Ya no wonder I wouldn’t like CS with these peers.
You have to be a nerd and supremely interested in status and money apparently. I don’t know many like that. Makes me think of Zuck and Elon. But they are minorities in the grand scheme. Maybe the author is exactly right, right here, why CS falters.
I understand hard work in a professional context, but the constant learning and tinkering that „nerds“ display stems from fun and curiosity.
Many people, who do not understand the most basic computer things, still think of "nerds" as "monkeys" sitting at a computer all day, doing something less relevant, not "having a life". Most people don't understand the profession of computer jobs. They see it as something inscrutable of dubious value. (And to be fair, often the greater picture our software serves to achieve is of dubious value.) It is not really like many other jobs, of which you could explain roughly to the next person on the street how the job is done. Before for example a software engineer gets to explain how some code they wrote works, the other person has long zoomed out. And before one gets to explain that it is a craft and what the art about it is, most people have fled. Not many are willing to listen to what fascinates a "nerd".
With that lack of understanding often come tendencies to wanting to associate with other people, rather than that person, whose job one does not even understand. And those "nerds" they have weird interests anyway, right? One couldn't engage in social activities with them, right? You may say those are superficial people and you may be right. But the world is full of such people.
In the end "nerd" is just a bag of stereotypes, that don't apply as often as most people think. Perhaps a "geek" is a friendlier word.
Also, nobody at the high school level has any idea what CS is. I had a bit of a leg up (in 1982) because my mom had taken a bunch of CS courses, and was teaching programming at a nearby community college. But she thought I'd be better off studying a traditional field. I chose math, and taught myself to program.
When I started college in 1982, I'd argue that nobody knew. For instance, at that time my parents were also mid-career in STEM. Well, my mom was teaching programming at a community college, and her students were getting jobs after 1 year of her course. Based on where we lived, near Detroit, most of them were getting hired up by the car companies.
But I don't believe anybody knew what was going to happen next. My mom thought that programmin was too easy to spend time learning at the college level, and that the market for programmers would soon be flooded. What happened next was the personal computer. I was keenly interested, but at my college, the CS majors used a mainframe computer. Most expected to work for banks, insurance companies, utilities, etc.
Non-STEM parents, sure. I'll grant you that. I'm lucky to have been raised by two scientists. But they weren't thinking about money when they talked to me about careers and college majors.
Imho, SWE and “Computation Science” should be separated.
You can treat the former as a computer oriented form of engineering, making it rigorous and produce SWEs that are actually good, and in the latter, you can put all the theoretical things and treat it as the branch of math it rightfully deserves to be.
> Ya no wonder I wouldn’t like CS with these peers.
Yeah I'd switch out of cs again to avoid those peers :)
Though in the proper setting I would have loved sticking with cs as an undergrad.