“It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”
Yogi Berra
Students flee field as computer 'fad fades' (1987)
61–70 of 406 posts
Re: Students flee field as computer 'fad fades' (1987)
#62I 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…
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 :)
Re: Students flee field as computer 'fad fades' (1987)
#63I 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…
To be fair, 2002-2003 would have been a pretty rough time to graduate as a developer. The industry hadn’t yet recovered from the whole dot com thing and there were still a million “converted business major” developers on the market who hadn’t yet got the hint that they should go to law school. The advice you got might not have applied to you on the way in. But it certainly applied to all the students those professors…
> 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 part ageism or higher salary expectations, but it’s much rare to hear back from a job application.
Re: Students flee field as computer 'fad fades' (1987)
#64My 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 at you that you slog through, so that you learn how to learn stuff. The best demonstration of this is in subjects that are scientific mathematical, because there's very deep trees of knowledge there that you have to trace, and there's relatively few ways to use common sense and cultural experience to answer questions.
This is why there are so many devs with no "relevant" degree. If you can sort through the mess of learning a stack, you can do the job. If you need to know some particular CS thing, you will find it and learn it yourself. There's no magic dust in any class, it's all publicly known information that's been digested by many many people before us, and these days you can find umpteen explanations for just about anything online for free.
The thing that sorts people is the ability to persevere through technical issues. You'll find a lot of people in this world are for some reason unable to deal with the mess. This is not a condemnation, I realise everyone has their own situation, economically and personally.
Re: Students flee field as computer 'fad fades' (1987)
#65By 2001, three companies I co-founded went under. One was going public in April 2000 (oops), plus a couple others failed after 911. I wound up living in my car and writing code in a cafe. There were quite a few of us. The owner was sympathetic. You could buy a tea and share a table for hours. Refills were free. One web developer said he was changing careers to house cleaning. Oddly, it was quite liberating.
Thats bad. Hope you are doing good now
Re: Students flee field as computer 'fad fades' (1987)
#66By 2001, three companies I co-founded went under. One was going public in April 2000 (oops), plus a couple others failed after 911. I wound up living in my car and writing code in a cafe. There were quite a few of us. The owner was sympathetic. You could buy a tea and share a table for hours. Refills were free. One web developer said he was changing careers to house cleaning. Oddly, it was quite liberating.
Ah, the cycle of life. We incorporated in 2001 and grew fast (Deloitte fast 50 for 4 years in a row) picking the people and clients from the companies that did not survive the dotcom bust.
Re: Students flee field as computer 'fad fades' (1987)
#67This 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.
> Achually for 10 years nothing exciting happened. Until maybe 1992 when you could install your very own Unix. What was happening in the span 1982-1992 was that everything imaginable was coming out as a peripheral for the IBM PC. It wasn't just stuff like disks and printers and graphics cards. Month after month you'd see something new, and realize "Yeah, I guess you could do that as a computer peripheral", but it wou…
Its crazy to me that a tech forum poster would consider the incredibly innovative years of 1982-1992 as nothing because his preferred OS didn't exist yet.
1982: Commodore 64
1983: Apple //e
1984: Macintosh
1985: Amiga
1986: 386-based PCs
1987: Hypercard and Acorn Archimedes
1988: NeXT cube
1989: 486 released. Deep Thought defeats its first master, WorldWideWeb released
1990: Power Processor, Gopher, EFF founded
1991: PGP, AM386, Python
and that ignores the incredible BBS and shareware scene that blossomed at that time. A lot was going on in the mid to late 80s in the PC world.
Re: Students flee field as computer 'fad fades' (1987)
#68I 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…
That’s strange, I started studying in 2005 and had planned to go into Comp. Sci. for at least 2 years, yet I had never heard similar sentiment expressed. Germany.
Re: Students flee field as computer 'fad fades' (1987)
#69I 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…
To be fair, 2002-2003 would have been a pretty rough time to graduate as a developer. The industry hadn’t yet recovered from the whole dot com thing and there were still a million “converted business major” developers on the market who hadn’t yet got the hint that they should go to law school. The advice you got might not have applied to you on the way in. But it certainly applied to all the students those professors…
I can confirm this.
I started my CS program in 1999 and was supposed to do a Co-op placement (university-facilitated internship) after 2nd year, and after 3rd.
In 2001, I had dozens of interviews and could easily choose whatever placement I wanted.
In 2003 I couldn't get a job, and had to wait until the next cycle 4 months later.
Re: Students flee field as computer 'fad fades' (1987)
#70I 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…
That’s strange, I started studying in 2005 and had planned to go into Comp. Sci. for at least 2 years, yet I had never heard similar sentiment expressed. Germany.
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