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

Post by Dylan16807 » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 7:31 AM UTC

pavlov wrote: post #88

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

btw Futurama's writers were paraphrasing this: "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." Thomas Watson, president of IBM, 1943 (of course in 1943 that was a totally reasonable thing to think considering they were the size of a small house and ran on thousands of vacuum tubes that needed constant replacing and started in the millions of dollars)

And it’s come full circle because today the majority of the Western world’s computing needs are served by five computers: Google’s, Facebook’s, Apple’s, Microsoft’s and Amazon’s. Each of them consists of millions of individual devices, but the end user posting to Instagram or accessing their iCloud files doesn’t need to know any of that.

Post by danuker » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 7:35 AM UTC

pattusk wrote: post #73

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…

Thank your for articulating something I've experienced over the years so clearly. It's one thing I wish recruiters/HR would understand. I have an advanced college degree in a field that has nothing to do with engineering and I've found that omitting it from my resume actually made the recruitment process a whole lot smoother as a candidate. Interviews went from inquisition sessions about why I wasn't doing what my gr…

Post by stepbeek » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 7:40 AM UTC

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…

Post by gambiting » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 7:41 AM UTC

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…

Post by zozbot234 » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 7:42 AM UTC

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.