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> the density of Zuckerbergs would be a lot lower. They'd still be there, but harder to find. Interestingly, he enrolled in CS at a time it was believed to be
by 908B64B197 3y ago
> the density of Zuckerbergs would be a lot lower. They'd still be there, but harder to find.
Interestingly, he enrolled in CS at a time it was believed to be a dead career, with offshoring replacing expensive American engineers.
- dragonwriter 3y ago> Interestingly, he enrolled in CS at a time it was believed to be a dead career Believed by whom? Because AFAIR this was never either the general public sentiment or consistent with BLS projections across the fields that CS feeds into.
- 908B64B197 3y ago> this was never either the general public sentiment Post dotcom crash in the early 00's? Everyone was saying this was a dead market. Cost-cutting was everywhere.
- zorked 3y agoNot sure of what the downvote is about because this is an accurate representation of the post-dotcom time. Enrollments in CS went down, programmers would be offshored to India, nobody wanted to be in tech anymore, unemployment was high. Hard to belive now but people enrolling in CS at this time were mocked and ridiculed.
- bcrosby95 3y agoYep. I decided upon my major in a similar time period. People thought I was stupid, and my advisor advised me against it. There was a lot of doom and gloom on the internet - way more than any downturn since then. Way more than what you see about ChatGPT replacing programmers. The options I was weighing were philosophy, math, or CS. I chose CS because I liked building things. I figured I could at least make minimum wage. If it turned out so terrible I could just go back to school for something else. Much to my relief, my first job out of college paid me $50k.
- Mezzie 3y agoYup. I went off to college right after this and was from a poorer family and that's one reason I opted not to go into CS as a degree despite over a decade of programming/web experience. It wasn't seen as a stable career path and the tech sector had a reputation as a bubble hype machine. The hilarity is that I went into Linguistics instead, and it turns out that in 2023 that is actually very helpful... I'm not the only one either.
- june_twenty 3y agoI was being told that in 2005/2006. Lucky for me I didn't care.. I just wanted to study something to do with computers rather than biology or physics.
- themodelplumber 3y agoIIRC this was far from a uniform opinion, because CS feeds careers in so many areas in and out of tech. I do remember it being a big concern on the part of 9-to-5 coders at large corporations.