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Why is a computer science background necessary for an IT career? I know many, many IT professionals who did not study CS in college.
by beat 10y ago
Why is a computer science background necessary for an IT career? I know many, many IT professionals who did not study CS in college.
- kerbalspacepro 10y agoNo, but also yes.
- TooGhosty 10y agoMaybe it is not strictly necessary but someone with a CS degree is obviously going to be the preferred hire.
- onion2k 10y agoFirstly, that isn't true. Huge numbers of people learn to write code as part of a degree that isn't CS - for example, if you want someone to develop a GIS startup you'd be better off with a geography graduate who can write decent code than a CS graduate who probably doesn't have experience of GIS. Secondly, if you hear "startup" and think "developers" then you're ignoring at least 50% of the work necessary to make the business a success, all of which can (and often should) be done by someone without a CS degree. There's a lot more to tech than writing code.
- TooGhosty 10y agoFair points for sure. I would agree with this.
- ci5er 10y ago"IT Professionals" is a broad label. Maybe we can think of getting a 'degree in a field' as a proxy-variable for 'interest in the field'. What's astonishing to me is through the 60s, 70's and into the mid-80s, computer-tech interest in female cohorts tracked with science, law and medical fields. Then it flattened and fell, while female participation in those other three fields continued to expand at the rates they had before. (So, what happened in 1985?)
- rrdharan 10y agoThis Planet Money episode attempted to tackle that question: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-women-stopped-coding http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-... Their tl;dr answer is that video games happened, and they were marketed exclusively to boys; that's what created and drove the cultural rift.
- ci5er 10y agoThanks for that link. My original sighting of the phenomena used the exact same graph, but made no attempt at being explanatory. I have since then, been searching, but failed to re-find a copy of that graph to stick into my files. Now, thanks you you, I have! Thanks!