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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)

#81

Post by dr_dshiv »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #60
CoolGuySteve wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

btw Futurama's writers were paraphrasing this: "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." Thomas Watson, president of IBM, 1943 (of course in 1943 that was a totally reasonable thing to think considering they were the size of a small house and ran on thousands of vacuum tubes that needed constant replacing and started in the millions of dollars)

Ironically, that's about how many major cloud providers exist (AWS, MS, Google,...)

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

#82

Post by jcelerier »

nickysielicki wrote: post #5
Syonyk wrote: post #4

> "It's not a video games major." If it was true in the 80s, it was certainly true in the early 2000s when I was getting my CprE degree. I met quite a few people who were studying ComS or CprE for reasons that can be summed up as, "I built my own computer, I like video games, people said I'm good with computers, so I should be a Computer Science/Computer Engineering major!" They rarely lasted more than a semester or…

> If you can write solid C, ring 0/EL3 doesn't scare you off, or you can figure out how to cram 10 pounds of hard realtime code into a 5 pound microcontroller... yeah, you'll go far. Come out having done the minimum, knowing Python and Javascript, well... there's an awful lot of competition for most of those positions if you're just a basic coder, not skilled at using those to accomplish interesting real world tasks…

Wonder on which world you live - around here the salary for hard real time on embedded are around 30-40k. Personal data point : a few years ago, after my PhD (revolving around some aspects of real-time), I did some interviews to stay fresh and was offered 35k to work on embedded chips used in Dassault missiles. I told them that I was already making more from freelance consulting at that time, they said tough luck.

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

#83

Post by KronisLV »

ajuc wrote: post #62
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…

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 wages, when compared to outsourcing companies, like Accenture.

Of course, there's no reason for why any developer should work against their interests in regards to being able to save and earn money, but it does seem interesting - maybe i'm wrong and it's just a regional thing?

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

#84

Post by bredren »

gpspake wrote: post #25
ChicagoDave wrote: post #9

Not one hour of college after graduating high school in 1982 and I’ve been working in IT non-stop. Calculus? Physics? Ridiculous.

Academia's gotta keep a tight grip on that knowledge. Can't possibly be successful without the gatekeepers.

It is more about preservation of entrenched power structures and resource flows than holding knowledge.

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

#85

Post by raverbashing »

gumby wrote: post #36

I moved to Palo Alto in 1984 after the tech boom had collapsed. All the mortgages were under water. People talked about how exciting it had been. “But how many disk drives will companies ever want, really?” In 1982 the MIT EECS department was trying to encourage students to pick other majors.* By ‘84 they didn’t need to. * posters in the Infinite Corridor that read, “Course 6 got you down? Change majors!”

But if you could see through the hype and bought one of the houses in PA for cheap today you would have been set for life.

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

#86

Post by lordnacho »

fuzzy2 wrote: post #72
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…

I agree that university isn’t vocational training. However, the knowledge is relevant. If you don’t know that some data structure/algorithm/whatever exists, would you know to look for it or what to look for? Sure you can learn all this by yourself, but you can also learn it at the university.

Maybe the way I'd phrase it is the knowledge you learn at university, to the extent that it's applicable, is actually just indexing.

So for instance I figured out that numerical methods are a thing that you can use to approximately solve differential equations, which often don't have a nice analytical solution.

Can I solve differential equations? Not anymore. Can I solve one by the end of this week? Definitely.

What you do in college is a bit of intellectual tourism, looking at wide variety of topics briefly. There are natives who depend on the tourists for part of their living, who know every nook and cranny of PDE solvers. But like in the real world we're mostly at home in one place and tourists everywhere else.

The other answer to your question is that you build up an intuition for where the dragons are. The more tourism you do, the more you come to suspect there are other continents in certain places.

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

#87

Post by raverbashing »

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…

People who thought jobs would go to India probably never did anything (or managed any work) that couldn't be outsourced there, hence why they thought this would happen in 100% of cases.

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

#88

Post by pavlov »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #60
CoolGuySteve wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

btw Futurama's writers were paraphrasing this: "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." Thomas Watson, president of IBM, 1943 (of course in 1943 that was a totally reasonable thing to think considering they were the size of a small house and ran on thousands of vacuum tubes that needed constant replacing and started in the millions of dollars)

And it’s come full circle because today the majority of the Western world’s computing needs are served by five computers: Google’s, Facebook’s, Apple’s, Microsoft’s and Amazon’s.

Each of them consists of millions of individual devices, but the end user posting to Instagram or accessing their iCloud files doesn’t need to know any of that.

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

#89

Post by quartesixte »

tyingq wrote: post #24
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...

Still $8.99 in Vegas :) https://www.fremontcasino.com/whats-new/offers/tony-romas-pr...

These are legitimately so good, and a great way to console yourself after busting at the blackjack tables

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

#90

Post by flomo »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #67
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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:…

It was a different time, when most of those new things came out, they were more expensive than whatever proceeded them (in a sense). Individuals weren't buying $10,000 Macintoshes, $20,000 NeXTCubes, and $30,000 UNIX/RISC workstations. My communist professor was bragging his SPARCstation was more expensive than a Mercedes!

The low-end got cheaper only very slowly. In 1990 you could go into a computer store and drop a couple grand on a slightly better version of a PC-XT or original Mac, ancient tech at that point.

This all changed very fast in the early 90s with 386/486 and Windows got cheap fast and crashed into the consumer market. Most of the above died or almost died in the process.

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