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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)

#41

Post by fzzzy »

chrisco255 wrote: post #18
timonoko wrote: post #10

This 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.

I always wondered why the desktop revolution didn't really take off until the 90s after seeing that the Mac was released in the early 80s.

The Mac was really, really expensive in the 80s.

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

#42

Post by zozbot234 »

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.

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

#43

Post by analog31 »

anonu wrote: post #13

Was this the actual feeling at the time? Or just one reporters perspective, spun into a story. I feel like the ad for $7.95 prime rib is probably a more relevant data point from the past than this article. Edit: Gourmet House: https://www.bismarckcafe.com/blogs/260/remembering-gourmet-h...

I graduated from high school in 1982, and from college in 1986.

My mom was teaching CS courses at a satellite campus of a state university, mostly to older students looking to change careers. Many were trying to get out of assembly line or clerical jobs. Her students were getting programming jobs after one year of intro programming.

There was certainly a lot of misconceptions at the time. How could anybody know? How many programmers would really be needed? Did programming really require a college degree? My mom didn't think so. She thought the market for programmers would quickly saturate.

I loved programming, but majored in math and physics instead. At my college, the people who seemed to be doing cool things with computers (relative to my own interests of course) were in the physics department. I had a summer internship at a computer facility, and the work that the programmers were doing seemed boring.

The market for programmers did not rise monotonically in my region (the rust belt) because the entire regional economy was heaving up and down. By 1987, it was still not clear that computer science majors had a compelling advantage over self taught programmers in the job market, especially since the degree took 4 years.

What nobody anticipated is that while programming seems easy once you know how to do it, learning to program is prohibitive for most people, for reasons that I don't think we understand. The relationship between choosing to major in computer science, and achieving a successful career as a programmer, is tenuous at best.

I still love programming, but have never been employed as a programmer per se.

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

#45

Post by detaro »

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.

CASE is more the "draw UML diagrams/flow charts/... and the code is generated" and vice-versa stuff.

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

#47

Post by tejtm »

chrisco255 wrote: post #18
timonoko wrote: post #10

This 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.

I always wondered why the desktop revolution didn't really take off until the 90s after seeing that the Mac was released in the early 80s.

For me it was Amigas instead of Macs but it seemed I could get another computer cheaper than I could a C compiler. Then there was this new BBS in town called "www" or something and it had this free C compiler ...

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

#48

Post by freddie_mercury »

anonu wrote: post #13

Was this the actual feeling at the time? Or just one reporters perspective, spun into a story. I feel like the ad for $7.95 prime rib is probably a more relevant data point from the past than this article. Edit: Gourmet House: https://www.bismarckcafe.com/blogs/260/remembering-gourmet-h...

In 1997 I bought my first car. During the small talk of signing the papers, the used car salesman asked what I did.

He said he had been a programmer, too, until the bust in the 1980s. Couldn't find any more work as a programmer so he went into used car sales.

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

#49

Post by donatj »

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 program only a couple years earlier. We were the last cohort before the college discontinued the program entirely, and I was the only one to graduate. What I found however for maybe five years after graduation was a insanely high demand for developers.

There was genuinely a generation that was so strongly discouraged from becoming developers that there were very few. Seems to me like the folklorists have largely missed this.

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

#50

Post by ggm »

CoolGuySteve wrote: post #38
nostrademons wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Entered college in 2001 just as the dot-com bubble was bursting. Freshman year graduating seniors were still pretty optimistic. Sophomore year I declared as a physics major, despite having worked at a dot-com and enjoying programming for fun, as a bunch of family friends started floating "Why would you go into software when all the jobs are being outsourced to India anyway?" Junior year I knew that I liked programmin…

My uncle dropped out of Waterloo in the early 70s because everyone figured there weren't enough computers for computer science to be useful. Like Professor Frink said: "I predict that within 10 years, computers will be twice as powerful, ten thousand times larger, and so expensive that only the 5 richest kings of Europe will own them" I entered Waterloo in 2002 and I took "Computer Science for Business" where a confi…

> It doesn't matter where you live, dialectical materialism is real.

I'm going to take this as a positive comment that scientific evidence based theories of the world generally work out correct: You were right to ignore the fantasists.

If you meant it some other way, do please elucidate

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