5 ms·

I've had this kind of argument presented to me every few years since the 1990s. It was probably happening for the forty years before that. Soon we'll need "real

I've had this kind of argument presented to me every few years since the 1990s. It was probably happening for the forty years before that. Soon we'll need "real engineers" - and these fly by night part timers who don't have a "proper" background in computing are doomed! DOOOMED I SAY!!!! Tosh. I'm a guy who has got a subject specific degree - more than twenty years ago now (1st in Computing and Artificial Intelligence for those who care). I was selling software before that, and have spent most of the time since in industry. What have I noticed since then? Amount I've actually used the "hard" CS stuff I learned there - close to zero. Correlation between "being good at math" and being a successful developer - basically zero. Correlation between having a degree and being a successful developer, after the first few years in industry, basically zero. I don't see that magically being different in the next four years. (Curiously the "being good a math" thing seems to be something US centric. I've not noticed the same focus on that with folk in the UK or elsewhere in Europe). The space that developers get to play in has got larger and larger over the last 30 years. I don't see that changing. Quite the opposite in fact. Sure some of that is going to be in areas that really need some hard-core math or engineering skills. Those jobs are out there now (embedded development is exploding again, big data has been around for years, the clever end of game development). I'm sure they'll be more in the future. But there are also many, many jobs out there that don't. Many, many jobs that involve developers being good generalists, or having cross-over with UX and design, or having a decent understanding of economics, or understanding big-money. I'm sure they'll be more of those in the future too. One thing we're really excellent at is wrapping up complicated stuff in abstractions that are stupidly easy to use. We're excellent at de-skilling our own job. And every generation whines that the previous one can't build their own computer / write microcode / write assembler / manage with less than 1k RAM / cope without a visual editor / manage their own memory / build their own OS / write their own application stack / whatever. Yet people somehow carry on building new and neat things. If you're a hard-core CS/algorithms person - go for it. They'll be lots of work for you. If you're not? Go find another niche. There are many, many out there. Be a good developer. Have fun. Make neat things. And thus ends this particular Grumpy Old Man's Saturday Rant :-)

StCroix 15y ago
Whoah, so you're saying us younger hackers DON'T have to learn how to write machine code and program C-64's to have any cred around here? Well... My life has been flip-turned upside down. (And I'd like to take a minute so sit right there, I'll tell you how I became the prince of a town called Bellaire)
- StCroix 15y ago
  C'mon you old motherfuckers, keep voting me down, that's right.
  - Karunamon 15y ago
    I think you meant to post this on 4chan, not HN.
SomeCallMeTim 15y ago
To follow up with a Grumpy Old Man Postscript: Reading Commications of the ACM (most recently, [1]), there's been an ongoing problem getting enough people into computer science programs (in large part because of the broad fears of "outsourcing"), and the projections are that EVEN MORE graduates will be needed through 2020. [2] So yes, many times yes: This article is completely and totally wrong. And as adrianhoward says, it's the same sentiment that my parents chided me with back in the 90s, and that I hear all the time from people who imagine that the silver bullet is just around the corner that will make it so that we need fewer rather than more programmers. (FWIW: My degree is in "Cognitive Science", the "other CS", and I haven't had problems getting jobs when I've wanted one.) And as an aside, if you look at the graph with yellow and brown bars about 2/3 of the way down [2], getting a job where math is the primary required skill looks like a slog (looks like about 2x as many math grads as math jobs), while in order to hire people AT ALL, companies are going to have to ignore whether they have a computer science degree, because there are nearly 3.5x as many jobs in CS-related fields as there are graduates in CS. Based on these numbers it looks almost inevitable that we'll see echos of the "You've put together a web page? By yourself! You're hired!" dot com boom, just because it will be so hard to hire anyone at all. So, while the story was cute, its premise is FUD that has a chance of scaring people away from CS at precisely the time that we need more people in CS. OK, end rant. [1] http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/148620-hot-job-market-for-computer-science-graduates/fulltext http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/148620-hot-job-market-fo... [2] http://cs.calvin.edu/p/ComputingCareersMarket http://cs.calvin.edu/p/ComputingCareersMarket [edit: typo]

StCroix 15y ago

Whoah, so you're saying us younger hackers DON'T have to learn how to write machine code and program C-64's to have any cred around here? Well... My life has been flip-turned upside down. (And I'd like to take a minute so sit right there, I'll tell you how I became the prince of a town called Bellaire)

StCroix 15y ago
C'mon you old motherfuckers, keep voting me down, that's right.
- Karunamon 15y ago
  I think you meant to post this on 4chan, not HN.

SomeCallMeTim 15y ago

To follow up with a Grumpy Old Man Postscript: Reading Commications of the ACM (most recently, [1]), there's been an ongoing problem getting enough people into computer science programs (in large part because of the broad fears of "outsourcing"), and the projections are that EVEN MORE graduates will be needed through 2020. [2] So yes, many times yes: This article is completely and totally wrong. And as adrianhoward says, it's the same sentiment that my parents chided me with back in the 90s, and that I hear all the time from people who imagine that the silver bullet is just around the corner that will make it so that we need fewer rather than more programmers. (FWIW: My degree is in "Cognitive Science", the "other CS", and I haven't had problems getting jobs when I've wanted one.) And as an aside, if you look at the graph with yellow and brown bars about 2/3 of the way down [2], getting a job where math is the primary required skill looks like a slog (looks like about 2x as many math grads as math jobs), while in order to hire people AT ALL, companies are going to have to ignore whether they have a computer science degree, because there are nearly 3.5x as many jobs in CS-related fields as there are graduates in CS. Based on these numbers it looks almost inevitable that we'll see echos of the "You've put together a web page? By yourself! You're hired!" dot com boom, just because it will be so hard to hire anyone at all. So, while the story was cute, its premise is FUD that has a chance of scaring people away from CS at precisely the time that we need more people in CS. OK, end rant. [1] http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/148620-hot-job-market-for-computer-science-graduates/fulltext http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/148620-hot-job-market-fo... [2] http://cs.calvin.edu/p/ComputingCareersMarket http://cs.calvin.edu/p/ComputingCareersMarket [edit: typo]