[flagged]
What happened to Michael O. Church? I enjoyed his writings
Here you go:
Computer science has one of the highest unemployment rates
81–90 of 130 posts
Re: Computer science has one of the highest unemployment rates
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think CS departments are at least partially responsible for this development. They know that most of the students applying care nothing about Computer Science, have no interest in Computer Science and will never learn Computer Science, yet they keep accepting (and graduating) them. If CS departments actually wanted to teach CS, then they would advocate for setting up a new series of departments/degrees with names l…
University departments do not always have the kind of autonomy your post implies. It is common for the university’s central administration to dictate how many students they must let it, how much money they get per student, and hence how many they can fail without going into the red.
What could possibly go wrong making education a for-profit business? /s
Re: Computer science has one of the highest unemployment rates
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bad term. If I get employed as a quantitative trader on Jane Street after completing a philosophy major am I underemployed because I'm not writing papers on ontology? Why do other people get to say what my "full utilization" is without even knowing me? Underemployment as "not working as many hours as you'd like" is the standard definition, and that one actually does seem to respect people's interiority.
It depends if you want to be a philosopher or not. The surveys do actually ask this question, see questions #93-95 here for example: http://gpiatlantic.org/pdf/communitygpi/communitypart2b.pdf (I think you are right to ask if a survey can accurately capture "underemployment", there are many problems with the definition and how to capture the right information to measure it.)
You're darn right I am right to question it. These questions only leave me further convinced this is a bad term.
""" 93. Would you rather have a job more closely related to your education, training and experience?
94. Considering your education, training and experience, do you feel that you are overqualified for your current job?
95. Considering your education, training and experience, do you feel that you have been overqualified for most of your jobs? """
93 is not a question I suspect most people answer faithfully. Because most people with tertiary education could probably find such a job - but it would be at a substantial pay cut. Yet the angle of compensation is nowhere to be found in the question itself.
94 is subject to the same bias that makes 90% of people think they're in the top 50% of driving, parenting, lovemaking and/or karaoke.
95 has that same issue, but also brings in a narcissistic wound aspect to it. No, of course you're better than all of those hams, shams, and japeths who you worked with/under/over through the years.
Re: Computer science has one of the highest unemployment rates
#84CS professor with 15 years experience. The massive boom in computer science enrollment over the last 20 years has been driven mostly by people chasing tech salaries, not by any real interest in computing itself. These students often show up completely unprepared for how difficult CS actually is, and universities have responded by dumbing down their programs to keep everyone happy and enrolled. If this weeds out the p…
Having interviewed a number of graduates from code camps, they're definitely just chasing the salary.
Most of them have no actual passion for computing, their scope of knowledge is superficial, and they're asking for six-figure salaries out of the gate.
I had a relatively simple coding assignment (shouldn't take more than 15 minutes) that I would use to weed out those that were just copying and pasting sample code. It required a very large number of values and added an additional profiling step to it. The sample code wasn't performant with a very large number of values, and was painfully slow to use unless you made minor adjustments to a few things.
Re: Computer science has one of the highest unemployment rates
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why teach it when it seems like less than 10% of postings are looking for it? And we're back to the discussion of what is the point of a University CS education. I would argue that learning something like C++ is important for the same reason something like Lisp or Haskell is important. Not because it will necessarily help you get a job, but because it introduces you to new concepts and a new way of thinking about pro…
I don't think there are any main concepts that I learned in C++ that weren't also covered in other courses, such as Java, assembly, and COBOL. If we're going to teach different types of languages then they should be truly different, such as the ones just mentioned.
Of course you can teach most concepts in most languages, but when it comes to understanding concepts like stack vs heap, pointers to a value vs the value itself, move vs copy semantics, pass by reference vs pass by value, explicit vs implicit memory allocation and deallocation, and so on, I found C++ pretty useful.
Re: Computer science has one of the highest unemployment rates
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
The first real language I learned was C++ and I was decent at it (best in class but mostly stuck with console based programs, nothing advanced like GUIs that year). I have never used it at work. If you look at job boards, it's overwhelmingly stuff like Java, JS/TS frameworks, etc. Why teach it when it seems like less than 10% of postings are looking for it? Might as well teach other languages and just learn it if you…
Frameworks are the opposite of what universities should be teaching. I had this argument with another classmate when I was there who said they should be doing that. The point of a university is to give students the skills to communicate the ideas needed to use and develop frameworks effectively, not to teach you particular frameworks.
Especially considering that the hot framework you are studying will probably be out of fashion by the time you graduate. If I was paying American college tuition rates and sat in class studying Next.js I'd demand a refund.
Re: Computer science has one of the highest unemployment rates
#87If we're around in 2000 and 2009, you've seen this before. Our field has ups and downs and every time we hit the bottom people say it won't come back. It will.
We had some cleaning up to do. I was a hiring manager during COVID and the resumes I saw were unbelievable. People with "web" boot camps being considered for 6 figure salaries. People who had absolutely no business being in this field were being hired.
It was due to the easy money from low interest rates. This field always had solid salaries but some people were making a million to sit on meetings and integrate frameworks into me-too websites.
The hammer is coming down and is unfortunately hitting many good people too. But they will recover while the people who shouldn't be here will move on. Don't get your HVAC repair certification quite yet. Stop complaining about AI and go study it (the hard stuff not ChatGPT for dummies).
Re: Computer science has one of the highest unemployment rates
#88CS professor with 15 years experience. The massive boom in computer science enrollment over the last 20 years has been driven mostly by people chasing tech salaries, not by any real interest in computing itself. These students often show up completely unprepared for how difficult CS actually is, and universities have responded by dumbing down their programs to keep everyone happy and enrolled. If this weeds out the p…
Lots of discussion about choice of programming language in the comments below.
- In principle, it should not matter at all, but there are practical reasons why one PL may be better than another in a particular school or context.
- But, all this "choice of PL" discussion is really a discussion about CS1. A CS degree has at least seven other courses -- assuming 1 CS course per semester -- and in practice many more than that. So, if you're going to ask questions about CS1, the question to ask is, "Does CS1 setup students to succeed in the advanced courses?" Classically, these were courses in compilers, operating systems, networking, and so on. These days, you can add distributed computing, machine learning, etc. (but don't subtract the classics).
Re: Computer science has one of the highest unemployment rates
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for sharing. Is this similar to what was attracting students to medicine/doctor (guaranteed position with high salary)? But the med-school-to-full-time-physician pipeline is long and can weed out. CS is a difficult subject, certain ways of thinking are difficult but certainly can be learned, like recursive thinking. Did colleges expand their computer science departments or even just create them to meet the dem…
Salary isn't traditionally what motivates people to study medicine. It's prestige. The difficulty is part of the prestige, which is probably why they still do things like memorize long lists of cranial nerve names. I haven't heard that they have a problem with dropout rates. A good CS education only gives you prestige with fellow nerds.
I actually think prestige is a contributing factor for CS as well. People assume you must be smart to be a software engineer, and FAANG companies are prestigious to normal people because they have name recognition. Definitely not on the same level as a Doctor/Surgeon/Lawyer or whatever but certainly could be more than a typical 4-year degree will get you. And I suppose there's also the fact that those companies were viewed very differently 10-15 years ago and now there is a lot more cynicism about big tech in general.
Re: Computer science has one of the highest unemployment rates
#90CS professor with 15 years experience. The massive boom in computer science enrollment over the last 20 years has been driven mostly by people chasing tech salaries, not by any real interest in computing itself. These students often show up completely unprepared for how difficult CS actually is, and universities have responded by dumbing down their programs to keep everyone happy and enrolled. If this weeds out the p…
Having interviewed a number of graduates from code camps, they're definitely just chasing the salary. Most of them have no actual passion for computing, their scope of knowledge is superficial, and they're asking for six-figure salaries out of the gate. I had a relatively simple coding assignment (shouldn't take more than 15 minutes) that I would use to weed out those that were just copying and pasting sample code. I…
Back when we used to interview in person, we used to have a computer and screen in the office running Linux. The number of people who couldn't handle a terminal even to type "ls" was either remarkable or shocking depending on your point of view. We're talking about people who claimed years of Linux experience, applying for Linux programming and administration jobs.