

Post by ketanhwr »

jatinshah wrote: post #103

It's more to do with existentialist crisis of computer science education, not status or pay for computer science grads. Computing has become a part of every major industry and computer science by itself is closer to applied math and such fields, valuable but by itself not very useful. Most professionals in most industries need to know quite a bit of computing skills to be effective.

> existentialist crisis of computer science education

Exactly what I've been facing for the past few months. I graduated as a CS Major last year, and I've already started doubting it.

No clue how to deal with it

Re: Why do so few people major in computer science? (2017)

#122

Post by superhuzza »

battertenr wrote: post #47

The reason is because it is a terrible job. Unlikely 90% of other jobs, you have to mentally burn your brain out each day, constantly learn new things, and focus intensely, supposedly for 8 hours. The reward is nothing, not even good pay outside of a couple of tech giants in the USA. If you compare it to a trade, there is a night and day difference to your mental health. The wage data in this article is meaningless b…

>No sane person dreams of sitting at a computer all day doing harder things than everybody else sitting at the computer and making average pay. Not only that, but most employers would rather pay a person $5 an hour to make their app from somewhere in yemin then they would hire a local person.

A bit arrogant to assume that your job is harder than everybody else's - most people feel that way. And pretty much any office job can be at risk of being outsourced, not just programming.

Re: Why do so few people major in computer science? (2017)

#123

Post by thebean11 »

jabbernotty wrote: post #118
thebean11 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> not even good pay outside of a couple of tech giants in the USA That's a huge exaggeration. In what other field can a bright kid take a 12 week bootcamp and get a job that pays $80k?

> That's a huge exaggeration. In what other field can a bright kid take a 12 week bootcamp and get a job that pays $80k? They did specify "outside of a couple of tech giants in the USA". Here in Europe, €30K would already be a good starting salary. Personally, 10 years in, I don't expect to reach €80k.

If they specified "outside of the USA" then I totally agree, but the $80k bootcamp salaries are absolutely not from the tech giants!

Re: Why do so few people major in computer science? (2017)

#124

Post by arethuza »

ghaff wrote: post #98
orobinson wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing quite matches that triumphant moment when you finally discover the root cause of an issue that's been bothering you for days.

At which point you bang your head into the wall because the fix is so bloody obvious. :-)

I am inclined to shout "You f*ing idiot!" at myself if it was my own fault.

Yet another advantage to home working!

Re: Why do so few people major in computer science? (2017)

#125

Post by CWuestefeld »

jkire wrote: post #101

FWIW I've been coding since my early teens and enjoyed it a lot, but when it came to university (in 2009) I had very little interest in doing a CS degree and instead opted for Maths. The two main reasons were: a) I knew that doing Maths instead of CS wasn't really going to hinder my job prospects in any way, and b) CS sounded a lot drier and had fewer options and choices than the Maths degree (in the UK you apply for…

I think this is the crux of it. What we're doing as software developers is not a scientific discipline, it's engineering. So if you want to be a software developer, computer science is the WRONG field for you.

Computer Science is largely concerned about things like algorithms and complexity, theory of automata, and stuff like that. They're doing research.

Software developers care about those algorithms, but we decidedly do not want to be implementing them. I've got libraries, where somebody already took care of coding the hashing or binary-tree-rebalancing algorithms, or databases with the same. There's really no reason I need to be able to explain how quicksort differs from bubblesort.

But what we DO care about is how to gather requirements, how to perform proper modeling and design, and stuff like that. Yet those are classes in the engineering school, and not required of CompSci majors (at least not back when I was in college).

The result is that folks with a CompSci degree are ill-prepared for a career in software development. They never use at least half of what they were taught, while on the other hand, at least half of what they do wind up needing was never taught to them.

Re: Why do so few people major in computer science? (2017)

#126

Post by radford-neal »

ghaff wrote: post #64
cs702 wrote: post #51

There's one other possible, additional reason. I recently asked a 17-year-old high school senior who is heading to college what she's planning to study, and she said it would be mathematics, biomedical engineering, or some other kind of engineering. She's self-motivated -- says she will be studying multi-variate calculus, PDEs, and abstract algebra on her own this summer. She maxed out her high school math curriculum…

That pretty much lays out one of the more standard explanations for why more women don't go into CS. Things arguably changed in the early 80s with the rise of PCs and gaming. While programming certainly existed before that, it wasn't something that most kids were exposed to in high school and CS curricula in general were heavily theory oriented and often in the Math department. Today, if you want to be a mechanical e…

Could this actually be good, or at least quite understandable? (I'm not actually sure whether you intend your comment to just be descriptive, or also judgemental.)

Does anyone expect college music programs to be easily accessible to people who didn't play an instrument, or sing in a choir, during high school? Similarly for dance, and drama, and art. And if you're right that mechanical engineering schools no longer expect students to have been tinkering around in their spare time previously, is that actually good?

At one time, there was good reason to not assume that incoming students had any programming experience, since many of them wouldn't have had access to computers, and so would not have had the opportunity to develop computer skills, or even to know whether they were interested in computers. But today in western countries, for any but seriously impoverished kids (or I suppose, those with mis-guided parents), that is no longer true.

There remains the possibility that a toxic culture in high school has prevented some students from realizing that they are interested in computers at that point in their lives, and therefore some remedial action in college is necessary. But fixing the toxic high school environment would be preferable.

Re: Why do so few people major in computer science? (2017)

#127

Post by offset1 »

easterncalculus wrote: post #89
ForHackernews wrote: post #3

Why would you major in computer science if you want to work as a software engineer? It's like getting a physics degree to become a civil engineer.

This is an incredibly flawed analogy. I can say safely that software engineering students (SE specifically, and not CS) have at a general level a massive amount of missing knowledge compared to their CS counterparts. Practically every SE concept either is or can be taught on the job. I don't hire but I can safely say that if I ever did I would hire CS graduates long before someone who calls everything they use an 'ap…

It all depends on the university and the curriculum. Some universities here provide only "software engineering" or "information technology" programs that are equivalent to their computer science counter part in countries like the US. Sure, you can learn topics like requirements engineering on the job (often an underrated subject if you really want to do it well), but the same thing can be said for literally any of the CS courses..

At the end of the day, the curriculum is really what matters for a person. Actually, you can even argue that "computer science" is not even a real science (similar with many other studies that have "science" in their name). Heck, I'd say software engineering is closer to actual "engineering" than computer science is to actual "science".

Re: Why do so few people major in computer science? (2017)

#128

Post by chosenbreed37 »

cs702 wrote: post #51

There's one other possible, additional reason. I recently asked a 17-year-old high school senior who is heading to college what she's planning to study, and she said it would be mathematics, biomedical engineering, or some other kind of engineering. She's self-motivated -- says she will be studying multi-variate calculus, PDEs, and abstract algebra on her own this summer. She maxed out her high school math curriculum…

> I recently asked a 17-year-old high school senior who is heading to college what she's planning to study, and she said it would be mathematics, biomedical engineering, or some other kind of engineering.

I find this interesting. In this day and age I get the impression that whichever STEM field one goes into there will be considerable time spent in front of a computer screen. Whether researching, writing programs, running calculations/models, writing papers, proofs, looking for exo planets, etc. Computers are everywhere :-)

Re: Why do so few people major in computer science? (2017)

#129

Post by EvgeniyZh »

karmelapple wrote: post #67
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the social status of computer scientists zero, or do computer scientists choose not to go into politics or other leadership positions? I suspect it's the latter [anecdotal; opinion; citation needed]. CS people are a tribe on their own (if I may generalize); I've not met anyone with an interest in participating in politics. They have strong opinions on politics, but not to the point where they're willing to represe…

Scientists - not just CS, but biologists, chemists, etc. - are not in elected leadership positions very much. I agree they are frequently not willing to represent. But again - why? A few opinions: * scientists (computer, life, or otherwise) do not think their talents are best used in making public policy. There are so many other ways those talents and intelligence could be used * perhaps worse pay (though the benefit…

Bad pay + toxic process + bad usage of talents. Are you sure you are not talking about academy? (half joking)

Re: Why do so few people major in computer science? (2017)

#130

Post by roosterdawn »

chrisseaton wrote: post #4

I don't think CS is a high social status field at all . You're deluding yourselves. Outside of our peers also in the industry nobody cares that you're a staff engineer at Google. Absolutely nobody. They'll assume you're doing IT work like the characters in the IT Crowd if they even bother to think about it at all and haven't already walked away. Here's a concrete example to make it really obvious. How many computer s…

I'm not sure I agree. Either you are conflating vocation, field of academic study, political power, socioeconomic class and status, or things are just different in the UK.

Here in the US, you rarely study computer science to become a computer scientist but rather to be a highly paid engineer or eventually obscenely wealthy founder. The same is true for philosophers, authors, politicians and composers; increasingly, the same is true for biology, physics and even law. You study these (or any of these fields) to show some ability for abstract thought to get you into the career of your choosing.

In the US, notably, the field you actually study increasingly seems to have little to do with what you do later on in life; that all seems to do with your socioeconomic class, who you make buddies with in early schooling, who your parents know. It doesn't matter if you study law at Harvard if you don't come from wealth; and likewise, it doesn't matter if you study CS if you come from wealth. And inside the middle class to upper middle class, studying either field isn't very likely to break you into the upper class; only starting/scaling a business will.

Looking at members of the senate is also not very useful. Sure, "computer scientists" may not be represented in the Senate. But wealthy "applied computer scientists" who started companies (Bezos, Gates, etc) hire lobbying firms that essentially purchase the behavior of these senators wholesale. They have more clout than entire nation states.

Still, with that said, there's a difference between clout and high social status. But I observe that high social status is something that pertains to caste and heredity, not necessarily field of study.

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