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Earlier quoted context omitted.
They do exist. Even Oxford has an MSc in SoftEng.
Doesn't Oxford just automatically boost all bachelors to masters a year after graduating though?
Are wages that high though? I don't know much about the UK, but I feel it's lagging behind Switzerland, for example, and that only London is the high paying spot because of inflated cost of living.
In Amsterdam, where I live, a junior developer isn't paid that much more compared to a junior business analyst or a junior marketeer. What is way more noticeable is that a lot more developer vacancies seem to exist compared to the other two, even for junior developers.
> I consider this a puzzle because I think that people who go to college decide on what to major in significantly based on two factors: earning potential and whether a field is seen as high-status. Now let’s establish whether majoring in CS delivers either.
In The Netherlands it's either whether something is interesting. Or it is whether something is interesting and it's good for one's career. It's almost never only for career.
> Are wages high? The answer is yes. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has data on software developers. The latest data we have is from May 2016, in which the median annual pay for software developers is $106,000; pretty good, considering that the median annual pay for all occupations is $37,000.
The comparison should be made for different categories from university. I wonder how business studies is doing as that major was a lot easier, in my experience. But I'm pretty sure that the pay isn't lagging behind (disclaimer: I don't have data, I can be wrong).
I've never seen someone join a field of study for social status and I asked the "why do you study xyz" question a lot. I have met a few people who started studying for finding a girlfriend, which usually worked. In most cases, they were also at least kind of interested in the content.
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Here is my partial guess. I have two factors.
I believe that there are more computer science people that are interested in math and physics than the other way around. So there is a crowding out effect.
In The Netherlands, CS suffers from a negative stereotype among Dutch women, which is truly evidenced at my uni by the amount of international female students versus Dutch female students (a good amount versus 0 in some years). Heck, I even met very traditionally feminine women in my computer science classes (caring about fashion, aesthetics/beauty and caring for people), but they were all non-Dutch. Of course, there were also non-Dutch women with other gender identities (I've seen integrated as well). The gender identity of Dutch women was either "not male and not female" (do they call this non-binary?), male, or integrated. So this might play a role in England as well?
Of course, my observations are limited, they're simply based on 8 years of walking around at the two universities of Amsterdam and talking to quite a few students.
??????????? Computer Science is by far the most popular stem major all around the world! If somebody have numbers showing opposite, I would like to see them.
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.
I'm not sure what you're saying here, that you don't need formal education to do software engineering? I mean on the one side I agree with you because there's so much you can learn online right now, but the same is true for other branches of engineering and STEM as a whole.
Is it though, my understanding is that for a lot of engineering programs and science courses, much of the value comes from labs and hands on experience with equipment that a consumer cant get access to.
Our CS Dept is good. They are not slave drivers, or doing crazy stuff. They run a standard Java class doing very reasonable things and give a perfectly typical range of grades. And the students who say these things to me are not just the poor ones.
Is it inherient in the material? Is it the way the intro is typically approached in standard texts? I don't know. And I admit that I only have anecdotes. But the article didn't mention it, so I'm mentioning it.
??????????? Computer Science is by far the most popular stem major all around the world! If somebody have numbers showing opposite, I would like to see them.
The wage data in this article is meaningless because it ignores the fact that the few places with the 100k+ wages are all in ridiculously expensive cities. Those wages bring up the "average", making it seem high.
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.
You also never get to be part of any kind of inner circle within the company. You will be paid less than some random useless person who "knows somebody high up" and is in charge of "managing" you.
Most people choosing Uni choose from what they know. Majority of young people know little about anything CS or nerdy; They often know the end product (computers, phones, apps) but very little about the people working on it.
Compare that to doctors, managers, Wallstreet types, scientist, lawyers; they got incomparable exposure through movies, tv-shows and media in general. Even Scientist have more exposure.
Difference is that in those profession, you can see the people working in it (although often not an accurate representation) so it is easy for a young person to imagine "I can see myself wearing their suits, doing what they do". But just as no one applying for college imagine themselves in a janitors boots, there must be a observable social status in the profession too. "you will be socially respectable after 4 years here!" sells better than a salary figure. I really don't think CS majors come close to the (perceived) social status for the young, compared to the above mentioned professions.
The closet to high social status an CS gets to is the "IT/tech entrepreneur", and you don't need a CS major to get there.
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.
I'm not sure what you're saying here, that you don't need formal education to do software engineering? I mean on the one side I agree with you because there's so much you can learn online right now, but the same is true for other branches of engineering and STEM as a whole.
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…
The premier minister of Singapore is a computer scientist ... (Though that might not be his primary qualification.)