As hopefully many readers will realise, when it comes to computers and the internet, the "Optimists Archive" is orders of magnitude larger than and equally as amusing as the entire "Pessismists Archive" for all things. When the "fad" is also the means of publishing news of the "fad", it stands to reason the "news" will generally support the fad. The number of people who have and continue to use the internet to publish their "predictions for the future" is enormous. The number of accurate predictions is infinitesimally small.
Students flee field as computer 'fad fades' (1987)
181–190 of 406 posts
Re: Students flee field as computer 'fad fades' (1987)
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 outs…
> … "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." Sad thing about this is that some of us (like me for one…
A track record of being right is useless for having your advice be seen as "good advice".
It takes some politics, and interpersonal trust to get your advice taken seriously. Sadly, this also means looking past the technical details and considering organizationally why certain decisions need to be made. The company might prefer the occasional breach and "we are sorry" PR over spending a lot of money on network security, for example.
Re: Students flee field as computer 'fad fades' (1987)
#183This was the time of the Turbo-button. Programs were made for 4.77 MHz IBM PC, so you had to slowdown the 30 MHz by default. The Turbo speed was mostly useless, and so it seemed to be the ultimate end of computer development. Achually for 10 years nothing exciting happened. Until maybe 1992 when you could install your very own Unix.
30MHz in 1987? Not many people had such luxury. My family bought a ~12MHz 286 brand new in ~1992, and our 25MHz 486 was still years away (but yes, they had turbo buttons, and the 486 even had an LCD display showing the current frequency).
Re: Students flee field as computer 'fad fades' (1987)
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The US isn't really an empire. Much more of a hegemony.
This article from "A Collection Of Unmitigated Pedantry" goes in depth about how historians would classify the US as a state:
https://acoup.blog/2021/07/02/collections-my-country-isnt-a-...
Re: Students flee field as computer 'fad fades' (1987)
#185Earlier 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.
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 co…
I remember looking longingly at thick color catalogs of computers I could never afford.
Like $4999 for a mid-priced Wang PC compatible. In the 1980s.
A lot of money back then. An unimaginable amount for a poor, inner-city kid growing up during that time.
It convinced my parent to buy a C64, as they must have felt sorry for me.
Re: Students flee field as computer 'fad fades' (1987)
#186>"They found that they had to take calculus"
...On that note:
When I enrolled at the University of Maryland in 1985, it was still at the height of the fad, and the CS department actually had so many hopeful undergrads signing up to be CS majors that they had to filter them out and discourage them somehow.
They came up with this idea they called "Programming Calculus" that they taught with this language called "CF Pascal" (which we called "Crucially Fucked Pascal") that was lobotomized so it was simple enough to write "correctness proofs" (FWTW).
Hitting freshmen who have never programmed before with such a crucially fucked language, and then asking them to think about programming as calculus and write proofs that their programs are correct was an effective filtering technique!
(From a document I don't have the URL for, describing Programming Calculus:)
>Perhaps the most noticeable achievement in the Department's educational program was the restructuring of the first year of computer science courses. Unlike most other introductory courses which start by teaching a specific programming language, this first year is oriented around the calculus of programming. Concepts such as program correctness and formal verification are introduced, although at a simpler level, at the freshman level rather than at the advanced undergraduate or graduate level. The students write programs in a subset of Pascal, called CF-Pascal that includes character data and files only. "Advanced concepts", like integers and arithmetic, are delayed until the second semester. This new course was designed by Harlan Mills, aided by Victor Basili, John Gannon, Richard Hamlet, John Kohl and Ben Shneiderman.
(From "Maturation of Computer Science Research and Education at the University of Maryland: Evolution of the Department of Computer Science from 1979 through 2006", describing CF Pascal:)
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/277064236_Maturatio...
>Educational activities: The first year of Basili’s tenure as Department Chair was taken up with the problems of students and getting the University to agree to a restricted major for the Department. By the second year attention could be placed on other educational concerns.
>CF-Pascal: As part of the plan for the restricted major, the freshman Computer Science courses were redesigned. For most of the 1970s, the SIMPL family of languages by Basili, was the basic programming model. SIMPL-T was used in the freshman programming course and a systems programming variant, SIMPL-XI by Dick Hamlet, was written for the PDP-11 minicomputer.
>Spearheaded by Dr. Harlan Mills, Vic Basili, John Gannon, and Richard Hamlet identified a subset of Pascal called CF-Pascal. This was Pascal using only character and file data types, and essentially made programming in CF-Pascal equivalent to programming a Turing machine using denotational semantics as the programming model [Mills89]. This became the basis for Computer Science I – CMSC 112. In 1984 Marv Zelkowitz, as part of the IBM Fulcrum award (See Section 3.2), obtained a laboratory of 20 IBM PCs. A syntax directed editor was developed for CF-Pascal, called SUPPORT, and this environment was used in CMSC 112 during 1986-87 [Zelkowitz84]. CF-Pascal was used for about 6 years until the freshman course changed again in 1989.11 Pascal became the basic language, which later became C++ and finally Java as the freshman programming language.
HCI researcher Ben Shneiderman did a study comparing the CF Pascal "SUPPORT" programming tools with a mainframe batch programming environment, and it turned out despite their predictions, SUPPORT users didn't receive statistically higher exam and programming project grades, and users preferred the mainframe batch system over SUPPORT.
(From "Subjective user evaluation of CF PASCAL programming tools", describing the study comparing CF Pascal SUPPORT to a mainframe batch computing environment:)
https://www.umiacs.umd.edu/publications/subjective-user-eval...
>Subjective user evaluation of CF PASCAL programming tools; Journal Articles; 1987; Chin JP, Norman KL, Shneiderman B; Department of Computer Science and Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory Working Paper
>Abstract: This study investigated subjective evaluations of two programming environments: 1) SUPPORT, an interactive programming environment with a syntax directed editor on a personal computer and 2) a batch run environment on a large mainframe computer. Participants were students in a 15 week introductory computer science course. In Part 1, one group of 128 first used SUPPORT, while another group of 85 programmed on a mainframe environment. After 6 weeks they were given an evaluative questionnaire and then switched programming environments. In Part 2, 68 used SUPPORT and 60 used the mainframe. At the twelfth week of the course, they were given two questionnaires, one evaluating the environment they had used in the last 6 weeks and one comparing both enviro nments. A measure of programming performance (exam and programming project grades) was also collected. SUPPORT was predicted to reduce the burden of remembering syntactic details resulting in better performance and higher subjective evaluations. Unexpectedly, the SUPPORT users did not earn statistically significantly higher grades. Furthermore, participants expressed a preference for the mainframe over SUPPORT. Specific items on the questionnaires were used to diagnose the strengths and weaknesses of each environment. Designers of syntax directed editors should focus on reducing the syntactic burden not only in programming , but also in the user interface of these tools.
So in the end, CF Pascal achieved its lofty goal of driving away more prospective CS majors than a mainframe batch computing environment could.
Re: Students flee field as computer 'fad fades' (1987)
#187“It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” Yogi Berra
Apparently not Berra: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/10/20/no-predict/
Re: Students flee field as computer 'fad fades' (1987)
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 outs…
> … "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." Sad thing about this is that some of us (like me for one…
Yes, I should have elaborated. The two best engineers in our team are in their mid 40a and our QA lead is in his late 50s. So, I'm well aware that even great candidates who are really good at what they do are passed over just because of age.
But I did want to explain the typical issue I have seen when interviewing older software engineers that had a long career but shot themselves in the foot by being too tied to a specific technology. At no point did I want to say that it was the case of every engineer I interviewed. And I fully agree that it's often tough dealing with the ageism in this industry.
Re: Students flee field as computer 'fad fades' (1987)
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting. I was just starting CS course at university in 2003 in Poland and it was obvious to everybody it's the future and there will be enough jobs for everybody. There were 20 candidates for each place in the course so you had to pass the entry exams really well (and it wasn't the best university in Poland, far from it). I guess that's the difference between being the outsourcing source and destination :)
> I guess that's the difference between being the outsourcing source and destination :) Personally i'd agree that this is good for individual employment prospects, but not necessarily good for the country itself. For example, here in Latvia i've heard that there's a shortage of developers and hence many government projects can't be fully staffed easily, because they're having problems being competitive in regards to…
I think this is an issue in most countries.
Government Development jobs just don't pay enough to be competitive for talent. So instead talent goes to outsourcers. Here in the Netherlands that has meant most big government development projects are done by outsourcers. Which leads to bad incentive alignment. Yielding cost overruns, projects that are DOA, and projects with way to large scope. And at the bottom line, the consultancies are better of keeping it this way than to improve things.
But government is not agile enough to pay fair wage for development work. Besides, it would be unfair to all other government employees if these developers made so much more money with less time on the job and the same level of education. (sarcasm)
Re: Students flee field as computer 'fad fades' (1987)
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
> … "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." Sad thing about this is that some of us (like me for one…
A track record of being right is useless for having your advice be seen as "good advice". It takes some politics, and interpersonal trust to get your advice taken seriously. Sadly, this also means looking past the technical details and considering organizationally why certain decisions need to be made. The company might prefer the occasional breach and "we are sorry" PR over spending a lot of money on network securit…
> "The company might prefer the occasional breach and "we are sorry" PR over spending a lot of money on network security, for example."
Sure, but what about when the choice presented is more along the lines of "Hey, let's spend a little money on network security now so that we don't have to spend millions later cleaning up a huge mess", and is met with the mentality of "You're worrying about nothing." Ummm, no? I'm sharing the expertise for which I was hired?