Edit: Gourmet House: https://www.bismarckcafe.com/blogs/260/remembering-gourmet-h...
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.
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.
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
"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)
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.
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.
I guess now, with arrival of Github Copilot the jobs outsourced to India will simply vanish.
My parents were always hugely dismayed by my interest in technology, said it was all just a flash in the pan, a waste of time, it’ll rot your brain. My boarding school from 7-12 (‘90-‘95) banned all computers and electronics because they were considered a distraction. You wanted to use a BBC micro, you sat on the now-imprisoned geography master’s knee, and he’d give you the key to his basement. I digress, but technology was so unpopular and unwanted you could only access it via pedophile.
Even at secondary school in the late 90’s the careers service told everyone who expressed any interest in tech than they needed to choose a realistic career, say a doctor or a lawyer, as technology is just a fad, the internet is just a gimmick, but people will always be having accidents and ending up in court.
As a kid, I honestly felt like I was the only person in the country who didn’t think computers were useless.
I remember reading an article about employment rates for different degrees. Computer science was at the bottom of the list.
This is why I'm always sceptical when I hear people here talking about the current high demand for programmers carrying on forever.
My mom was teaching CS courses at a satellite campus of a state university, mostly to older students looking to change careers. Many were trying to get out of assembly line or clerical jobs. Her students were getting programming jobs after one year of intro programming.
There was certainly a lot of misconceptions at the time. How could anybody know? How many programmers would really be needed? Did programming really require a college degree? My mom didn't think so. She thought the market for programmers would quickly saturate.
I loved programming, but majored in math and physics instead. At my college, the people who seemed to be doing cool things with computers (relative to my own interests of course) were in the physics department. I had a summer internship at a computer facility, and the work that the programmers were doing seemed boring.
The market for programmers did not rise monotonically in my region (the rust belt) because the entire regional economy was heaving up and down. By 1987, it was still not clear that computer science majors had a compelling advantage over self taught programmers in the job market, especially since the degree took 4 years.
What nobody anticipated is that while programming seems easy once you know how to do it, learning to program is prohibitive for most people, for reasons that I don't think we understand. The relationship between choosing to major in computer science, and achieving a successful career as a programmer, is tenuous at best.
I still love programming, but have never been employed as a programmer per se.
He said he had been a programmer, too, until the bust in the 1980s. Couldn't find any more work as a programmer so he went into used car sales.
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Chem engineering is process engineering. Chemists give you the reaction they want to do, and how much of it. Then engineers will size boilers, heat exchangers, pipes, process controllers and a bunch of other industrial equipment to make this happen.
It's not a bad career, you just have to be aware that it mostly happens in a production/manufacturing kind of environment with everything that entails (ie possible oncall in case of plant emergencies on weekends, etc).
As a professional engineer, you are putting your ass and your career on the line every time you sign off on a design. If an accident happens with loss of human life, serious injuries or large financial loss, you can be sued and you can have your license revoked if it was caused by a mistake in your design. You have to be able to live with this weight on your shoulders every day you come in to work.
It's obviously not paid as much as programming, but what is? Programming is pretty much an outlier at the moment, chem eng is probably in line with other traditional engineering disciplines (civil, electrical, mechanical, etc).
This quote seems a fair assessment, but doesn't exactly match the headline:
"There certainly is going to be a need for more and better technical talent in the high-tech industry."
So enrollment dropped from 2.1% to 1.6% after the hot computer jobs market cooled a bit, and reality set-in for several of the students who weren't very technical, and just expected an easy path to a high-paid job. It's been known to happen.
Half of the students here think CS is about games and fun, once they realize it's maths and pretty dry stuff they switch to something else.
I graduated college the first time in 1999, right before the Dotcom bubble popped. Outsourcing was definitely the big scare. So much so that I initially designed my career around avoiding outsourcing the best I could.
My plan was (and still is) to not just be a tech person (it has worked out ok, but may not be the best way). For all my electives I took business courses, and I started keeping up with the business side and finance. I wanted to be in meetings and offer solutions (at one job I had the title 'Solution Architect') to problems that may or may not be programming related.
I do see this a lot more today. Where some of the best programmers are ones who ask questions, and figure out that the best solution to a given problem is no coding at all.
I eventually got into IT anyway, but It's nice to know I have a proper education to fall back on when things go south; forklift driver licences don't expire...