Discussion on:

Students saying no to computer science

The obvious reasons that students are avoiding technical careers is that we techies are not exactly on the top of our society's heap. We would rather have our kids become Doctors, Lawyers or Accountants (probably in that order) because a) they make money and b) they have clout.

If we don't pay attention and stop equating jobs managing McDonalds with jobs inventing anti-lock braking systems (or in my case medical imaging devices), we will certainly and swiftly lose our place in the world. The folks who are in charge (see the above list) will fight tenatiously to retain their financial piece of a diminishing pie.

The outsourcing of everything except (again, see the above list) has allowed certain high tech firms to prosper, but the cost has been horrendous. If we don't stop giving our intellectual property away, we will have nothing that anyone wants and have to pay for everyone elses inventions. Remember -- He who invents, gets to say who benefits and where it is made.

And technology isn't even a real issue in the most vicious Presidential campaign in memory.

I agree entirely with Tom Mariner.
The folks in charge however are the ones to blame as they are the ones who are subcontracting their work out to these other countries. I mean lets face it, how many times have you heard about trying to get into IT and then finding out that the government has let in X Thousand immigrants purely for filling in the jobs that you were applying for. Students read about such stories and are intimidated by them.
I left England for the same reasons. I had a nice job in IT but wanted to further my career and for 10 years I couldnt - apparently I wasn't experienced enough - thats not encouraging for students who wish to take up IT. Information Technology and other Computer Science related courses need to find better ways of attracting and most of all keeping students on the right path. So they're going to need to work with their country's IT companies more closely. I dont see it as a fault of the Universities mainly as that of the finances of companies who merely want a cheaper alternative.
Ever heard of a cheap lawyer or an accountant yet?
Best Regards
An Englisman in Warsaw
(Now Teaching English)

This article is so, on-the-money, true and so depressing that I sat and stared at my monitor for about 15 minutes, wondering just where to begin.

When I was a child, computer programmers were wizards who practiced their magic at the shrine of the main frame. They were members of an elite fraternity.

Each programmer knew one or two languages, for example Assembly and FORTRAN, or COBOL and RPG. They were paid well and honored.

Today, computer programmers have become a commodity; even more disposable then the machines which they use and program for. Just an applicant who had the good fortune of claiming the EXACT skill set to match the laundry list that companies expect these days. Gone are the days of titles like "C Programmer". Today it is "Senior programmer with a BS and at least 5 years experience with C++, Java, Visual Basic, J2EE, .NET, HTML, XML, Perl, CGI, SQL Server, PLSQL, MySQL, MS Access, ..." then "...helpful to have knowledge of ". Maybe medical code, legal code, movie industry, auto industry, etc. I have seen this list grow over the years such that, if we apply some first grade math, we see that with 5 years of experience, one would average about 30 days for each skill.

Only recently have I realized that this is not a list to find a person with many skills, but rather a list to prevent any and all applicants from qualifying. Why would they waist money advertising with no intension, or realistic hope, of finding a match? It is to show that there were no Americans who fill their need so hiring a foreigner through the H1B visa program is necessary.

Since programmers are now a commodity, why not get one who is essentially an indentured servant. In the last place I worked, the H1B visa workers would work 60 to 80 hours, but charge for only 40. They received no vacation, sick leave, or benefit of any kind. Worked for low wages and never asked for raises. And take many forms of abuse and insult without comment. I could go on, but I think you get the picture.

Why would anyone choose to educate themselves for IT when their own Government is wholesale importing unreasonably cheep and hungry workers to compete with them? The H1B visa program was created to temporarily solve a shortage of IT workers, but is now one very major cause of an even greater shortage.

I have been attending a junior collage to add to my laundry list of skills for about the last two years. In that short time I have seen not only drastically reduced numbers of IT students, but the character of these students has changed.

There were once bright, enthusiastic, career oriented students competing to get seats in IT classes. They are gone now. What is left are retirees, bored house wives, recovering drug addicts, students of other majors who just want a particular skill like Photoshop or Dreamweaver, and some who are just so uninformed that they have never heard of an H1B visa worker. And a few unemployed IT workers like me who just refuse the change carriers.

Each semester the school offers fewer and fewer classes and still about half close due to having less than the minimum students enrolled.

The sharp students know that:

Unemployment in IT is higher than the general population,

IT workers are just a commodity,

IT workers work too hard,

IT workers must constantly re-educate themselves,

IT jobs are just too easily exported to other countries,

The IT job market is just too rollercoaster like volatile. They just know too many unemployed IT worker and too many employed IT worker who are over worked and under paid, but afraid to do anything about it.

Like I said; this is soooo depressing. I think I will stop now.

This article is right, computer industry in the US is very discouraging to say the least. Companies are running overseas to get the $12.50 an hour programmers /less benefits as well...
Programmers here in the US are fighting a loosing battle for any advancement and growth...
Why further your education when your advancement/growth potential is slim??
Article states qualifications long list/experience when probably under 50% of the applicates out there might have 25% of what they want...
As far as computer businesses engaging in freelancing, that is very tough due to the same factor they want it all in a computer company. The days of 70,000-100,000 + programmers annual pay are far and in between. Today they want you to know alot for 30,000-35,000 annual or they go overseas to get the help cheap, cheap, cheap.
I have my own computer web development business and it is tough to freelance, potential clients want you to have a fleet of programmers on hand ready and waiting to assist. Well this is not feesable, to costly. If I need a special script, coding I just sub-contract(here in the US) that part out and go on. Then we will put it all together for the client....
Tough tough tough to compete....I like to work with a small team of people in the IT biz because one expertise varies from another which therefore makes up your computer business....
Question, where is it going to stop. Someone told me the other day that China's economic structure is up/forward, well it should be with the help of the US, sending employment over....

Absolutely Right On about the "looking for developer with 17 languages" and H1's waiting.

I was unfortunately out of work last year and
inquired to positions posted through the Mass. unemployment office about some high tech jobs; only to have one of the counselors tell me that
the company was "just going through the motions"
to satisfy the rules cos they already have foreign workers ready to go.

' "Senior programmer with a BS and at least 5 years experience with C++, Java, Visual Basic, J2EE, .NET, HTML, XML, Perl, CGI, SQL Server, PLSQL, MySQL, MS Access, ..." then "...helpful to have knowledge of ". Maybe medical code, legal code, movie industry, auto industry, etc. I have seen this list grow over the years such that, if we apply some first grade math, we see that with 5 years of experience, one would average about 30 days for each skill. '

Exactly right. That is the crux of the matter.

I think the capitalists' fear of an I.T. career is rebound from the reality-check we got during the 90's.

A LOT of folks with no technical savvy, but much financial training, were selling themselves as engineers of somesort. Talking heads shouldn't do that.

The result of that massive fraud was that the industry was rife with inept engineers and technicians. We're still having to deal with the fallout from that.

I would rather suffer along with a well-trained, but understaffed team - than to do the same thing with a poorly trained, unmotivated, untalented *expensive* pool of ineptitude.

I have two daughters in the tech. field and a son completing his batcher?s degree. I have advised them all to get out. But, who listens to parents.

I have seen too many tech. jobs to offshore to save corporate dollars. You do not find electronics built in this country; toolmakers' jobs are moving offshore. Computer techs are being replaced by low paying jobs on the other side of the globe or by temporary immigrants who do not know what our cost of living is. Even they are sent back to their homeland when they start asking for enough wages to live on. As long as that happens, Computer Techs., Engineers and Programmers will be kept suppressed like our Farmers and Teachers.

I recommend a career in the trades, carpentry, plumbing, electrical, etc., to the non=doctor and non-lawyer individuals.

"I recommend a career in the trades, carpentry, plumbing, electrical, etc., to the non=doctor and non-lawyer individuals. "

We only need so many doctors and lawyers so who is going to hire us to do this kind of work.

If your a walmart worker spending $5.00 at McDonalds how can either one afford a plumber or carpenter.

The middle class is what makes these jobs and without that we all become our own carpenters.

The US has a net surplus in Services, and according to the Department of Labor demand for IT jobs over the next ten years far exceeds the minimal percentage of jobs that are being offshored. In addition, the recent decline in manufacturing is actually a result of a decrease in exports, as opposed to, an increase in imports.

See the following link: http://www.cato.org/current/outsourcing/index.html

I agree with everything posted in the branches of this discussion, but I think one point has been overlooked. When the love affair with computer sciences began the majority of the students who entered the field did so because of the lure of money, not because they loved the field. That led to a large number of mediocre computer science graduates during a time when business began to engage computers as a method for enhancing the bottom-line.

We are not only fighting the side-effects of that (culminating in the dotcom BS), but we are fighting the impression left by that experience. Just like all complex fields, the key ingredient to success in the long term is artistry -- and for years the industry lost that. Businesses treat computer programmers and the like as a commodity because they have no trust in the ability of their applicants. So, it is easier to excuse that there are no available applicants to fill a role and go for cheap labour.

The long-term impact of shipping all the work outside, of course, is that it will starve out the true artisans and make the recovery of the industry that much harder.

We do ourselves no favour though, because our laziness has frequently allowed us to buy in to the idea that large teams, managed strictly, produce inherently higher quality results. So we take no risks, and we neither succeed nor fail spectacularly. It suppresses the creative cycle and diminishes us.

Technology is not a political issue, nor a business issue, but rather a passion. Engaging passion in students is the first step to producing better technologists. Fewer graduates with higher quality will have the long-term effect that it increases opportunities, because the passion these people have will ignite a rediscovery of what makes for success -- quality of people; not quantity.

Just a thought, of course.

See this everyday. People dedicated to making money.

I agree with everything that has been said here. Unfortunately, our lamento is applicable to almost all skilled labor:

There is too much return on investiment (ROI) and too little return on labor (notice: there is no abbreviation for "return on labor", it is a non-entity for politics).

There is yet another aspect to the IT disaster:

When the financial arms of companies noticed that they were liable to become dependent on the skills of hired help (IT professionals) they came up with a plan: They send some of the business managers to attend a 4-week IT manager course at an expensive Institute of FastTechEd.

Now, these incompetents are in charge and afraid of anyone who might know his/her art and rights.

I totally agree. Its not a big mystery - why should students go through the rigors of a engineering degree when they have a great chance of having their jobs outsourced. become a doctor or lawyer and your job will always be in demand and, more importantly, stay in the States.

Just based on some of the posts here, people seem to think doctors and lawyers are safe professions. Careers in these fields aren't magic bullets either.

Doctors: The rising cost of medical school, the insurance industries downward pressure on fees, the insane cost of malpractice insurance, and the over-abundance of doctors are all leading to some real strain within our medical community. Consider also that we've already seen experiments with remote surgeries where the doctor and the patient are not in the same room and you can easily see that there is a potential (not for decades, but eventually) that surgery can be outsourced too. Also consider, that cheaper, yet very good, medical care in India and elsewhere actually is causing some people to travel there for plastic surgeries, etc.

Now consider lawyers. Any lawyer that doesn't appear before the courts is at risk for being offshored. Already tax and patent lawyers are offshoring a lot of their grunt work. And corporations like IBM are at least exploring off-shore legal departments.

In general, I view the decrease in CS students as a "generally-good-thing-for-me." It reduces the supply of local workers with which I have to compete. I mean, of course I have to compete with off-shore, but given that those people aren't going away, at least reducing the local talent pool is good for those of us competing for these jobs.

The days of a single career seem to be coming to an end. All my uncles, aunts, and my father stayed in the same company at pretty much the same job for 30+ years and did OK. They can?t believe that I?ve changed job descriptions at least a dozen times in the last 25 years, but I can do many things if need be. My son likes, and is good at, both carpentry and computers. He has taken my advice to get education and training in several unrelated areas. He will start carpentry school shortly and will also take the courses necessary for network administration. Whatever happens to the job market he should be prepared to adapt. Later, I?ve advised him to get a business degree. Darwin?s gave us the key to survival - adapt or perish.

Amen to that. Beyond the entry-level stage, I don't think it's possible to develop a long career in IT without having experience in other fields as well.

I was on my way to being an Accountant when I got into programming. Before that I was an investigative journalist, and before that a Yeoman in the Navy.

Without a good view of the forest, it's hard to tell how to fix a tree.

An accountant can do just fine without understanding programming, but a programmer *must* understand accounting, or seamanship, or whatever else - if he's to build solutions that are useful to those people.

I see a *lot* of situations where developers are developing tools for other developers. While such tools are absolutely necessary, they are the means - not the end.

In the end, you gotta get outta your cubicle or home office and go experience what it is your users are doing.

Technology is changing every now and then,IT field is nolonger vibrant in such a way that even people who are already in the field decide to change their career to fiels such as law,Medical doctors etc,so how will pupil at lower level get interest in IT,there is a high competition of service providers which really make technology to change at a rapid rate.

As I think, this is truely a sad thing to see in our universities. As a student of Information Technology, here in Bangalore,INDIA. The scenario is similar but not worse.

I feel there is still that untapped potential of exploiting computer science in various areas and one should not loose hope , just because others r doing so by not enrollin themselves.

If u feel u have a die hard instinct to develop , Desigin or even be a Fighther IT Manager, then look no further.

Follow ur dream and Iam sure u will succeed.

May GOD BLESS America and its people.

Best Regards

Anil Mahadev
Applied Information Technology Student
Bangalore
Karnataka
INDIA

{

Software Innovation is my Passion.

}

it doesn't inspire confidence in the job market either to see so many tech and science jobs flowing overseas. everything from tech support to software developement is being offshored to cut costs. not to mention the poor quality of training in alot of tech schools today, i have friends who started taking classes only to find that the instructor was only a couple chapters ahead of the class in the book and barely understood the material couple all that with the difficulty in finding a good paying tech job due the employers not wanting to pay techs what they're worth. can you really blame people for shying away to other industries.

Many people are pointing to off-shoring as the reason behind this but I think that is only a small part. There was even a poster here from Bangalore, India who points out one of the real problems, the lack of passion for the field of Computer Science.

Someone in college right now sees an industry full of spam, viruses, worms, hackers, security and privacy requirements, etc. They also see the offshoring and the dot-bomb collapse. Add to that the fact that the vast *majority* of the human race hates and fears the typical "computer". We are all aware of the help desk support nightmares that, for the most part, end up causing users to feel like idiots at the hands of some stupid machine. People have pointed out that money is no longer a real draw for the field either. Tell me, what does the average college/university student see of value in going into Computer Science?

I know why computer science was my major, and the poster from Bangalore gave their view, but the field as a whole has no real attractiveness to students who don't have the logic/set theory/database/whatever/etc. mindset that attracts them to the field in the first place. If the United States retains those kind of people in our schools and in our Universities then a declining IT/IS industry can be avoided. It should not even matter if India or China does the same thing. We just need the Industry to move forward. The perception that the IT industry is only about "code monkeys" siting in front of a terminal all day, and it doesn't matter if they are in India or the USA, needs to go away.

People seem to forget the innate nature of innovation: that once an invention moves us forward we take that innovation for granted. Once we had airplanes we now assume airplane travel times and capabilities. The same goes for computer science innovations. The problem is that everyone else now takes these things for granted. Thus we have the whole "off-shoring" thing. Virtually all off-shore workers use computer languages created and developed here in the United States.

The industry needs some better goals.
The industry needs to get its act together.
The industry needs to make the average person a better part of the equation.

And all of this needs to get through to the college age student so they can make a good decision.

I came over from the manufacturing sector (as a tooling engineer) to the tech field and started a small web development company because the organized wealthy and the republicans always attack manufacturing so as to weaken the economy. In doing so they can develop a needy weak desperate workforce. They can attack the 40 hour work week and overtime pay and they chip away at benefits (ie healthcare programs). There are many other advantages that the organized wealthy gain in a weak economy with the republicans in control of the white house, congress, senate and judiciary, but, it is far to much to list and discuss in this forum.

Now, thanks to the outsourcing schemes the organized wealthy and republicans have cooked up (along with many other deceptive underhanded plans) It comes as no surprise that the tech sector is suffering in the same manner that manufacturing has been for quite some time.

It is especially troubling to see that the tech sector (our new jobs frontier)has come under attack at a much faster rate than manufacturing did due to the fact that it is very easy to import/export code(programming). Coding and other tech sector jobs only require computers and people (that are easy to find worldwide) manufacturing requires raw materials and special hands-on trade skills as well as shipping costs and customs problems. In other words, I can build a website from anywhere.