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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)

#91

Post by lelanthran »

quicklime wrote: post #59
nickysielicki wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Is being "closer to business problems" really the sole reason? Or even a big reason? From the numbers I've seen, DevOps people are the best paid of all types of developers, but they aren't closer to business problems than React/Rails devs. I think it has more to do with the fact that most embedded developers are working on niche platforms and niche problem domains, so they don't enjoy the same level of job mobility a…

> Is being "closer to business problems" really the sole reason? Or even a big reason?

It's got to do with visibility. Those people more visible to the holders of the purse strings get paid more than those who aren't. The closer you are to the business side of things, the more visible you are to the profit line.

Compensation is very closely tied to how visible the role is to the company profits and/or leaders. A highly skilled DBA who ensure the most profitable application's DB is up, running and tuned is less visible than the business major who uses QlickView to send reports to the CEO. Guess who has more leverage to ask for money.

Sidenote: Skills have nothing to do with compensation. For a long time I used to feel guilty whenever I learned that I was making similar money to someone who was more skilled at my role than I was.

Now I don't feel guilty at all if I find out I'm making more than that person, and this is because I realised that the HR head, who has few relevant skills and can viably be replaced by a mollusc, makes more than I do.

I don't feel guilty making more than others anymore, because other people making more than me don't feel guilty about making more than me.

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

#92

Post by quickthrower2 »

jasonkester wrote: post #58
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…

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…

Oh yeah 2001! 6 months and dozens of applications to get a job offer. I would have done 100s of applications had their been that many to apply to.

Low points was being rejected from a job maintaining access databases in a small town. Being rejected from another job because I hadn’t suggested manually unrolling a loop as an alternative solution to a problem and I said “oh yeah you could do that I guess” (feedback: bad communicator I withhold information), and a 2 day hoop jumping affair for a dev job involving fake meetings where you had to make up bullshit.

Fuck graduating 2001. Also probably heavily affected my lifetime earnings as I started on £18k.

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

#93

Post by krige »

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…

That's entirely not the point of college. College isn't supposed to give you job skills. There are other educational avenues far superior for that purpose. College is supposed to install you with broad and reasonably thorough knowledge base in the general direction you chose as well as shape your perception of the world and the underlying mechanisms.

It wasn't ever supposed to be a required qualification for the modern world emplyoment but here we are.

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

#94

Post by haakon »

flomo wrote: post #90
drzaiusapelord wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Home computers in the eighties weren't that expensive. That was the whole point – you could actually have a computer in your home now. Kids got them for Christmas.

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

#96

Post by jhbadger »

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:…

And even a bit earlier, 1977 was the year of the "holy trinity" of early home computers -- the initial Apple II, the TRS-80 Model I, and the Commodore Pet. There were even earlier machines, like the Altair, but those were generally sold as kits and assumed knowledge of electronics, but the 1977 machines were consumer products that you could just buy and use.

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

#97

Post by happyhardcore »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #92
jasonkester wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Oh yeah 2001! 6 months and dozens of applications to get a job offer. I would have done 100s of applications had their been that many to apply to. Low points was being rejected from a job maintaining access databases in a small town. Being rejected from another job because I hadn’t suggested manually unrolling a loop as an alternative solution to a problem and I said “oh yeah you could do that I guess” (feedback: bad…

FWIW £18k in 2001 is ~£30k in today's money which is on the upper end of graduate starting salaries even for today

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

#98

Post by heurisko »

ayngg wrote: post #79
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…

I went to university a couple years after that and also felt a similar sentiment that it was basically too late to get in on a good career before the industry got outsourced. Of course then social media happened and everyone and their grandma needed developers so it didn't matter that people were flooding in because there simply wasn't enough labor to go around.

I think there are also qualitative reasons why outsourcing didn't prove as successful as many companies thought.

One being, that business requirements are often complex, and contain ambiguity, which requires communication between developers and the business, which is hampered by differences in timezones and culture.

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

#99

Post by jamespitts »

There will always be people who choose a field for success, and they are more likely to flee when it seems unsuccessful.

I was once connected with someone who was just getting started in his career. He was entering the tech industry as a software engineer, having graduated w/ a CS degree from a UC in 2000 or thereabouts.

This person had majored in CS because of the late 1990s tech bubble, yet felt strongly at the time that it was not a good field once the tech bubble burst. I was aghast, not only at the reason he chose his path and the waste, but also at the idea that a bubble pop would send him out of the field so easily.

He ended up going into real estate just as that field bubbled into insanity, God bless his soul.

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

#100

Post by [deleted] »

pavlov wrote: post #88
drzaiusapelord wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]
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