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Students flee field as computer 'fad fades' (1987)
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- umvi 5y ago"Good money and easy opportunity"
- Syonyk 5y ago> "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 two, though I think the most epic flameout I knew managed a whopping 0.34 GPA his first semester... And if the goal is "Get a degree, coast on through life with the easy money from computers," well... good luck. There are some very wide open pathways where if you're good, you can make lots of coin, but they're rare, and most tend to involve an awful lot of years of hard learning before you're competent (embedded dev and firmware/OS dev are some fields desperate for competent hires). 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 ("make those images slide across the webpage" is not particularly novel or interesting anymore). I'm struggling a bit to find ComS majors as a percent of degrees, but some stuff I've found indicates it's only in the 3-4% range or so today, so while it's double the percentage referenced in the article, it's not an order of magnitude higher by ratio (though in terms of degrees issued, probably, with college being more popular).
- nickysielicki 5y ago> 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 ("make those images slide across the webpage" is not particularly novel or interesting anymore). Go take a look at salaries and get back to me. Embedded does not pay as well as React/Rails, for the sole reason that React/Rails developers are closer to business problems.
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- theshadowknows 5y agoYou’re absolutely correct. I can write solid C :) but I make ok salary (155 base) and the vast majority of my work is doing architecture diagrams and writing reference code, most often in js. I also write a lot of sql.
- ThrowawayR2 5y ago"Past performance is not a predictor of future results". The gravy train might keep going for as much as another decade but, as more and more people are flooding into web development every year, at some point demand is going to be saturated and then ...
- joelbluminator 5y agoThere are also way more web jobs than embedded though, but you're right that another .com bubble will be bad for web devs (especially juniors, the seniors should do fine).
- quicklime 5y agoIs 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 as React/rails devs, who in turn don't have as much mobility as a DevOps person. Moving companies is by far the easiest way to get a pay rise. Job mobility gives you more negotiating power, and thus a higher salary.
- whatshisface 5y agoThe pay people are getting with their basic Python skills still outstrips non-programming professions at the same level of experience by a large margin. I also would like to express some skepticism about the embedded development pay scale idea, because a lot of those jobs are at engineering-first firms that put software, and by extension programmers, last.
- the_only_law 5y ago> because a lot of those jobs are at engineering-first firms that put software, and by extension programmers, last. I may be wrong, but I’m also skeptical of ever applying to these sort of positions because I feel they’d likely carry other aspects of engineering firms like heavy credentialism. l.
- whatshisface 5y agoI don't mind the idea of applying, as long as you negotiate seriously.
- poorjohnmacafee 5y agoI agree that knowing only basic Python or JavaScript isn't that useful today. In the companies I've worked at we've never hired a fresh grad or career change person whose skillset was described as "basic Python skills." We've only hired if they have professional experience, a compelling portfolio, or show some exceptional talent for a junior level. I think this is the norm.
- geofft 5y agoI have an MIT degree with coursework in operating systems and a lot of ring 0 experience and my well-paying job has me writing Python and JavaScript. As far as I can tell I'd be taking a significant pay cut if I went into embedded dev. Supply is higher for "basic coders" but demand is also much higher. There are a whole lot of images that need to be slid across web pages; there aren't that many CPU architectures that need Linux ported to them.
- rejectedandsad 5y agoThis is correct. At a hedge fund (ostensibly one like HRT given the pedigree you mentioned) geofft makes on the order of $500-700k or more, unlike mere mortals like me that went to a state school that make just $200k. Of course, I didn’t take any embedded classes and got an A- in my C class so perhaps I deserve nothing to begin with.
- imtringued 5y agoSpeaking of hedgefunds. Those are unlikely to hire embedded software developers but they may need a lot of "basic coders" and they can afford to pay them a lot even if the job is simple.
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- vmception 5y agohedge funds are not uniform enough to have any predictable set of skill requirements some need a node js script, some swear by python because an area of computational finance has gathered around it, some swear by languages closer to the metal, some have use cases that are better off with low latency stacks, others dont some are modifying FPGAs, others have simply negotiated a payout from a court case and will teach you F to analyze a dataset faster if they need coders at all, they all mostly need some level of quicker analysis but not possible to predict what kind of coder a hedge fund will need
- jlokier 5y ago> you can make lots of coin, but they're rare, and most tend to involve an awful lot of years of hard learning before you're competent (embedded dev and firmware/OS dev are some fields desperate for competent hires). Embedded dev and firmware both seem to pay comparatively poorly, despite the expertise required to do it well. Last year I discussed a number of contracts in this area, and when I found how much was on offer, they were all distinctly low compared with other contracts. OS dev, I will grant you, can pay well, eg kernel development, graphics drivers, storage layers. I think that's driven by servers and mobile devices more than embedded. > 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. Oh if only! Doing that stuff is fun. I think cramming hard realtime into microcontrollers is best kept for hobby time if "coin" is what you're after though. Perhaps it's different for big, serious controller projects (like say a Mars rover or satellite), but I think mostly, embedded/microcontroller type things seem to be paid closer to mid-level electronic engineering levels. I don't know why, because there's a lot of expertise involved, but electronic engineering seems to pay considerably less than software at the moment.
- killtimeatwork 5y ago> (embedded dev and firmware/OS dev are some fields desperate for competent hires). There's a Samsung R&D center in my country where they do very cool and tough stuff and they ARE desperate for hires - mostly because their salaries are a laughing stock of the entire city. Web and data/backend pay best and the "tough" fields are trying to get by on sub-web salaries.
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- ChicagoDave 5y agoNot one hour of college after graduating high school in 1982 and I’ve been working in IT non-stop. Calculus? Physics? Ridiculous.
- gpspake 5y agoAcademia's gotta keep a tight grip on that knowledge. Can't possibly be successful without the gatekeepers.
- bredren 5y agoIt is more about preservation of entrenched power structures and resource flows than holding knowledge.
- ChicagoDave 5y agoNot just academia. Google is jarringly restrictive in who they hire. If you haven't memorized the Data Structures textbook, you can't even talk to a recruiter. I've been pretty successful without even glancing at that book (since most business domain data structures aren't complex). Now...I have improved my knowledge of complex data structures like graph traversal, but it's rare this knowledge is needed in every day business-oriented development.
- JohnL4 5y agoWe don't need no book larnin! [Writes an n^3 nested loop] Maybe I'm just traumatized by 00s coders, but I hear rejection of college as rejection of knowledge and critical thinking. I admit school ain't all that, but you CANNOT reject it all.
- timonoko 5y agoThis was the time of the Turbo-button. Programs were made for 4.77 MHz IBM PC, so you had to slowdown the 30 MHz by default. The Turbo speed was mostly useless, and so it seemed to be the ultimate end of computer development. Achually for 10 years nothing exciting happened. Until maybe 1992 when you could install your very own Unix.
- chrisco255 5y agoI always wondered why the desktop revolution didn't really take off until the 90s after seeing that the Mac was released in the early 80s.
- dole 5y agoWindows for Workgroups/NT.
- ChuckNorris89 5y agoCheap IBM PC clones running pirated videogames on Windows sparked the "real" boom of PCs in homes. Wolfenstein, Doom, Quake etc.
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- IncRnd 5y agoSome of that code is till being parroted by Copilot! https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309 https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309
- timonoko 5y agoIn 1988 I watched when they tried to use the Smalltalk environment with its windowing system in software production. It was very robust and well for a week, but then it just choked up. Not enough memory and virtual too slow.
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- anonu 5y agoWas 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-house-restaurant https://www.bismarckcafe.com/blogs/260/remembering-gourmet-h...
- ForgotPwd 5y agoI entered college in the fall of 1982. I thought about majoring in CS but the general concensus was that the field was overpopulated and there wouldn't be enough jobs.
- MattGaiser 5y agoI originally went into chemical engineering rather than CS/software/computer engineering as many of my relatives thought that software engineering was a fad that wouldn't stick around. I graduated in 2019. So even several decades later some thought that.
- sparks1970 5y agoOfftopic but my son is thinking of taking Chemical Engineering. Would you recommend in 2021?
- auxym 5y agoJust make sure he's aware of what exactly is chem engineering. It's not discovering new chemicals. That would be chemistry PhDs. It's not even discovering new reaction pathways, that's still mostly chemistry people (process chemists). Chem engineering is process engineering. Chemists give you the reaction they want to do, and how much of it. Then engineers will size boilers, heat exchangers, pipes, process controllers and a bunch of other industrial equipment to make this happen. It's not a bad career, you just have to be aware that it mostly happens in a production/manufacturing kind of environment with everything that entails (ie possible oncall in case of plant emergencies on weekends, etc). As a professional engineer, you are putting your ass and your career on the line every time you sign off on a design. If an accident happens with loss of human life, serious injuries or large financial loss, you can be sued and you can have your license revoked if it was caused by a mistake in your design. You have to be able to live with this weight on your shoulders every day you come in to work. It's obviously not paid as much as programming, but what is? Programming is pretty much an outlier at the moment, chem eng is probably in line with other traditional engineering disciplines (civil, electrical, mechanical, etc).
- DoreenMichele 5y ago"News" is almost always bad news. I find that I have to create my own content if I want to share news that's not the most negative spin one can reasonably make. To get any more negative, you would need to start fabricating stories and leave the land of plausibility. Edit: Come to think of it, when I was interviewed for a news story about the quiet little hep a epidemic a few years back, they fabricated a quote from me and thereby left the land of plausibility.
- read_if_gay_ 5y ago> they fabricated a quote from me Whenever I see someone mention having been interviewed, chances are good they'll mention this.
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- Wildgoose 5y agoYup. It's happened to me as well.
- catwind7 5y agoi better not tell employers that I haven't touched a physics text book in the last 10 years
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- jhgb 5y agoTell them; it obviously means that you already know physics by heart! ;)
- johnswas 5y agoThe thing I learned is that if there is "bad news" about anything you have invest more in it.
- kristopolous 5y agoI wish this were the case now. The field has eternal Septembered. Tools no longer empower, they constrict and patronize developers, setting up ceremonial barriers that are merely performative while restricting and shepherding users away from creativity independence and ownership into proscriptive systems. The other disciplines actually take systems of qualifications seriously. Doctors, mechanical and civil engineers, lawyers, this is how they avoid crackpots, frauds and other Dunning Kruger claims. We do no such thing. This damage control tech is the way of bumper laning everything while simultaneously kneecapping the serious practitioners. Computer programming is trashed by the flood, nothing positive is coming of this. Like the Luddites who stood at the Dawn of the March of Intellect, the destination we are coursed for we ride to on waves of destruction. There's better ways possible.
- AussieWog93 5y agoI agree with your complaint about tools being designed to constrict and patronise us (my old manager used to always make reference to "hardware obstruction layers"). Perhaps software development as a whole is in an Eternal September, even, but don't think that using qualifications as gatekeeping tools will solve this. I come from a "real" engineering background (EEE), as does my old man (Chem Eng) and things are no different there: the companies that care more about whether or not you're 6 Sigma certified than what actual, real experience you have at the coalface tend to repel highly competent problem solvers and attract the Process Eng equivalent of the "Microsoft Certified Solutions Developer". The SWE "hacker" ideal where your code speaks for itself and they don't care what idiotic courses you've completed is one of the things that attracted me to the role.
- kristopolous 5y agoBut the code doesn't speak for itself. It's not meritocratic. It's amenable to the same social ingratiations as all other institutions. In the same way that say, homeopathy presents itself as medicine where it is just expensive capsules of pure sugar, the reliance on the extraordinary popular delusions and madness of the crowds has been a well documented problem since mackey wrote a book in that name in 1841. That's why when barriers were real, in days of inferior computing, only competency could pull through while now it's been supplanted by conformance and orthodoxy. To what? It's merely perfunctory. The levers to reality have been detached. We have become the homeopaths diluting belladonna in a hope that poison will become medicine. But all we get in the end is merely a sugar high.
- gumby 5y agoI 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!”
- raverbashing 5y agoBut 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.
- chii 5y ago> bought one of the houses in PA for cheap hindsight is 20/20 for a reason.
- varjag 5y agoYou have similarly endless opportunities for arbitrage today, which will only become clear in a decade or two.
- getlawgdon 5y agoSorry? I'm not understanding -- arbitrage in what market(s)?
- __s 5y agoAny. They're pointing out that markets are priced with predictions of future value, but some of those predictions are wrong
- novok 5y agoYou'd be even more set for life you bought bitcoin and HODL for a decade when there was only CPU mining too. It's all relative.
- chadcmulligan 5y agoI think CASE - (Computer aided software engineering) was starting to come about that time iirc. Business folk would just drag and drop stuff in these new fangled GUI's and everyone would go home early. Edit: That crab stuffed fillet sounds good
- zozbot234 5y agoWasn't CASE just a fancy word for what we now call IDEs? Business people might not do much dragging and dropping there, but developers do it quite a bit.
- detaro 5y agoCASE is more the "draw UML diagrams/flow charts/... and the code is generated" and vice-versa stuff.
- chadcmulligan 5y agoI used Oracle CASE at the time, it had a "data dictionary" where you defined the database schema in terms of the business terms and you could match it to the physical elements in the tables. I think there was also a tool that you could make business logic in and maybe map to SQL*Forms (the user screen painter). There was an idea of being able to join these together somehow, but I don't recall the mechanics.
- varjag 5y agoThe promise of CASE was closer to the promise of now Copilot, but hard coded instead of statistical.
- rauhl 5y agoAs others indicated, CASE was more about code generation rather than smart IDEs. My recollection from the time is that the industry really strongly believed that almost no-one would write actual textual lines of codes and that graphical programming was going to be where it was at. Looking back, it’s a remarkable delusion: mankind went from pictures to pictograms to text, not in the reverse. The career path everyone expected (mentioned elsethread: go from a junior guy-who-writes-lines to an architect guy-who-draws-pictures) doesn’t really make sense. If anything, while a high-level architectural document needs to have some diagrams, even more than that it needs to have text: text to describe the problem being solved, the context, the potential solutions and the reasons to choose one solution over the rest. Likewise, it’s striking how many PowerPoint slides could be effectively replaced with short point papers … but that’s a discussion for another time. I am not 100% sure of why the industry had this wrong-headed idea, as I was too young at one point in time and too junior at another to really have good context. Maybe it was the rise of GUIs which led folks to think, ‘gosh, if pictures can enable folks to use a computer easily, then they will enable folks to program a computer easily!’ Or maybe it was the unfortunate habit non-experts have of not really understanding an expert’s field. As I recall, it also had a very strong correlation with the rise of OOP.
- hkmurakami 5y agoSimilar story post Dotcom crash at my alma mater. There were either 21 or 26 incoming undergrads declared as CS majors. The dean exclaimed that it was great to have them and that they were "the true believers". Fast forward to now, and there's about 250 incoming CS undergrads without much student body expansion.
- alexgmcm 5y agoI studied Physics but I think if I could do it all again CS would make more sense (in my job I do some CS stuff anyway and zero physics..) At least in Europe, even Engineering fields (let alone sciences and god forbid, the arts/humanities..) have pretty dismal job prospects compared to CS. It seems like everyone and their grandmother wants to "learn to code" these days and it really doesn't seem like a sustainable situation. That said, it's quite a hard field to actually learn enough to be a useful, paid professional so at the moment I'd still say it is the best degree choice.
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- KingOfCoders 5y agoWhen I was telling people I'd study computer science at the end of the 80s, everyone said: "Why? Everything has already been developed, word processors etc. Nothing left to develop".
- donatj 5y agoI 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 program only a couple years earlier. We were the last cohort before the college discontinued the program entirely, and I was the only one to graduate. What I found however for maybe five years after graduation was a insanely high demand for developers. There was genuinely a generation that was so strongly discouraged from becoming developers that there were very few. Seems to me like the folklorists have largely missed this.
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- yojo 5y agoI experienced the exact same thing (graduating in 2005) to the extent that it dissuaded me from getting a CS degree at all. Outsourcing was supposed to be the end of programming jobs in America. My career took a 6 year detour until I finally made my way to programming professionally. I wish I’d had your conviction - the jobs I did in between weren’t half as fun and my career started that much later.
- jasonkester 5y agoTo 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 had just seen graduate. It probably took them a few years to notice the tide coming back in. Incidentally, the jobs had all been “going to India” for a long time by then. I’ve personally heard about them going there for at least 30 years now and I don’t doubt they will continue to do so in the future. At this point I’m not overly convinced they will all make it.
- ggm 5y agoI started my CS degree in 79 and entered the workforce in 82 and at no time did anyone in the UK imply to me it was a shrinking field. I think this may be a niche view of the US education system, because I was working in UCL-CS in 87 and got no sense it was in contraction there, nor in Australia when I moved here 87-88 and in fact at no time in my personal experience, has CS or SW eng been in decline as a taught subject. Ok maybe 1-2 year windows of reduced entry requirements, but shortages of jobs? Nope.
- mikewarot 5y agoIn 1981, I knew for sure there was no money to be made as a programmer, even though it was what I really wanted to do. So I studied Electrical Engineering instead. College didn't work out, and I did a fair bit of programming, and some electronics repair/design work. Clearly I was wrong. 8)
- musesum 5y agoBy 2001, three companies I co-founded went under. One was going public in April 2000 (oops), plus a couple others failed after 911. I wound up living in my car and writing code in a cafe. There were quite a few of us. The owner was sympathetic. You could buy a tea and share a table for hours. Refills were free. One web developer said he was changing careers to house cleaning. Oddly, it was quite liberating.
- fukd 5y agoThats bad. Hope you are doing good now
- musesum 5y agoActually quite nice; still using some of that code.
- tluyben2 5y agoAh, the cycle of life. We incorporated in 2001 and grew fast (Deloitte fast 50 for 4 years in a row) picking the people and clients from the companies that did not survive the dotcom bust.
- shoto_io 5y ago“It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” Yogi Berra
- lordnacho 5y agoMy 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 at you that you slog through, so that you learn how to learn stuff. The best demonstration of this is in subjects that are scientific mathematical, because there's very deep trees of knowledge there that you have to trace, and there's relatively few ways to use common sense and cultural experience to answer questions. This is why there are so many devs with no "relevant" degree. If you can sort through the mess of learning a stack, you can do the job. If you need to know some particular CS thing, you will find it and learn it yourself. There's no magic dust in any class, it's all publicly known information that's been digested by many many people before us, and these days you can find umpteen explanations for just about anything online for free. The thing that sorts people is the ability to persevere through technical issues. You'll find a lot of people in this world are for some reason unable to deal with the mess. This is not a condemnation, I realise everyone has their own situation, economically and personally.
- fuzzy2 5y agoI 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.
- lordnacho 5y agoMaybe 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.
- smcameron 5y agoI started college in 1986, EE, but after a year switched to CS in 1987, graduated 1991. Around 1990 or so, I can remember walking around the halls of the main CS building on campus on the way to one of my classes, passing a door labeled "Hypertext Laboratory". I remember thinking, "Hypertext... pffft. That's never going anywhere."
- refulgentis 5y agoThe claims in this article, bluntly and simply, are not true: what is described as a 'fad' has grown into one of the hottest professional fields, for decades.
- amelius 5y agoI guess today students flee the field because of the image of ads, privacy infringements and fake news and dark patterns on social media.
- jamespitts 5y agoThere 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.
- chii 5y agoThe person you are talking about is following hype and trend, hoping to hit an easy career and ride the tide. But the issue with this is that by the time you hear or know about a trend, it has already started and probably well underway. Like trying to catch up to a wave on a surfboard, you could miss, or fall off as it crashes.
- AndyMcConachie 5y agoIn the movie The Karate Kid, 1984. The mother moves to California because there are no more computer jobs in New York. It's stated a few times in the movie that this is why they moved.
- isolli 5y agoTwo personal anecdotes: When I graduated in 1995, some of my friends were disappointed when they went into computer science for lack of a better option. By 1999, they were getting frantic calls from recruiters trying to outbid each other. In the mid-80s, I went to a job fair, and two jaded programmers told me that there was no future in computer science, everything was already done and invented, and the job was mostly boring maintenance. I sense a cycle...
- buzzert 5y agoRelated content, a slightly depressing video of some Finnish programmers talking about their work: https://youtu.be/AxSdWhkMB_A https://youtu.be/AxSdWhkMB_A
- Tepix 5y agoNice find from 1973! The second guy in the video is really chill, he is complaining about having little time to do actual work. You could have a similar interview in 2021.
- foxfired 5y agoIt was 2011, a childhood friend visited me after 10 years. We talk about the old days, we laugh, I even tease her husband sitting next to me, smiling politely. She excuses herself leaving the men alone to bond. "So, what do you do?" He asks after a long 5 second. "Oh, I'm a programmer." I say with pride. To be sure I add, "A computer programmer." I make it a habit to add this because regular people have a hard time understanding what we do as hackers. The man smirks. "Like, writing code right?" He asks. This is the first time I get this reaction. Usually, people are almost envious when I tell them what I do. They praise me and I act humble by belittling my profession just a bit. But not this man. This one is trying to hold his ribs together. "Yes, you know I accidentally fell into programming, I actually went to school to become an Electrical Engineer." I say, but as I'm watching his reaction, my voice starts to break. Not only is he not impressed, he feels sorry for me. Before I am done he bursts out laughing. "No, my friend, if you were chasing the future, you made a mistake." This was the first time I ever heard this. I'm a programmer, am I not writing the code that powers the future? "Nursing, my friend. Nursing. That's the future." He went on to explain why nursing was not only one of the most important jobs, but it was also one of the fastest growing. And then he told me something that I still can't believe I heard correctly. "Even jQuery is becoming irrelevant" The past few years, I've been working on incredible software. Some of it almost feels like magic. Distributed systems, embedded software, neural networks. But every once in a while, I remember his words. At the very least, they help me stay humble.
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- vmception 5y agoForget being humble. You aren’t a pro-athlete or an Olympian, you aren’t a rockstar, composer or a lean surfer that people fawn over. You have a contribution to society that provides for you, just say what that is and your area of competence. The humble approach offered you no utility at that point in time, when boisterous confidence would have.
- the_only_law 5y ago> Nursing, my friend. Nursing. That's the future." He went on to explain why nursing was not only one of the most important jobs, but it was also one of the fastest growing. And then he told me something that I still can't believe I heard correctly. Actually, I still see stuff like this these days, in regards to automation FUD. Something about the only jobs that will be left will be those that require human emotion and empathy.
- sbr464 5y agoI think traditional CS programs could take a page from what I believe is the most successful aspect of coding bootcamps; the inspiration/excitement/desire to learn etc. felt by a graduate in a very short period (weeks/months vs years+). It's not perfect, they are missing many fundamentals, but now the student can appreciate why those are needed and the drive to learn more grows naturally. I think other disciplines could benefit similarly, especially for students completely new to a field. Go through an intense/short program, then follow up with a more traditional, longer term program.
- dkdbejwi383 5y agoMaybe degree programs should start with a bootcamp, then a "real" project using those skills, then start with in-depth CS fundamentals so that students can start to unwrap the things they've learned, why things are done a certain why, explore problems they had with their post-bootcamp project, etc.
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- 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y agoAs hopefully many readers will realise, when it comes to computers and the internet, the "Optimists Archive" is orders of magnitude larger than and equally as amusing as the entire "Pessismists Archive" for all things. When the "fad" is also the means of publishing news of the "fad", it stands to reason the "news" will generally support the fad. The number of people who have and continue to use the internet to publish their "predictions for the future" is enormous. The number of accurate predictions is infinitesimally small.
- DonHopkins 5y ago>"They found that they had to take calculus" ...On that note: When I enrolled at the University of Maryland in 1985, it was still at the height of the fad, and the CS department actually had so many hopeful undergrads signing up to be CS majors that they had to filter them out and discourage them somehow. They came up with this idea they called "Programming Calculus" that they taught with this language called "CF Pascal" (which we called "Crucially Fucked Pascal") that was lobotomized so it was simple enough to write "correctness proofs" (FWTW). Hitting freshmen who have never programmed before with such a crucially fucked language, and then asking them to think about programming as calculus and write proofs that their programs are correct was an effective filtering technique! (From a document I don't have the URL for, describing Programming Calculus:) >Perhaps the most noticeable achievement in the Department's educational program was the restructuring of the first year of computer science courses. Unlike most other introductory courses which start by teaching a specific programming language, this first year is oriented around the calculus of programming. Concepts such as program correctness and formal verification are introduced, although at a simpler level, at the freshman level rather than at the advanced undergraduate or graduate level. The students write programs in a subset of Pascal, called CF-Pascal that includes character data and files only. "Advanced concepts", like integers and arithmetic, are delayed until the second semester. This new course was designed by Harlan Mills, aided by Victor Basili, John Gannon, Richard Hamlet, John Kohl and Ben Shneiderman. (From "Maturation of Computer Science Research and Education at the University of Maryland: Evolution of the Department of Computer Science from 1979 through 2006", describing CF Pascal:) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/277064236_Maturation_of_Computer_Science_Research_and_Education_at_the_University_of_Maryland_Evolution_of_the_Department_of_Computer_Science_from_1979_through_2006_Updated https://www.researchgate.net/publication/277064236_Maturatio... >Educational activities: The first year of Basili’s tenure as Department Chair was taken up with the problems of students and getting the University to agree to a restricted major for the Department. By the second year attention could be placed on other educational concerns. >CF-Pascal: As part of the plan for the restricted major, the freshman Computer Science courses were redesigned. For most of the 1970s, the SIMPL family of languages by Basili, was the basic programming model. SIMPL-T was used in the freshman programming course and a systems programming variant, SIMPL-XI by Dick Hamlet, was written for the PDP-11 minicomputer. >Spearheaded by Dr. Harlan Mills, Vic Basili, John Gannon, and Richard Hamlet identified a subset of Pascal called CF-Pascal. This was Pascal using only character and file data types, and essentially made programming in CF-Pascal equivalent to programming a Turing machine using denotational semantics as the programming model [Mills89]. This became the basis for Computer Science I – CMSC 112. In 1984 Marv Zelkowitz, as part of the IBM Fulcrum award (See Section 3.2), obtained a laboratory of 20 IBM PCs. A syntax directed editor was developed for CF-Pascal, called SUPPORT, and this environment was used in CMSC 112 during 1986-87 [Zelkowitz84]. CF-Pascal was used for about 6 years until the freshman course changed again in 1989.11 Pascal became the basic language, which later became C++ and finally Java as the freshman programming language. HCI researcher Ben Shneiderman did a study comparing the CF Pascal "SUPPORT" programming tools with a mainframe batch programming environment, and it turned out despite their predictions, SUPPORT users didn't receive statistically higher exam and programming project grades, and users preferred the mainframe batch system over SUPPORT. (From "Subjective user evaluation of CF PASCAL programming tools", describing the study comparing CF Pascal SUPPORT to a mainframe batch computing environment:) https://www.umiacs.umd.edu/publications/subjective-user-evaluation-cf-pascal-programming-tools https://www.umiacs.umd.edu/publications/subjective-user-eval... >Subjective user evaluation of CF PASCAL programming tools; Journal Articles; 1987; Chin JP, Norman KL, Shneiderman B; Department of Computer Science and Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory Working Paper >Abstract: This study investigated subjective evaluations of two programming environments: 1) SUPPORT, an interactive programming environment with a syntax directed editor on a personal computer and 2) a batch run environment on a large mainframe computer. Participants were students in a 15 week introductory computer science course. In Part 1, one group of 128 first used SUPPORT, while another group of 85 programmed on a mainframe environment. After 6 weeks they were given an evaluative questionnaire and then switched programming environments. In Part 2, 68 used SUPPORT and 60 used the mainframe. At the twelfth week of the course, they were given two questionnaires, one evaluating the environment they had used in the last 6 weeks and one comparing both enviro nments. A measure of programming performance (exam and programming project grades) was also collected. SUPPORT was predicted to reduce the burden of remembering syntactic details resulting in better performance and higher subjective evaluations. Unexpectedly, the SUPPORT users did not earn statistically significantly higher grades. Furthermore, participants expressed a preference for the mainframe over SUPPORT. Specific items on the questionnaires were used to diagnose the strengths and weaknesses of each environment. Designers of syntax directed editors should focus on reducing the syntactic burden not only in programming , but also in the user interface of these tools. So in the end, CF Pascal achieved its lofty goal of driving away more prospective CS majors than a mainframe batch computing environment could.
- graycat 5y ago1987? How could the poor students have known? Gee, 1987, I was at IBM's Watson lab as a researcher in their effort at the time in artificial intelligence. So, at the lab we had an ambitious computer services group, and they had for our general use six mainframes, I believe all single processor machines, running the operating system software Virtual Machine/Conversational Monitor System (VM/CMS). For access from home, I had a PC/XT with some special software to use a standard dial-up land line telephone line to access the mainframes. As I recall, the data rate was about 30 characters per second. So, the mainframes were likely water cooled. As I recall, the last of the water cooled mainframes had a clock speed of 153 MHz. In contrast, the last desktop I plugged together has an AMD (American Micro Devices) processor, FX-8350. It has 64 bit addressing and 8 cores. The standard clock speed is 4.0 GHz. To buy the processor, at Amazon I paid their usual price, quantity 1, ~$100. Tiny little thing; came in a tiny little box. The processor has been fine: It is the basis of my startup. So, let's compare, counting clock ticks: The 6 mainframes had best I can guess at most in total 6 * 153 = 918 million ticks per second. The AMD has 8 * 4.0 * 1,000 = 32,000 million ticks per second. Then we can take the ratio (8 * 4.0 * 1,000) / (6 * 153) = 34.858,387,799,6 Call it 35. Soooo, counting clock ticks my desktop with the $100 processor from the tiny box is 35 times faster than all six of those mainframes combined. With speculative execution, out of order execution, pipelining, etc., there is on average some number of instructions per clock tick. So, first cut here, and maybe a gift to the IBM mainframes, for the two processors count the average number of instructions per clock tick as the same. So, this fantastic, we're talking not just world class but unique in civilization class, improvement in price/performance, is much of what enabled Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, AMD, TSMC (Taiwan Semi-Conductor Manufacturing Corporation), smart phones, solid state disks, and essentially all of the Internet. E.g., for communications data rates for connect from home, now with 1 Gbps Internet versus then, 1987, 300 bps, ..., to the 56 Kbps of V.90 of 1995. So, how the heck in 1987 was a computer science student or early career person to anticipate and actually believe in this fantastic, all-time unique step up in price/performance of computing and communications along with associated infrastructure? This progress blows away wood, wheels, stone, copper, iron, steel, steam, electricity, and broadcast radio and TV. Now, what are we going to do with this suddenly cheap, powerful computing, communications, and infrastructure?
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- beyondcompute 5y agoThat’s when the smart people exited the field. Because they felt that computers will soon stop being fun (that’s what happened in the early nineties indeed). And now we are stuck in this bells-and-whistles industry (software and web). While real engineers and scientists are focused on the fields that matter, like transportation, space exploration, robotics, construction, food production, medicine…
- janmo 5y agoWell it depends. There is and there will always be demand for "talented developers". But I remember at University there were students who after years of studying were not able to write a simple program or app. Later they became managers or technicians. But it looks like all of them found some kind of job.
- phendrenad2 5y agoThere were bound to be some big spikes at the beginning. But software salaries have plateaued into an equilibrium finally, I don't think we'll see anything like that in the future.
- rsynnott 5y agoThis happens from time to time. There were about 60 people in my starting year of CS in 2003 (~30 completed); two years previously there'd been about 200.
- mkl95 5y agoI made the mistake of studying Physics in uni because there wasn't any decent CS uni near my town. After interacting for a while with the bitter, skint postgraduate students that hung out in the labs, I dropped out, and I've been making software for a living ever since. Once in a while I wonder if those lab guys are already approaching minimum wage.
- iAm25626 5y ago"Find work that feels like play" apply here. CS/Engineering problem are not easy but always feel like game to me. Chasing fad(picking major)/money to me is like cart pulling the horse. I get it but not for me.
- ryloric 5y agoWe humans don't know shit about making decisions about the future do we, and often just are like logs floating around in a sea of randomness.
- rekabis 5y agoAnd here I’m looking at those restaurant prices with envy.