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CS professor with 15 years experience. The massive boom in computer science enrollment over the last 20 years has been driven mostly by people chasing tech sal

CS professor with 15 years experience. The massive boom in computer science enrollment over the last 20 years has been driven mostly by people chasing tech salaries, not by any real interest in computing itself. These students often show up completely unprepared for how difficult CS actually is, and universities have responded by dumbing down their programs to keep everyone happy and enrolled. If this weeds out the people who are just there for the paychecks, it might actually be a relief to get back to teaching students who genuinely want to learn about computing.

ramesh31 1y ago
Thank you for saying this because it feels like these people entering the industry in such numbers over the 2010s completely killed what made this job fun in the first place. I call them "ticket completers". Sure they can mechanically perform the minimum requirements of the job, but there is zero interest at all in what is actually being done; just following PM directions to the letter with no further thought. The whole spirit of innovation and curiosity and discovery has been lost, replaced by lifestyle seekers who look at you like an insane person when trying to talk about software in the abstract (ha!). The hackers and nerds will be just fine. They are like gold when we find them now. But if this makes CS "uncool" again, I am all for it.
- dpflan 1y ago
  > The hackers and nerds will be just fine. They are like gold when we find them now. But if this makes CS "uncool" again, I am all for it. Think about how AI can help students cheat nowadays. You could still cheat previously, but now a CS-degree seeker can have an AI do the entirety of school work for them (with exception of say pen-and-paper tests). Imagine how the quality of new graduates drops with regard to the understanding and abilities you highlight as crucial to being effective in software, and how those that do understand are even more valuable relatively, but perhaps harder to find in the noise.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - giantg2 1y ago
    When most jobs just want you to be a ticket completer, the cheaters will do just fine if they can do it faster. The rest of use will be considered slow and discarded. It's happening to me.
    - dpflan 1y ago
      Yes, they can be ticket punchers more easily, kind of trained to do that. But there are certainly levels of achievement that are not as possible with such a foundation that lacks grounding and true understanding. Do you mind elaborating here on what is happening to you? It seems worthwhile information to add to the discussions ongoing for this post.
      - giantg2 1y ago
        The short of it is that the team just wants high throughput but doesn't care about improving the system health or process efficiency. I tend to consider multiple aspects of the work including those areas. But if you just want someone to turn out tickets, I tend to be slower unless the task is simple or repetitive. I have a disability and graying hair, so my options are limited. I'm going to fail my PIP later this month and I'll probably end up working at Walmart.
        dpflan 1y ago
        Hm, I see. Do you use a coding assistant? Do you see value in keeping up or your morale is diminishing? Can you change teams or positions or focus?
        giantg2 1y ago
        I use Copilot, but it isn't that helpful. There is no morale - I'm so burnt out I fantasize about getting hit by a bus. No team will touch me on a PIP.
- dinetrimr 1y ago
  Hackers could like hacking outside their job for hobby but find job itself soul crushing. More like hackers and nerds that can withstand the corporate demand to grind will be left, rest get filtered. Plenty of talented people can be left outside the cog machine but cook up apps nobody but they care about
- giantg2 1y ago
  "The hackers and nerds will be just fine. They are like gold when we find them now." This is not at all my experience. One of the problems I face is many of those PMs and companies in general want mindless ticket completers. My current job just wants us to grind through the Jira backlog. They have no interest in anything else and crush it from your will too.
dpflan 1y ago
Thanks for sharing. Is this similar to what was attracting students to medicine/doctor (guaranteed position with high salary)? But the med-school-to-full-time-physician pipeline is long and can weed out. CS is a difficult subject, certain ways of thinking are difficult but certainly can be learned, like recursive thinking. Did colleges expand their computer science departments or even just create them to meet the demand for the degree? The pipeline to possible employment with a CS degree is quite short, doesn't require residency and board-certification so it's a quicker route to employment, but then you are competing with peers with stronger backgrounds and educations and seasoned professionals for the same positions.
- vintermann 1y ago
  Salary isn't traditionally what motivates people to study medicine. It's prestige. The difficulty is part of the prestige, which is probably why they still do things like memorize long lists of cranial nerve names. I haven't heard that they have a problem with dropout rates. A good CS education only gives you prestige with fellow nerds.
  - dpflan 1y ago
    Yes, prestige, perception of self by others, but certainly salary and job guarantee are attractors to medicine. First hand anecdata from educators and doctors alike supports this.
  - km144 1y ago
    I actually think prestige is a contributing factor for CS as well. People assume you must be smart to be a software engineer, and FAANG companies are prestigious to normal people because they have name recognition. Definitely not on the same level as a Doctor/Surgeon/Lawyer or whatever but certainly could be more than a typical 4-year degree will get you. And I suppose there's also the fact that those companies were viewed very differently 10-15 years ago and now there is a lot more cynicism about big tech in general.
    - dpflan 1y ago
msgodel 1y ago
This is how I've been feeling through the whole situation. I got my current job at the bottom of the last slump the other year so it doesn't seem to be affecting me. Still I've been careful to set my life up so I could go many years without employment if I had to. It's hard to trust the rest of the economy in general.
Maro 1y ago
I started my degree in 1999, and already then this was already a factor. I hope more articles like this are published, and people who aren't really interested in computing stop choosing this path.
paxys 1y ago
Even 20 years ago back when I was in college you had a sizable portion of kids who came in to study computer science thinking it would be fun and games. They were then made to study formal logic in their first semester and debug segfaults in gdb in the next, and by the end of the first year pretty much all of them had switched majors. Anecdotally I've heard that very few CS programs even use C++ anymore, and schools now favor Python because students find it more accessible.
- sofixa 1y ago
  While C++ is unquestionably still widely used, outside of legacy and some niches (like embedded) it's not in the top 3 "best" choices. Why teach a more complicated language with a poorer ecosystem and toolchain than is actually needed? I think there's still value in starting with C and C++, to see where it's coming from and see how much tooling and DX has improved, but I can't really blame courses jumping directly to the more useful things.
  - msgodel 1y ago
    Maybe it's selection bias because I'm an above average C++ programmer but all three large tech companies I've worked at used C++ very heavily.
    - giantg2 1y ago
      The first real language I learned was C++ and I was decent at it (best in class but mostly stuck with console based programs, nothing advanced like GUIs that year). I have never used it at work. If you look at job boards, it's overwhelmingly stuff like Java, JS/TS frameworks, etc. Why teach it when it seems like less than 10% of postings are looking for it? Might as well teach other languages and just learn it if you need it.
      - dagw 1y ago
        Why teach it when it seems like less than 10% of postings are looking for it? And we're back to the discussion of what is the point of a University CS education. I would argue that learning something like C++ is important for the same reason something like Lisp or Haskell is important. Not because it will necessarily help you get a job, but because it introduces you to new concepts and a new way of thinking about programming and computation that will be useful no matter what language you end up programming in for a living.
giantg2 1y ago
"If this weeds out the people who are just there for the paychecks, it might actually be a relief to get back to teaching students who genuinely want to learn about computing." It's not going to work that way. I was genuinely interested and took many high level electives. I felt the program was very good 15 years ago at the school I attended. I also got an MSIS at a different school, but feel that one was not any more advanced than BS, just a faster pace and weirdly less coding. I did well for years at my job. Now it looks like I might lose my job and probably won't get another IT one. I will probably end up working at Walmart or something.
dagw 1y ago
I think CS departments are at least partially responsible for this development. They know that most of the students applying care nothing about Computer Science, have no interest in Computer Science and will never learn Computer Science, yet they keep accepting (and graduating) them. If CS departments actually wanted to teach CS, then they would advocate for setting up a new series of departments/degrees with names like Software Development and Engineering or Application Design and UX, and send most of the students there. Then those who want to learn/teach Computer Science can learn/teach Computer Science without having to deal with a classroom full of people who really don't want to be there.
- _aavaa_ 1y ago
  University departments do not always have the kind of autonomy your post implies. It is common for the university’s central administration to dictate how many students they must let it, how much money they get per student, and hence how many they can fail without going into the red.
  - pintxo 1y ago
    What could possibly go wrong making education a for-profit business? /s
    - _aavaa_ 1y ago
      None of this has to be for-profit. It just requires the university administration to put its wants, priorities, and head count (!) above the interests of the individual departments and of the students. Making the whole thing a non-profit or a charity won’t solve this.
- paxys 1y ago
  When education becomes a business students become your customers. And the last thing you want to do is piss off your customers by failing them.
  - dagw 1y ago
roxolotl 1y ago
About 15 years ago when I started my degree there were both the “I want a good job” people and another crowd that I’d describe as having followed a thought process of “I like video games; I want to make video games; I should study comp sci”. At that time at least I think the video game crowd was even less equipped than the job crowd. Not to disparage video games, they are a majority of my free time, but those who were joining the field to _have fun_ are going to have an even harder time than those looking for work.
marklubi 1y ago
Having interviewed a number of graduates from code camps, they're definitely just chasing the salary. Most of them have no actual passion for computing, their scope of knowledge is superficial, and they're asking for six-figure salaries out of the gate. I had a relatively simple coding assignment (shouldn't take more than 15 minutes) that I would use to weed out those that were just copying and pasting sample code. It required a very large number of values and added an additional profiling step to it. The sample code wasn't performant with a very large number of values, and was painfully slow to use unless you made minor adjustments to a few things.
- rwmj 1y ago
  Back when we used to interview in person, we used to have a computer and screen in the office running Linux. The number of people who couldn't handle a terminal even to type "ls" was either remarkable or shocking depending on your point of view. We're talking about people who claimed years of Linux experience, applying for Linux programming and administration jobs.
enum 1y ago
Lots of discussion about choice of programming language in the comments below. - In principle, it should not matter at all, but there are practical reasons why one PL may be better than another in a particular school or context. - But, all this "choice of PL" discussion is really a discussion about CS1. A CS degree has at least seven other courses -- assuming 1 CS course per semester -- and in practice many more than that. So, if you're going to ask questions about CS1, the question to ask is, "Does CS1 setup students to succeed in the advanced courses?" Classically, these were courses in compilers, operating systems, networking, and so on. These days, you can add distributed computing, machine learning, etc. (but don't subtract the classics).
km144 1y ago
I'd argue it is actually more of a broad trend i.e. the boom in computer science enrollment over the last 20 years has been driven mostly by people chasing a better return on investment in the increasing cost of the average four-year degree, and software pays better than the average four-year degree. I do think that college being cheaper on average would help at least somewhat with CS being such a popular major.
sys_64738 1y ago
There really is too much hand holding of university students nowadays. I don't think degrees are really equivalent to what they were thirty years ago. Back then the university was about weeding out the wasters and lazy folk who didn't study. College courses are meant to be hard for a reason. Don't get me started with that extra credit crap.

ramesh31 1y ago

Thank you for saying this because it feels like these people entering the industry in such numbers over the 2010s completely killed what made this job fun in the first place. I call them "ticket completers". Sure they can mechanically perform the minimum requirements of the job, but there is zero interest at all in what is actually being done; just following PM directions to the letter with no further thought. The whole spirit of innovation and curiosity and discovery has been lost, replaced by lifestyle seekers who look at you like an insane person when trying to talk about software in the abstract (ha!). The hackers and nerds will be just fine. They are like gold when we find them now. But if this makes CS "uncool" again, I am all for it.

dpflan 1y ago
> The hackers and nerds will be just fine. They are like gold when we find them now. But if this makes CS "uncool" again, I am all for it. Think about how AI can help students cheat nowadays. You could still cheat previously, but now a CS-degree seeker can have an AI do the entirety of school work for them (with exception of say pen-and-paper tests). Imagine how the quality of new graduates drops with regard to the understanding and abilities you highlight as crucial to being effective in software, and how those that do understand are even more valuable relatively, but perhaps harder to find in the noise.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- giantg2 1y ago
  When most jobs just want you to be a ticket completer, the cheaters will do just fine if they can do it faster. The rest of use will be considered slow and discarded. It's happening to me.
  - dpflan 1y ago
    Yes, they can be ticket punchers more easily, kind of trained to do that. But there are certainly levels of achievement that are not as possible with such a foundation that lacks grounding and true understanding. Do you mind elaborating here on what is happening to you? It seems worthwhile information to add to the discussions ongoing for this post.
    - giantg2 1y ago
      The short of it is that the team just wants high throughput but doesn't care about improving the system health or process efficiency. I tend to consider multiple aspects of the work including those areas. But if you just want someone to turn out tickets, I tend to be slower unless the task is simple or repetitive. I have a disability and graying hair, so my options are limited. I'm going to fail my PIP later this month and I'll probably end up working at Walmart.
      - dpflan 1y ago
        Hm, I see. Do you use a coding assistant? Do you see value in keeping up or your morale is diminishing? Can you change teams or positions or focus?
        giantg2 1y ago
        I use Copilot, but it isn't that helpful. There is no morale - I'm so burnt out I fantasize about getting hit by a bus. No team will touch me on a PIP.
dinetrimr 1y ago
Hackers could like hacking outside their job for hobby but find job itself soul crushing. More like hackers and nerds that can withstand the corporate demand to grind will be left, rest get filtered. Plenty of talented people can be left outside the cog machine but cook up apps nobody but they care about
giantg2 1y ago
"The hackers and nerds will be just fine. They are like gold when we find them now." This is not at all my experience. One of the problems I face is many of those PMs and companies in general want mindless ticket completers. My current job just wants us to grind through the Jira backlog. They have no interest in anything else and crush it from your will too.

dpflan 1y ago

Thanks for sharing. Is this similar to what was attracting students to medicine/doctor (guaranteed position with high salary)? But the med-school-to-full-time-physician pipeline is long and can weed out. CS is a difficult subject, certain ways of thinking are difficult but certainly can be learned, like recursive thinking. Did colleges expand their computer science departments or even just create them to meet the demand for the degree? The pipeline to possible employment with a CS degree is quite short, doesn't require residency and board-certification so it's a quicker route to employment, but then you are competing with peers with stronger backgrounds and educations and seasoned professionals for the same positions.

vintermann 1y ago
Salary isn't traditionally what motivates people to study medicine. It's prestige. The difficulty is part of the prestige, which is probably why they still do things like memorize long lists of cranial nerve names. I haven't heard that they have a problem with dropout rates. A good CS education only gives you prestige with fellow nerds.
- dpflan 1y ago
  Yes, prestige, perception of self by others, but certainly salary and job guarantee are attractors to medicine. First hand anecdata from educators and doctors alike supports this.
- km144 1y ago
  I actually think prestige is a contributing factor for CS as well. People assume you must be smart to be a software engineer, and FAANG companies are prestigious to normal people because they have name recognition. Definitely not on the same level as a Doctor/Surgeon/Lawyer or whatever but certainly could be more than a typical 4-year degree will get you. And I suppose there's also the fact that those companies were viewed very differently 10-15 years ago and now there is a lot more cynicism about big tech in general.
  - dpflan 1y ago

msgodel 1y ago

This is how I've been feeling through the whole situation. I got my current job at the bottom of the last slump the other year so it doesn't seem to be affecting me. Still I've been careful to set my life up so I could go many years without employment if I had to. It's hard to trust the rest of the economy in general.

Maro 1y ago

I started my degree in 1999, and already then this was already a factor. I hope more articles like this are published, and people who aren't really interested in computing stop choosing this path.

paxys 1y ago

Even 20 years ago back when I was in college you had a sizable portion of kids who came in to study computer science thinking it would be fun and games. They were then made to study formal logic in their first semester and debug segfaults in gdb in the next, and by the end of the first year pretty much all of them had switched majors. Anecdotally I've heard that very few CS programs even use C++ anymore, and schools now favor Python because students find it more accessible.

sofixa 1y ago
While C++ is unquestionably still widely used, outside of legacy and some niches (like embedded) it's not in the top 3 "best" choices. Why teach a more complicated language with a poorer ecosystem and toolchain than is actually needed? I think there's still value in starting with C and C++, to see where it's coming from and see how much tooling and DX has improved, but I can't really blame courses jumping directly to the more useful things.
- msgodel 1y ago
  Maybe it's selection bias because I'm an above average C++ programmer but all three large tech companies I've worked at used C++ very heavily.
  - giantg2 1y ago
    The first real language I learned was C++ and I was decent at it (best in class but mostly stuck with console based programs, nothing advanced like GUIs that year). I have never used it at work. If you look at job boards, it's overwhelmingly stuff like Java, JS/TS frameworks, etc. Why teach it when it seems like less than 10% of postings are looking for it? Might as well teach other languages and just learn it if you need it.
    - dagw 1y ago
      Why teach it when it seems like less than 10% of postings are looking for it? And we're back to the discussion of what is the point of a University CS education. I would argue that learning something like C++ is important for the same reason something like Lisp or Haskell is important. Not because it will necessarily help you get a job, but because it introduces you to new concepts and a new way of thinking about programming and computation that will be useful no matter what language you end up programming in for a living.

giantg2 1y ago

"If this weeds out the people who are just there for the paychecks, it might actually be a relief to get back to teaching students who genuinely want to learn about computing." It's not going to work that way. I was genuinely interested and took many high level electives. I felt the program was very good 15 years ago at the school I attended. I also got an MSIS at a different school, but feel that one was not any more advanced than BS, just a faster pace and weirdly less coding. I did well for years at my job. Now it looks like I might lose my job and probably won't get another IT one. I will probably end up working at Walmart or something.

dagw 1y ago

I think CS departments are at least partially responsible for this development. They know that most of the students applying care nothing about Computer Science, have no interest in Computer Science and will never learn Computer Science, yet they keep accepting (and graduating) them. If CS departments actually wanted to teach CS, then they would advocate for setting up a new series of departments/degrees with names like Software Development and Engineering or Application Design and UX, and send most of the students there. Then those who want to learn/teach Computer Science can learn/teach Computer Science without having to deal with a classroom full of people who really don't want to be there.

_aavaa_ 1y ago
University departments do not always have the kind of autonomy your post implies. It is common for the university’s central administration to dictate how many students they must let it, how much money they get per student, and hence how many they can fail without going into the red.
- pintxo 1y ago
  What could possibly go wrong making education a for-profit business? /s
  - _aavaa_ 1y ago
    None of this has to be for-profit. It just requires the university administration to put its wants, priorities, and head count (!) above the interests of the individual departments and of the students. Making the whole thing a non-profit or a charity won’t solve this.
paxys 1y ago
When education becomes a business students become your customers. And the last thing you want to do is piss off your customers by failing them.
- dagw 1y ago

roxolotl 1y ago

About 15 years ago when I started my degree there were both the “I want a good job” people and another crowd that I’d describe as having followed a thought process of “I like video games; I want to make video games; I should study comp sci”. At that time at least I think the video game crowd was even less equipped than the job crowd. Not to disparage video games, they are a majority of my free time, but those who were joining the field to _have fun_ are going to have an even harder time than those looking for work.

marklubi 1y ago

Having interviewed a number of graduates from code camps, they're definitely just chasing the salary. Most of them have no actual passion for computing, their scope of knowledge is superficial, and they're asking for six-figure salaries out of the gate. I had a relatively simple coding assignment (shouldn't take more than 15 minutes) that I would use to weed out those that were just copying and pasting sample code. It required a very large number of values and added an additional profiling step to it. The sample code wasn't performant with a very large number of values, and was painfully slow to use unless you made minor adjustments to a few things.

rwmj 1y ago
Back when we used to interview in person, we used to have a computer and screen in the office running Linux. The number of people who couldn't handle a terminal even to type "ls" was either remarkable or shocking depending on your point of view. We're talking about people who claimed years of Linux experience, applying for Linux programming and administration jobs.

enum 1y ago

Lots of discussion about choice of programming language in the comments below. - In principle, it should not matter at all, but there are practical reasons why one PL may be better than another in a particular school or context. - But, all this "choice of PL" discussion is really a discussion about CS1. A CS degree has at least seven other courses -- assuming 1 CS course per semester -- and in practice many more than that. So, if you're going to ask questions about CS1, the question to ask is, "Does CS1 setup students to succeed in the advanced courses?" Classically, these were courses in compilers, operating systems, networking, and so on. These days, you can add distributed computing, machine learning, etc. (but don't subtract the classics).

km144 1y ago

I'd argue it is actually more of a broad trend i.e. the boom in computer science enrollment over the last 20 years has been driven mostly by people chasing a better return on investment in the increasing cost of the average four-year degree, and software pays better than the average four-year degree. I do think that college being cheaper on average would help at least somewhat with CS being such a popular major.

sys_64738 1y ago

There really is too much hand holding of university students nowadays. I don't think degrees are really equivalent to what they were thirty years ago. Back then the university was about weeding out the wasters and lazy folk who didn't study. College courses are meant to be hard for a reason. Don't get me started with that extra credit crap.