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Entered college in 2001 just as the dot-com bubble was bursting. Freshman year graduating seniors were still pretty optimistic. Sophomore year I declared as a
by nostrademons 5y ago
Entered college in 2001 just as the dot-com bubble was bursting. Freshman year graduating seniors were still pretty optimistic. Sophomore year I declared as a physics major, despite having worked at a dot-com and enjoying programming for fun, as a bunch of family friends started floating "Why would you go into software when all the jobs are being outsourced to India anyway?" Junior year I knew that I liked programming more than physics, but saying I wanted to go into software was still a dicey conversation to bring up. Senior year Facebook & YouTube came out, I switched to a CS major, and I started getting more "Oh, that's a lucrative career, you'll do fine" from older people.
For an older perspective, my father-in-law was an EE in Silicon Valley through the 80s and 90s. He said that the period from 1989-1994 were dark days - the job market was stagnant, nobody was really getting rich, housing prices in Silicon Valley were going down. If people were saying it in 1987 they were a little prescient, but there was definitely a mood in the early 90s that PCs were a fad that was over and the Next Big Thing would be some other form of tech.
- CoolGuySteve 5y agoMy uncle dropped out of Waterloo in the early 70s because everyone figured there weren't enough computers for computer science to be useful. Like Professor Frink said: "I predict that within 10 years, computers will be twice as powerful, ten thousand times larger, and so expensive that only the 5 richest kings of Europe will own them" I entered Waterloo in 2002 and I took "Computer Science for Business" where a confidently incorrect lady repeatedly told us all our jobs would be outsourced to India so we should all be managers instead. 20 years later and that person was the worst fucking professor I ever had. The only reason I knew she was full of shit was because I was a second generation 'good at math class' person. It doesn't matter where you live or what non-logarithmic things cost, dialectical materialism is real.
- ggm 5y ago> It doesn't matter where you live, dialectical materialism is real. I'm going to take this as a positive comment that scientific evidence based theories of the world generally work out correct: You were right to ignore the fantasists. If you meant it some other way, do please elucidate
- drzaiusapelord 5y agobtw 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)
- dr_dshiv 5y agoIronically, that's about how many major cloud providers exist (AWS, MS, Google,...)
- pavlov 5y agoAnd 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 5y ago[deleted]
- Dylan16807 5y agoSure, if you ignore the issue of how the user accesses them. Even if you pretend the user has a dumb terminal, that's 5 computers that can each serve a hundred million users at once. Very very different from batch processing. Also the original quote was about preorders for a single model in the united states.
- kortilla 5y agoThat’s a pretty ridiculous stretch given that I have more than 5 computers in my home that all work without talking to any of those FAANG datacenters.
- raverbashing 5y agoPeople who thought jobs would go to India probably never did anything (or managed any work) that couldn't be outsourced there, hence why they thought this would happen in 100% of cases.
- 988747 5y ago>> all our jobs would be outsourced to India I guess now, with arrival of Github Copilot the jobs outsourced to India will simply vanish.
- pydry 5y agoThe irony is that a lot of those jobs did get outsourced to India which restricted the supply senior developers who can now charge a premium.