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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)

#131

Post by chii »

jamespitts wrote: post #99

There will always be people who choose a field for success, and they are more likely to flee when it seems unsuccessful. I was once connected with someone who was just getting started in his career. He was entering the tech industry as a software engineer, having graduated w/ a CS degree from a UC in 2000 or thereabouts. This person had majored in CS because of the late 1990s tech bubble, yet felt strongly at the tim…

The person you are talking about is following hype and trend, hoping to hit an easy career and ride the tide.

But the issue with this is that by the time you hear or know about a trend, it has already started and probably well underway. Like trying to catch up to a wave on a surfboard, you could miss, or fall off as it crashes.

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

#132

Post by Cthulhu_ »

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…

Weird, around that time (a few years earlier actually) I was warned by the IT school we went to that they might try and pick us up to work for them before graduation. Didn't work out like that though, and plenty of my classmates couldn't find a job in IT and had to go for something else or move on to college.

I went on to college anyway because I wanted to do software development. Most of my classmates that joined didn't make it, or needed more time. A friend of mine ended up working in garbage collection and construction (remote crane operator) for a while, but he landed a job at a shipyard, and now a very cushy one at a generic IT supplier, traveling the country sometimes to go to jobs.

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

#133

Post by tppiotrowski »

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 remember a national best seller around that time was "The World is Flat" [1]. It talked about globalisation and made convincing arguments about outsourcing. Maybe your advisors were influenced by it.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/World-Flat-History-Twenty-first-Centu...

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

#135

Post by read_if_gay_ »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #19

"News" is almost always bad news. I find that I have to create my own content if I want to share news that's not the most negative spin one can reasonably make. To get any more negative, you would need to start fabricating stories and leave the land of plausibility. Edit: Come to think of it, when I was interviewed for a news story about the quiet little hep a epidemic a few years back, they fabricated a quote from m…

> they fabricated a quote from me

Whenever I see someone mention having been interviewed, chances are good they'll mention this.

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

#136

Post by kortilla »

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.

That’s a pretty ridiculous stretch given that I have more than 5 computers in my home that all work without talking to any of those FAANG datacenters.

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

#137

Post by adamauckland »

zozbot234 wrote: post #129
haakon wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do the math. They really were that expensive in today's money. Of course you had cheaper alternatives for the home like the C64 and even more so the ZX Spectrum, but that flimsy toy would still set you back several hundred dollars in inflation-adjusted prices.

Amiga was £399 in 1989 in the UK, which is about £1000 in today's money. I expect they were cheaper in the US, but £1000 is fairly reasonable for a computer.

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

#138

Post by conjectures »

momento wrote: post #124
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…

My father was very strongly against my decision to get into web development (2012) and he echoed this sentiment heavily. I distinctly remember him yelling at me as a teenager; "you'll be living under a bridge in 5 years if you do this! India has this market!". He eventually kicked me out for not listening, forcing me to to borrow money from a friend to pay tuition in my final semester. Needless to say he was complete…

Wow, sounds both harsh and an ineffectual way to go at life.

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

#139

Post by irjustin »

momento wrote: post #124
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…

My father was very strongly against my decision to get into web development (2012) and he echoed this sentiment heavily. I distinctly remember him yelling at me as a teenager; "you'll be living under a bridge in 5 years if you do this! India has this market!". He eventually kicked me out for not listening, forcing me to to borrow money from a friend to pay tuition in my final semester. Needless to say he was complete…

Wow there's so much to unpack there. While professionally sounds like you're doing just fine, I hope you're doing okay personally.

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

#140

Post by sersi »

hellbannedguy wrote: post #126
donatj wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The industry hadn’t yet recovered from the whole dot com thing You are completely right about that and that slipped my mind. Either way it was kind of nice how easy it was to get a job back then. Getting my foot in the door was a little difficult actually, but once I had some thing on my résumé I got an interview for basically every job I applied to. My résumé is much more impressive these days, and it may be in pa…

It's ageism. Sorry for being so blunt, but I know to many people who were just uninteresting to human resourses after hitting 45-50. I know more than a few homeless people in my life, and over half were once Programmers. It makes me sick. I do know this, if you are in tech, save up that money. (I have never understood this industry's way of hiring. Long drawn out interviews, and candidates whom are just average that…

As someone who's been in charge of recruitment, I've made an effort in hiring people who are less likely to get a chance at other places (minorities, older candidates)

One thing that stood out to me though is that a lot of the older candidates I interviewed that had been struggling had deep knowledge of a technology that's no longer used and had had very little interest during their career in learning new things outside their job. So once the thing they were expert in was no longer fashionable, they had a hard time catching back up.

I know it's unfashionable to say this and I know that a lot of people have full time jobs and don't want to have side project additionally to their full time job but if you want to keep a career as a software developer past 40 without going into management then you need to do side projects,you need to keep up to date with some of the latest fad (even if some of those fads are cyclical and recycle concepts from 20 years ago). Doing a job well and becoming an expert in an obsolete technology is no path to career growth.

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