Students flee field as computer 'fad fades' (1987) • Hacker News Board

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

#311

Post by rauhl » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 1:25 PM UTC

zozbot234 wrote: post #42

chadcmulligan wrote: post #37

I think CASE - (Computer aided software engineering) was starting to come about that time iirc. Business folk would just drag and drop stuff in these new fangled GUI's and everyone would go home early. Edit: That crab stuffed fillet sounds good

Wasn't CASE just a fancy word for what we now call IDEs? Business people might not do much dragging and dropping there, but developers do it quite a bit.

As others indicated, CASE was more about code generation rather than smart IDEs. My recollection from the time is that the industry really strongly believed that almost no-one would write actual textual lines of codes and that graphical programming was going to be where it was at.

Looking back, it’s a remarkable delusion: mankind went from pictures to pictograms to text, not in the reverse. The career path everyone expected (mentioned elsethread: go from a junior guy-who-writes-lines to an architect guy-who-draws-pictures) doesn’t really make sense. If anything, while a high-level architectural document needs to have some diagrams, even more than that it needs to have text: text to describe the problem being solved, the context, the potential solutions and the reasons to choose one solution over the rest. Likewise, it’s striking how many PowerPoint slides could be effectively replaced with short point papers … but that’s a discussion for another time.

I am not 100% sure of why the industry had this wrong-headed idea, as I was too young at one point in time and too junior at another to really have good context. Maybe it was the rise of GUIs which led folks to think, ‘gosh, if pictures can enable folks to use a computer easily, then they will enable folks to program a computer easily!’ Or maybe it was the unfortunate habit non-experts have of not really understanding an expert’s field. As I recall, it also had a very strong correlation with the rise of OOP.

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

#312

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 1:25 PM 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…

[deleted]

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

#313

Post by MrBuddyCasino » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 1:44 PM UTC

empthought wrote: post #251

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're in full agreement. What is your point? "This idea is bad therefore all ideas are bad"? Some ideas are healthy pro-social enablers of a functioning society, others lead to the death of millions. Christianity is far from perfect, but compared to the competition it has a stellar track record.

The point is that your thesis is wrong. “College used to…” vs “College today…” No. College used to; college still does.

Nice job substantially changing your comment after my reply. Very principled of you.

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

#314

Post by victor106 » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 1:48 PM UTC

hughrr wrote: post #149

momento wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If there’s anything I’ve learned it is that you should always make your own mistakes. Your parent’s mistakes don’t even make sense any more 30-40 years down the line. My father pushed me into EE. I burned 5 years in industry being paid crap and then discovered it was actually a fairly low paying profession in the UK. Ended up supporting a bunch of Sun machines for other EEs which was more fun. So i learned Perl one w…

In hindsight this may seem wrong but I don’t completely blame him.

The offshoring of IT was so novel unlike say manufactured goods. Governments can’t stop it although I think they should in some form if you think it’s important for your country

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

#315

Post by vmception » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 1:50 PM UTC

flomo wrote: post #110

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.

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…

So like today

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

#316

Post by wirthjason » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 1:52 PM UTC

hughrr wrote: post #149

momento wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If there’s anything I’ve learned it is that you should always make your own mistakes. Your parent’s mistakes don’t even make sense any more 30-40 years down the line. My father pushed me into EE. I burned 5 years in industry being paid crap and then discovered it was actually a fairly low paying profession in the UK. Ended up supporting a bunch of Sun machines for other EEs which was more fun. So i learned Perl one w…

+1 for “make your own mistakes”

It’s easier to take ownership of a failure as move on when you made the choice.

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

#317

Post by vmception » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 1:54 PM UTC

foxfired wrote: post #152

It was 2011, a childhood friend visited me after 10 years. We talk about the old days, we laugh, I even tease her husband sitting next to me, smiling politely. She excuses herself leaving the men alone to bond. "So, what do you do?" He asks after a long 5 second. "Oh, I'm a programmer." I say with pride. To be sure I add, "A computer programmer." I make it a habit to add this because regular people have a hard time u…

Forget being humble. You aren’t a pro-athlete or an Olympian, you aren’t a rockstar, composer or a lean surfer that people fawn over.

You have a contribution to society that provides for you, just say what that is and your area of competence.

The humble approach offered you no utility at that point in time, when boisterous confidence would have.

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

#318

Post by snickerer » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 1:56 PM UTC

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…

A university is not a programmers' boot camp. (I can talk here only about Western Europe here, I don't know academia in other parts of the world.)

A university is for learning the ways of science. Of scientific thinking and methods. And to learn the foundational facts of your field.

Engineering is the application of the science. It is not the science itself. You don't need a scientific background to engineer. It helps, but it's overkill.

You don't need to study to do development work. But a structured education helps to become a good software developer. Why? Because on the job you teach yourself only the bare necessities to solve the next problem. You have never the time to dive deep into the background of the problem. And deep and broad background knowledge is fun and helps to train your brain in general.

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

#319

Post by mkl95 » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 1:57 PM UTC

I made the mistake of studying Physics in uni because there wasn't any decent CS uni near my town. After interacting for a while with the bitter, skint postgraduate students that hung out in the labs, I dropped out, and I've been making software for a living ever since. Once in a while I wonder if those lab guys are already approaching minimum wage.

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

#320

Post by Isamu » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 2:03 PM UTC

murgindrag wrote: post #307

hughrr wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you over promote the utility of the formal methods taught in the degree. Not once did I use Laplace in EE. It was all cheat sheets or applying data sheets and doing some adhoc calculations in excel or taking a wild guess and iterating. After twenty years of doing IT related stuff I’ve forgotten how to even differentiate stuff.

I've used them all the time in my career, but: 1. I did learn them well, and so I did use Laplace quite often in EE. 2. I jumped careers not into IT, but into tracks which leveraged both programming and a mathematical skill set. I'll mention: I'd be bored out of my wits doing just IT. The intersection of IT and math includes computer graphics, visualizations, robotics, machine learning, fintech, image processing, and…

Yeah, I have an EE degree but have only worked in software, and I have to say you can bring any kind of mathematics to the job if you have the imagination to find the places where it is an advantage.

I sought areas where I could learn more math and use it to stand out from the crowd, albeit to mixed results, because if your manager can’t read your analysis paper he may not be impressed either, and sometimes the reverse.