Comment by SomeCallMeTim | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SomeCallMeTim | Hacker News Reader

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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-fo...

[2] http://cs.calvin.edu/p/ComputingCareersMarket

[edit: typo]

there's been an ongoing problem getting enough people into computer science programs (in large part because of the broad fears of "outsourcing"),

Then what fields are these people going into? Law? I hope not: http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2010/10/a_ca... . Medicine has its own problems too. Are they majoring in the humanities? Getting bogus business degrees?: http://www.amazon.com/The-Marketplace-Ideas-Resistance-Unive... ?

It might just be that undergrads have serious information asymmetry problems, of the sort I tried, probably futilely, to correct here: http://jseliger.com/2012/04/17/how-to-think-about-science-an... , but I wonder how these kinds of asymmetries can really persist.

Part of the problem is that we don't know how to teach computer science to students that haven't already been programming for years before college. The major has the highest first-year dropout rate.

http://www.siliconrepublic.com/innovation/item/18532-compute...

http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1151604

That suggests that one reason there are so few CS graduates despite demand is that those who enter CS programs because of said employment demand, and not because they are already interested in programming, don't make it out with a CS degree.

With respect to CS in particular, I think it's different from all other school subjects in that it is and has always remained a predominantly self-taught subject. You don't really get "taught" to program.

(I think this may be part of the reason that while there are increasing proportions of women in all the other sciences, the proportion of women in CS is dropping. Girls are statistically better in all school subjects than boys, and tend to be more diligent at homework and so on. Math and science fall neatly into that paradigm; programming doesn't. You get no gold stars from grownups by programming. So a lot of people who have the problem-solving aptitude to be good programmers never actually get started -- because nobody TOLD them to.)

Are there really asymmetries? CS degrees have a small value-add. Many of people enjoy software development without having the desire to be able to implement a RB tree on the fly. For intance, my boss majored in film studies; only one person on the team I work in has actual formal training in CS beyond introductory classes, and they're probably the least productive developer. Given that, why should people major in CS when they can instead spend 4 years debating social theory or going on class trips to Death Valley?

And really, is what we're hurting for now more CS people? I don't think so: if anything, the issue is that there's too much a CS emphasis. That's why we have people spending time building Lisp VMs in JS and all that jazz here, while tons of other fields (even technical ones) have absolutely massive inefficiencies because their problems aren't theoretical enough for CS folks.

Undergrads do have serious information asymmetry problems. My best guess as to the reason is that they don't have a lot of interaction with a wide range of people in the working world. They don't really have any idea what it'll be like to be adults. Incidentally, I think this is a big part of the reason undergrads at good schools gravitate to such a small number of employers (investment banks, consulting firms, and famous programs like Teach for America). Kids simply don't know what's out there, and so they reach for known quantities. And one consequence of that ignorance is that they don't have a very clear idea of which skills are most marketable.

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