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Didn't this also happen in the mid-to-late '90s, with the first dot-com boom? I mean, I don't think that the proportion of CS majors dropped precipitously afte
by lsc 12y ago
Didn't this also happen in the mid-to-late '90s, with the first dot-com boom? I mean, I don't think that the proportion of CS majors dropped precipitously after the crash, but the rise certainly seems to correlate with demand for programmers.
It makes a whole lot of sense, really, except that if you started your degree in 1998, you were going to graduate right into a crash.
- hga 12y ago"[...] I don't think that the proportion of CS majors dropped precipitously after the crash..." MIT's EECS enrollment more than halved, after being 40% of the undergraduate body for more than 2 decades.
- lsc 12y agoman, I wonder what happened to those guys? I was able to remain employed through the dot-com crash, but I know many people who were obviously better than I was that did not. It seems like it would have been brutal for a fresh graduate with no experience in '01.
- hga 12y agoA lot of them that were strong in math, getting the mostly EE or enough of both degrees, would have gone into finance as quants (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_analyst https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_analyst), which was a desired initial destination for many of them anyway. Don't remember too much about the mostly CS track ones, I think it was fairly grim; I can remember at least one major, Fortune 50 or so company, rescinding offers they made one year (which obviously poisons the well for some time; one reason Kodak failed so badly in Japan). I couldn't remain employed during that period (had the particularly bad luck of joining Lucent at the beginning of 2001, just as it began its descent from 106,000 employees to 35,000).