8 ms·

Slight note about Dan Wang picking 2005: That was the peak of CS degrees awarded because it's 4/5 years after the height of the dot-com bubble. So the upward bu

• deleted 9y ago
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• twblalock 9y ago
  > The number of grads for difficult degrees and the quality of grads seems to be another story. This is why I never believed the "There is no STEM shortage" stories. They were mostly based on the assumption that all STEM grads were qualified to work in STEM. That's not true in any field where you can complete a degree with a C or D average. I find it unfortunate that some of the larger software companies filter out applicants based on the school they graduated from, but I understand it. The companies have to have some sort of filtering mechanism, because many colleges clearly do not.
  • kevin_thibedeau 9y ago
    There is no STEM shortage because salaries haven't risen for those already working in the field.
    • twblalock 9y ago
      They certainly have risen in tech, the T part of STEM.
      • kevin_thibedeau 9y ago
        NYC and SF are small islands compared to the rest of the country. Salaries are flat for everyone else.
        • twblalock 9y ago
          > NYC and SF are small islands compared to the rest of the country. Not in terms of tech jobs.
          • sidlls 9y ago
            Yes, even in terms of tech jobs. Software just isn't as big a deal outside of these places.
            • sbov 9y ago
              I think the point is a huge number of tech jobs are within these locations. The SF bay area has something stupid like the top 3 cities when it comes to tech jobs. Throw out all the locations with the most jobs and surprise, salaries suck.
              • sidlls 9y ago
                Well, I wouldn't say salaries "suck" outside of well-known tech centers like SF/Bay Area and NYC. They aren't great, though. Even in the Bay Area, at least, the salaries of engineers still pale in comparison to the salaries of managers and executives.
                • kelnos 9y ago
                  > Even in the Bay Area, at least, the salaries of engineers still pale in comparison to the salaries of managers and executives. Depends on where you work. If you work at an actual technology company that "gets it", they'll have parallel management and individual contributor tracks where you can make as much as a director-level person as an IC, or more.
  • FLUX-YOU 9y ago
    >The companies have to have some sort of filtering mechanism There's no one to hold companies accountable for having a unjustifiably high or low filter. And frankly I don't think anyone outside of CS has gotten those filters right any more than CS has. An incorrect filter turns into "Well, there's no one qualified to work for us" or "Well, all of these candidates failed to do the job" which leads to incorrect assumptions about the labor pool, which is what's going to bias your hiring decisions. There are companies out there hiring for A+ students that would be just as well off with a C or D average student because what the company is doing day-to-day is too far from what university was like.
    • poikniok 9y ago
      Well this is why a free market is great, if you think all these companies are doing things wrong, start your own and outcompete them.
      • FLUX-YOU 9y ago
        Feel free to write me a check for the millions of seed money I'll need.
        • pkaye 9y ago
          Bootstrap!
          • noobermin 9y ago
            Poiknoik quite literally used the "bootstrap" argument in a non-ironic way to describe an actually real systemic problem .
        • arjie 9y ago
          Do you actually need millions for a software consultancy? You're hiring people who wouldn't be employed elsewhere. You could pay them less and cut prices to your clients and everyone would come out better. I mean you've spotted what you claim is a clear inefficiency. Your guys could be taking the jobs that Infosys and gang are taking.
  • smichel17 9y ago
    > This is why I never believed the "There is no STEM shortage" stories. They were mostly based on the assumption that all STEM grads were qualified to work in STEM. That's not true in any field where you can complete a degree with a C or D average. This is true IFF we assume that gpa accurately reflects qualification to work in industry.
    • slededit 9y ago
      There is a difference between getting a C or D average because you don't care about school, and getting that because you can't do any better. Unfortunately the two are hard to separate, and even if the grad didn't care about school - it doesn't mean they will care about work. I was in the boat of not caring about school (although I did get a B) and it worked out - but anyone following that path should understand its an up hill climb.
  • Bakary 9y ago
    At the risk of sounding foolish, but isn't it easy for a company to filter out applicants in technical fields, simply by asking technical questions?
    • 35bge57dtjku 9y ago
      Yes, and that's what they've done at every programming job I've ever had.
    • flukus 9y ago
      Now there is a mini industry around getting people over that very low bar. FizzBuzz was a temporary patch, now we need a real fix.
    • pkulak 9y ago
      But that takes the engineers you already have and puts them in interviews instead of engineering.
• gnodar 9y ago
  Interesting that in the nsf data it shows that during the 2000-2004 time frame the number of CS grads rose and then peaked in 2004, while the number of CS women grads during the same time frame was flat, and then dropped in 2004.
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  • fivestar 9y ago
    '04 was just post dot-com bubble, though. Sad if those numbers haven't picked up since then. We badly need people who are doers and not just rent seekers or mid-level functionaries.
• SkyMarshal 9y ago
  What's interesting to me about that data is the high rate of biological and agricultural sciences grads, relative to all other sciences. CS grad rates seem to fall right about where they should on XKCD's Purity Scale [1] (if CS had been included in it). 2004 was an outlier for CS, but it has reverted to its mean since. But bio and ag sciences are beating out Psychology, which is a bit of a reversal. Biology isn't easy, especially not any program with a requirement for organic chemistry. Could that be b/c the big midwest and southwest universities (Iowa, Texas A&M, etc) have large bio/ag programs to support that industry in their region? [1]:https://www.xkcd.com/435/ https://www.xkcd.com/435/
  • watwut 9y ago
    Although biology and organic chemistry are much harder then CS anything, they can be learned in school and from school resources only. No one expects you to already come in already knowing how to code or configure linux. If you are good students willing to work, you will learn them, period. With cs, you are expected to already know a lot that was not taught in school - meaning that all kinds of cultural and social effects play the role (who your parents and friends were). Also, there is a lot less myths about biology around. Nobody assumes you have to be some kind of nerd to learn it, nobody assumes there is special in-born ability for it totally different from all other kinds of intelligence (like is often implicitly assumed even with things like operating system configuration), there is much less cultural bullshit about "hackers and their culture" around.
    • violinist 9y ago
      I haven't personally taken organic chemistry, but several of my friends who have taken both organic chemistry and algorithms have said that algorithms is by far the harder of the two. So I tend to disagree that biology and organic chemistry are harder than anything in CS.
      • base698 9y ago
        Have degrees in both and agree. The amount of work require to get a B in data structures would get you an A+ in biochemistry. Physical Chemistry on the other hand...
• _delirium 9y ago
  Re: the choice of 2005 as origin, if you rebase on 2009, then CS degree growth looks on par with other STEM fields. Thus I think is's misleading to say CS majoring is "flat". At a certain end-to-end view it is, but that obscures that it crashed, and is now rapidly growing, not that it's been stagnant and unchanging. In the early 2000s it was widely perceived as the economically smart thing to go into a technical field other than CS, especially petroleum engineering, chemical engineering, and similar areas, or maybe even better, a non-technical field like law. They had higher pay and were seen as more stable employment options. CS employment was seen by many people as unlikely to ever fully recover from the dotcom crash, partly because of mass outsourcing. So unsurprisingly, new enrollment numbers were low, and some departments at smaller schools even closed. Then from around 2005, CS began to be seen as a lucrative again, and enrollment has been steadily rising every year since then. Universities have responded likewise by reopening CS departments, hiring more faculty in existing ones, and increasing class sizes (so enrollment growth is actually considerably outpacing faculty growth). This does not look to me like a market that fails to respond to economic incentives, but exactly like one that does respond. Maybe it ought to respond even faster, although if it did in general, the CS-degree crash of the 2000s might've been even deeper than it was.
  • noobermin 9y ago
    >if you rebase on 2009, then CS degree growth looks on par with other STEM fields. Thus I think is's misleading to say CS majoring is "flat". No, what you described is called "misleading with data" at best and "lying" at worst. There is a clear dip in CS on that plot that is suffered but none of the other points. Moreover, the growth is below the rate of increase in college graduates.
    • _delirium 9y ago
      The clear dip in CS is what the rest of my comment is about. The point is that the entire premise of the original post, which claims CS enrollment is "flat" by cherry-picking a specific benchmark year and ignoring huge movement between that year and the present, is indeed "'misleading with data' at best", because CS enrollment is not "flat". If you pick an earlier or later year, you get different narratives. The post then spends a bunch of time musing on why CS enrollment supposedly doesn't respond to economic incentives, even though responding to economic incentives, i.e. rising and falling together with tech booms and busts, is precisely what the data shows it doing. Edit: better said here, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14441423 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14441423
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• Spooky23 9y ago
  Who gives a hoot about IQ in 2017? That doesn't match what I see in the ground. I get 10-20 interns a year on my teams from big state universities and liberal arts schools with CS and stem degrees. They tend to be awesome. The best ones outperform most of the consultants you find.
  • simonsarris 9y ago
    More people than ever, especially on HN. https://www.gwern.net/iq https://www.gwern.net/iq Nothing you say relates to IQ stats about the median grad. If CS enrollment was up, it would push the needle I'm sure. It's not. You may as well be saying, "What do you mean most wine is bad? I drink good wine all the time."
    • Spooky23 9y ago
      I'm getting a random lot of 20 kids from average schools. Surely, if IQ is dropping significantly amongst the general population of CS students, I'd be seeing that?
      • gareim 9y ago
        Is your company actually selecting 20 kids at random, or selecting 20 from the best of the ones applying? Are you also comparing this over a long timeframe? 112 in the 70's -> 100 now means less than 1 point every 3 years. You probably can't notice a difference that small year over year.
      • david927 9y ago
        Of course, "the plural of anecdote is not 'data'," is the first thing I would say. I know someone who just went through the process to hire a half-dozen interns, some from top schools, who (frankly) would argue with you. There are a thousand possible reasons for this but I think the best course of action is to dispense with that, personal, line of reasoning.
      • graeme 9y ago
        The author's point was that college IQ was dropping, and this explained the lack of rise of CS enrolemt. Simce CS is objectively harder, only a lower portion of college students can now do it. That's their hypothesis. So their hypothesis isn't that CS student IQs are dropping.
• lgessler 9y ago
  Re: the Wordsum test, I can't believe it is seriously used to assess IQ. If we assume that all participants know all of the words used, then maybe it would have some merit. But so many of the words used are either archaic, little-used, or culturally specific to North America that you could only reasonably expect a well-read and/or well-educated (and therefore wealthy) American person to know them.
  • Houshalter 9y ago
    It still likely correlates well with IQ. That's the whole point of IQ. A bunch of different cognitive tasks like solving puzzles and memory tests tend to correlate very well with each other. I'd be very surprised if wordsums didn't predict IQ very well.
  • hasenj 9y ago
    It's hard to believe a person of high IQ is not going to be well-read and/or well educated. The only point about this test is it's specific to native speakers of English, but if you were born in North America than it surely applies to you even if your parents speak another language.
    • lgessler 9y ago
      > It's hard to believe a person of high IQ is not going to be well-read and/or well educated. What of high IQ individuals who are born into low- or middle-class families, who didn't have their parents read them 19th century British novels, and therefore don't know what a dowager is?
      • hasenj 9y ago
        They would go to the library of their own accord. You don't need your parents to read things for you.
  • lostboys67 9y ago
    I think you forgot class here
• metaphorm 9y ago
  institutional education is subject to diminishing returns at every level of the process. it's a fractal of diminishing returns. the "college for everyone" experiment is grinding our society into paste and generating enormous debt burdens for an entire generation. time to end it. those with aptitude for programming can learn programming without a college degree. let's find out just how flat aptitude really is. all we know now is that aptitude is flat in the institutional environment.