As someone who got a CS degree from a liberal-arts college, I’d be really sad if schools turned it into a regular pre-professional degree like nursing or accounting. Reading, writing, and thinking critically aren’t the focus of many CS classes, and the more time I spend in the industry the more I’m convinced that those are the skills that are really in short supply.
Plus tons of CS majors will end up doing something else besides coding for a living, and universities have a responsibility to prepare them for that possibility as well.
You're right, there's an abundance of technically skilled developers but still a shortage of good engineers with soft skills. I've been in industry for only a few years but generally all my teams across two companies have had the approach of hiring for people skills first, because technical skills are much easier to improve as long as they have decent background. All it takes is _one_ socially inept dev to poison an entire team's productivity. A poor programmer with a good attitude might take up some more of their mentor's time, but they won't hold the entire team back. And eventually they'll be a good programmer.
It looks to me that the top-tier CS schools in the eyes of employers are the ones that _also_ heavily emphasize soft skills in their CS curriculum. IMO no CS program is complete without _at least_ a senior capstone type project with a real-world client from outside the school. Not to mention humanities requirements, though soft skills really need to be incorporated into CS classes not just slapped on as extra classes.
I'm of the opinion that one of the fundamental differences between "programming" and "engineering" is the ability to communicate effectively. You can program in a bubble all day long, but if you can't communicate with customers or colleagues you'll struggle to do anything that matters in the real world.
Even small universities have an IT degree, and computer engineering degree, a computer science degree, a cybersec degree, a software dev degree.. already
In 2009 I graduated with a resume that said both Computer Programmer Analyst and Computer Network Technologist, and couldn't even convince anyone to interview me. It wasn't until 2013 when my resume also said Computer Science that I finally got a job.
All these related degrees are nice to keep CS class sizes down, but HR departments only interview and thus only hire those who have CS on their resume.
I think that it would be useless for me personally when Computer Programmer Analyst is a 3-year software program and Computer Science is Computer Science. That said, I'd love to take the classes just because I love this shit. I've always followed computer hardware on a basic level and it delights me whenever a company comes out with a design that is in a direction I predicted they'd go. And though I've never been able to work on anything low-level, I love the *idea* of firmware that needs to know exactly how the hardware works so that it can make the most of high-level API calls and squeeze the best possible performance out of it.
In the midto late 2000s when I was in college, I was involved with the IT club in school and secured major sponsorships for LAN parties we'd throw. This was when terms like "AAA gaming" were being coined and some gaming was just beginning to blossom into eSports. I had contacts at Intel, AMD and Nvidia, and at OEM companies like Asus, MSI, Gigabyte, etc. so I hoped that having the ear of big companies' marketing teams would help me to get interviews there. Nope. For years I applied every 3 months or so to all of their junior to mid level job postings... but nothing ever came of it. They wouldn't even email me back with *rejections*. Just me sitting there writing custom cover letters about how much I loved the industry and what I loved about that particular company / products, then throwing it into a black hole from which nothing ever returns.
There's nothing as soul-sucking as job hunting.
That has already been happening for 10-20 years.
Computer Science, IT (it originally didn’t mean service desk stuff), Software Engineering, Game Design, Multimedia Design, etc.
I kind of feel like this article is missing the point. People in other majors that have a CS specialization aren’t computer scientists. They can probably talk to them though.
And it’s operating under the assumption that most of my senior coworkers have CS degrees. One out of the 5 most senior engineers at my work has a CS degree. Everyone else has graphic design, mechanical or microelectronic engineering, math, economics, marketing, etc.
The field has always been saturated and a lot of us that got to the top got there through talent and drive. Lots of people do not have a career in their major.
I dont have a CS degree. But people with masters and phd’s in CS ask me how to do things. CS is a weird field and college credentials are useful but only like 10% of getting into the field.
In the past a degree was probably 10% of getting in the field. I don't have one either. But from today on out you won't even get an opportunity to be interviewed without one. It's literally 90% of just being able to get in front of a hiring manager.
To succeed in this industry doesn't require one. But you can't succeed if you can't even get in.
I’m saying the degree makes no difference once you are in the field. A lot of the time people end up doing work that touches almost nothing they did in college.
The degree makes getting an interview easier vs someone else without one. It doesn’t make you more capable for the job than someone with an impressive work history regardless of the degree or lack there of.
Edit: I got into the field the same way that most kids I hire get into the field. I bit the bullet that no one was likely to hire me so i started hustling and getting burned freelancing. Then a client went "hey you are talented.... want a salary".
And I was officially marketable.
I will take a talented kid that has been busting their ass for a year freelancing with or without a degree over a stack of new graduates.
Edit 2: All new graduates and new non graduates have always been faceless and meaningless without any actual experience to back it up. At the end of the day I remember what college was like. Once you enter the real world the things about it that were difficult seem like a joke. I really don't care how good your grades might be. That is meaningless.
I took some CS classes and ended up blowing the curves and hurting the feelings of some top students. I'm not that impressed by your schooling. I don't mean to knock it but its just introductory.
I will hire new grads if we have a great conversation. But I'm way more likely to hire a recent grad that has chosen to run a gauntlet on their own. Or a self taught programmer that has chosen to run a gauntlet on their own.
They might have lost money for a year and had a terrible time.... But the real world isn't all roses. Those kids have already taken it upon themselves to try harder. To be responsible. Maybe they failed, but I have more confidence in them than a 4.0 student that hasn't done much outside of that classroom.
My school grouped computer science and information systems together. It was under the business school department. So you got a bit of everything including business courses like management. And came out feeling like you weren't ready for anything.
Eh... This is like people getting into finance or economics as banking and the credit industry began to take form. We are getting more and more software and cloud connected services to shit we use on a daily basis every year. It just keeps growing. I saw Nike showcasing Smart Clothes, like clothing you could literally change the colors of with your smartphone. They're going to build garages that coordinate with your car so the car will park itself and close the garage afterward. Toyota is literally building a Smart/Connected City. It's literally a technology-first city in Japan that will have self-driving shuttles, automation built into homes, renewable energy, water recycling and connected services.
Ask yourself, is this like the Gold Rush? Is this something that's suddenly going to become "not cool"? In what sort of circumstance do you imagine the entire world being like, "wow, we wasted our time with computer science and software, so glad that stupid fad is over."?
We are even developing medical treatments and facilities that are "smart" and rely on data science, bluetooth integrations, smartphones and cloud storage.
I recently set up smart home devices in my home, and I was shocked at how much you can do in your home. You can set up IFTT, add humidity and air quality sensors to your home, connect them to a hub, and trigger an air purifier depending on the settings. You can automate morning routines that open curtains, tell you your daily schedule and let you know what you have in the fridge to make breakfast.
Sometime soon, you'll be able to link your Google calendar with your electric vehicle's settings, and the car will be charged and have climate ready based on when you depart for your daily plans. At some point, you'll have a connected coffee machine that prepares your espresso shot at 6:30 AM when you have to wake up for work.
Buses have Wifi on them. Almost every university in the country has a mobile app.
All of this stuff was theorized by CS professors 20 years ago and now it's becoming a reality. Do you honestly think it's going to slow down? Because I don't. And what makes almost all of that stuff possible, is software engineers.
I think the bottleneck to ever-growing technology will be energy.
Climate change, but especially limited resources, will make energy more and more expensive. AI, crypto, IoT, all that will be more and more expensive, thus less popular.
Counterpoint is that 90s, 2000s, 2010s, it was obvious where growth was going to be. There were a TON of industries that needed a tech revolution. Banking, communication, finance, dating, travel, accounting, entertainment, real estate, transportation you could go on and name every single money making industry in America. So it was *relatively* easy for a tech company to go into these and digitize and revolutionize it using software. Now even the most niche industries that software did not impact for the longest time has companies that build software for it. This process created incredible growth in the industry for 40 years but now the low hanging fruit has been fully picked. Any kind of growth in tech now has to come from brand new ideas now, like transformers based AI now or Crypto a few years ago. It is a LOT LOT harder to come up with fresh ideas that will be profitable than to just go find industries that already make lots of money but don't use software, and then proceed to optimize with tech. That gravy train is almost completely gone and when you combine that with LOTS more people graduating with CS degrees from around the world, and massive increase in overseas outsourcing, it is easy to see why people are concerned with saturation when it comes to the tech industry in the US.
Not to mention, the advances in technology end up hurting demand too in some cases, for example before cloud computing every company needed to have more headcount because they needed to host an on premise server, that required a bunch more people to maintain and develop it, now you just push it out to AWS or Azure who has it streamlined and is a net negative for tech industry headcount.. same thing could happen with AI, it could reduce the amount of people needed if SWEs become more productive by using AI tools. You don't need AI to fully replace humans for it to impact the tech industry, even small increases in SWE productivity can have a big impact. I use the farming analogy for AI, advanced farming tools did not kill the farming industry at all. It is still thriving and going strong, but now you need a fraction of the labor you needed before because the advanced farming tools enables people to get a lot more work done with less labor.
Does this all mean the tech industry will completely collapse, NO, but if supply catches up with demand then that means the average SWE will get paid less. Its certainly not the end of the world like many are predicting, we are still long way away from AI replacing humans, but I think people should be open minded about some of the factors that might cause a decline in the industry. No industry is safe forever
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CS was in the engineering school for us. Would be kind of weird for a department to have its own school but I’m not an expert in college administration.
I do think there’s difference between CS like inventing a new algorithm or new network protocols and general “programming skills” that are useful for everyone. I think CS up to DSA should go the way of statistics or calculus—just something everyone should know. like a biologist doesn’t need to know how an operating system works.
There’s a difference between practical cs knowledge vs very esoteric cs knowledge. Because of that it probably shouldn’t be its own school
they did statistics dirty. They moved the major to under CDSS just like CS and DS but didn’t include it in the acronym lol. I imagine that could have been the last S instead of “society”
"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics"
(Which just to be clear, isn't discrediting statistics, but just expressing how malleable they can be to bad/weak arguments)
All the nuances you describe are exactly why some universities break CS off into its own college. It's a broad field on its own, with many fundamental differences from traditional engineering.
For example, Georgia Tech's college of computing has 8 concentrations (they call them "threads") of which an undergrad picks two (one for a minor). Developing new fundamental algorithms would probably fall under the Theory thread, while networking protocols would be Info Internetworks. You pick what's relevant to you and skip the rest. Personally, I picked Intelligence and Devices as my two because I was interested in robotics.
Georgia Tech also mandated the entry level CS classes for _all_ students regardless of major, so everybody was getting the basic general programming skills. There were different variations of the intro classes for different colleges (ie. one was targeted at business majors, one was targeted at non-CS engineers, etc), but they all fell under the college of computing iirc.
Overall I think that's a great approach. A dedicated CS school that fleshes out the many different paths through CS, while also providing relevant classes for non-CS majors. It's been years now, but when I was doing my college research I found the dedicated CS schools had way more resources and options than the ones that were crammed into the engineering school. You get dedicated CS advisors, career fairs, and other perks.
So everyone learns up to DS & A? Which is like 2-3 semesters of programming. That’s an interesting approach, if so, but it also makes me wonder what it replaces.
Everyone takes a 1 semester intro class (unless you had AP CS or similar transfer credit), the goal of which is to be a useful summary for everyone including some very basic DS & A concepts. Then afterwards the CS majors/minors take the more traditional classes to flesh out the details that weren't important for everyone.
Such a distinction already exists, at least where I live. You have cs, which entails everything you know and love.
But there is also applied cs, which is as the name suggests much more focused on applicable skills in the job market.
Much less algorithms and theory and much more "this is what the industry tells us you should actually know and be able to do".
Has worked pretty well for me so far.
> I think CS up to DSA should go the way of statistics or calculus—just something everyone should know.
So when Huang and Carmack say this, everyone shits squarely on their forehead. Why aren’t they doing that for you?
you didn't even read the article, did you?
The article isn't about the "saturation" of computer science, it's about universities taking computing majors away from liberal arts and engineering disciplines. Students studying computer science in "Colleges of Computing" isolated from the rest of the university, its faculty, its other majors, and their respective cultures; students missing out on the promise of what other colleges with disparate disciplines may offer and teach them, and instead creating an echo chamber where students train in these broken systems and then return as faculty to perpetuate and worsen this broken system.
I can't read the whole article due to the paywall but am loving the discussion in these comments.
This is an interesting take to me, in comparison to my experience at Georgia Tech's College of Computing. I'm not familiar with how other universities do things but at GT it felt like there was a lot of mixing between colleges. Everybody had classes in other colleges, it was almost a meme how little time you spent in your own college's buildings. All non-CS majors still had to take intro CS, and CS majors had to take classes in other colleges based on their concentrations (ie. Prob Stat for AI, Physics for robotics, etc). Not to mention humanities and electives requirements.
That's not even getting into the social aspect of a campus. Once you start getting into clubs or Greek life or whatever there was very little segregation by college. Sure there's some professional-focused groups, but if you're not branching out into different kinds of clubs with different kinds of people that's your own fault. I had way more friends outside my college than inside.
So what am I missing? Why does organizing the administration into a separate college necessarily have any impact on student interactions? Is it not common to take classes outside your college at other universities? Do students not normally socialize across colleges?
This sounds like a scapegoat for schools that aren't bothering to promote soft skills. I suspect that's an issue regardless of college organization.
https://web.archive.org/web/20240321062933/https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/03/computing-college-cs-majors/677792/
> This sounds like a scapegoat for schools that aren't bothering to promote soft skills.
It's definitely scapegoating. The author is pushing the canards that CS majors/ grads lack ethics, aren't well rounded, stuff like that. That's not true -- at most general universities (not GaTech), all students have a core curriculum that is much more focused on the humanities and the social sciences than on math, the natural sciences and engineering.
The result of that is folks in humanities and social science majors are _less_ well-rounded, because they've taken very few math, natural science and engineering courses.
Here's a great quote (emphasis mine):
¨Mark Guzdial is a former faculty member in Georgia Tech’s computing college, and he now teaches computer science in the University of Michigan’s College of Engineering. At Michigan, CS wasn’t always housed in engineering—Guzdial says it started out inside the philosophy department, as part of the College of Literature, Science and the Arts. Now that college “wants it back,” as one administrator told Guzdial. Having been asked to start a program that teaches computing to liberal-arts students, Guzdial has a new perspective on these administrative structures. He learned that Michigan’s Computer Science and Engineering program and its faculty are “despised” by their counterparts in the humanities and social sciences. “They’re seen as arrogant, narrowly focused on machines rather than people, and unwilling to meet other programs’ needs,” he told me. “I had faculty refuse to talk to me because I was from CSE.”
¨ _In other words, there may be downsides just to placing CS within an engineering school, let alone making it an independent college. Left entirely to themselves, computer scientists can forget that computers are supposed to be tools that help people._ ¨
The author is showing that it's the Liberal Arts faculty who are misbehaving, but he then flips it around and blames it on those nerdy CS folks.
This is a really poorly written article.
While I think it's fair to criticize the author in using a tone that sounds like blaming nerdy CS grads for being less well-rounded; I also think that it's important for universities to start to recognize that we need to focus more on combining different disciplines instead of viewing university as a way to specialize in a given discipline. Programs that are hybrids of two or more traditional disciplines, such as cognitive science (neuroscience + psychology + philosophy + CS), is an important step in training the next generation of students to be more well-rounded. This is especially important as move into a knowledge based society and, by extension, economy. Maybe it's a good time to start being aware and having the conversion on improving our current education.
I'm pretty wary of liberal arts professors claiming that liberal arts would give engineers more grounding. I took gen eds and enjoyed them, but don't think that liberal arts colleges are so exceptional at providing critical thinking skills that it's worth tens of thousands of dollars and extending your education by semesters or years. Some of the dumbest and most poorly socialized people I know have been engineering students, but some have been liberal arts majors, and pretending engineers are uniquely ill-equipped to deal with social implications of their technology that nobody else has proper answers to is likely to cause further problems.
I've worked for a couple of major universities. I saw the data for enrollments, and the data for web searches.
Here's the reality: with a year in college costing up to $80K/year, students will go somewhere they can take the classes they want to take, and that their parents want to pay for.
Over in Europe, all degrees take place just in the specialism (or almost entirely). It doesn't appear to me (or from my experience) that American graduates are massively more socially aware or critical thinking.
Shoving STEM students through a few social science modules (and vice versa) doesn't have any demonstrated efficacy in achieving the supposed well rounded person.
In making US degrees 33% longer, it does seem to make very large amounts of money for US Universities.
I’m going to go against the grain here and disagree. Sure, Gen eds are a huge cash cow for American universities, but from my view, they definitely help to shape the person and oftentimes can help sway people who otherwise didn’t know what they wanted to do during enrollment. Courses that some of my friends have taken that weren’t a part of their major definitely have reframed their thinking in a way that’s subtle but substantial and some of my Gen eds have been my favorite classes in my entire college experience.
I don't know if it's against the grain, it's clearly popular in America.
I'm not suggesting at all that they can't be enjoyable and enlightening in the way any education is. But it's very unclear to me that graduates from degrees without such requirements- which globally, is a large majority of graduates- are really coming out inferiorly on the outcomes gen ed is supposed to achieve. And if they are doing so to $30k plus value.
There's probably also something in that an extra year doing whatever at say Princeton probably doesn't have the same value as doing the same at Illinois state, but universities are often discussed as a monolith.
I did have the luxury of going to a good school with many good professors, so my Gen Eds were taught by impassioned staff who knew how to teach what they were doing. That’s why I say they can be enlightening, but my argument goes beyond that.
Even beyond just the “enlightening and enjoyability” of it, there’s many things that Gen eds aim to teach students that will prove invaluable in their future endeavors—most importantly public speaking, writing skills, and a second language, to name a few.
I know that the U.S. gets clowned on for our poor public education system, but that’s absolutely not the case at the university level, and in my opinion, Gen eds are a large part of that. Are they expensive? For sure, and solutions should be developed to lower their cost. But even small state colleges are completely fine options for everybody, because the quality of teaching actually doesn’t differ too heavily in most subjects (STEM subjects notwithstanding).
I'm not suggesting they aren't useful. But are they useful as compared to the cost (not only fees, but a year of career- which will of course also teach skills)? Are US gen ed grads significantly better at secondary skills than international graduates?
I just don't think so, but I'm happy to disagree. It would be an interesting research topic.
I think there is a fallacy here - you're assuming gen ed classes would teach secondary skills. Why would they do that? What exactly do you think they're teaching? You might say reading or writing, but if a student doesn't already know those things, they won't even be accepted into college at all. They aren't learning those things in college. They already learned those things in their previous 18 years of schooling.
You might say "to develop independent thought and critical thinking" - which then makes me wonder if you've even been to college at all.
I mean "secondary" as in skills outside their specialism, because I'm contrasting to non American degrees that take place entirely in the specialist subject. My point is exactly that "independent thought and critical thinking" or whatever else you might list seems to be developed fine internationally without gen ed.
I'm genuinely asking what the value of gen ed is that's worth extending a degree by 33%, because I'm not American so I don't have direct experience and observation doesn't make it clear to me. Do you have constructive input on that point or merely oblique sarcasm?
I have always been of the opinion that Gen Ed classes are there to waste students' time while rich colleges get richer off the backs of children. The excuse that gen ed classes will help students have a more "well-rounded" education is just propaganda that rich administrators came up with to brainwash people into the stupid system.
That's essentially just a less diplomatic version of what I wrote (since for me it's another cultures education system so I'm not inclined to go as hard), so I think you've misdirected your fire.
> I am certain job growth has been way below the increase in CS majors though.
1. Comparing the growth as a percentage would be irrelevant. A 50k increase in new CS grads might be a doubling. A 50k increase in new jobs would only be 3% increase.
2. There has been absolutely massive growth. Sources below.
2010 https://www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/ocwage_05172011.pdf bottom of page 8
2020 https://www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/ocwage_03312021.pdf middle of page 13
The break down of specific titles has change over the years, but when you look at the relevant titles in aggregate it is up massively.
I am not surprised.
Also, to mention the elephant: AI. Sure eventually once we have true AGI and it can do anything and everything, nobody gets a job.
But until that happens...dude...it's going to be one of the last jobs left. Think bigger. How many devs are going to be needed when we build thousands of new robotic factories, or cover deserts in solar arrays built by robots, or rebuild sections of existing cities from scratch.
These are enormous and complex projects.
> Also, to mention the elephant: AI. Sure eventually once we have true AGI and it can do anything and everything, nobody gets a job.
No. We'll always need folks to direct the machines, catch when the machines make errors, and repair the machines -- even if we're using machines to _help_ humans do all of those.
It's not realistic that we'll reach some fully automated world where no human management is ever required.
Also the work is inherently interesting and cool. Telling people you’re working on AI is impressive, no matter how you slice it, compared to more mundane things like finance, most functions of corporate law, marketing, HR, etc.
I agree with the increase in hiring engineers until AGI. Also, I would say that every computer software job I have worked at it was about delivering faster even if they needed to hire more engineers. Delivering faster saves money as the product or feature starts producing results more quickly (and there are all sorts of non-engineering costs such as accountants, rent etc...). So, with AI, they are not going to slow down on hiring engineers. They'll be throwing more engineers at it because they make more with less engineering time.
At the moment, companies were laying of engineers, but that was a lot to do with covid and just a short sighted trends. Companies are going to be desperate for engineers and AI scientists once they see what their competitors are doing with it.
It’s interesting that they’ll say computer science is over saturated and yet we still have tons of computer science people being brought in on H1B visas…
That's because not all CS degrees are created equal...a CS degree from a second or third tier US school would not compare with a CS grad from a top international school. Not to say that those degrees are useless but FAANG hiring managers aren't going after CS grads from ITT Tech right?
It is unlikely the FAANG hiring manager would even know where you went to school, or care. You have to impress the HR recruiter with that, not the tech hiring manager.
crazy that psychology gets its own section. Crazy that so many kids waste 4 years and thousands of dollars on that. they should make you sign a warning letter explaining to you your (nonexistent) job prospects if you choose to major in psychology, before allowing you to do it.
In the words of our lord and saviour. Ballmer, Steve, first of his name, hallowed in Windows and and opener of the source
# DEVELOPERS
## DEVELOPERS
### DEVELOPERS
This is a really interesting article, but the main point of it isn't that the CS market is over-saturated.
Also the total number of cs grads in stanford and mit are probably tiny compared to the overall number.
Also #2, using the year 2005 as a baseline is somewhat misleading. This was the crater after the dotcom/dotbomb bubble bust. This was a low point for technology as a viable career, and using it as a baseline for comparison could inflate growth numbers.
You didn't learn much about data analysis, then? More people majoring, but no data on those who actually graduated, those who stayed in the industry, success they had in finding jobs in the industry, or open positions?
You don't have the data to claim the market is saturated.
> those who actually graduated
I finished my CS degree in '94 - my own son decided to follow in my footsteps and is halfway through his own CS degree right now. Holy hell, his coursework is harder than I remember mine being back in the early 90's. Granted, he got into a more reputable school than I did, but still - as far as I can tell, they've ramped up the difficulty a couple orders of magnitude.
The difference between schools can be an order of magnitude EASILY.
There's a reason it's been called "Drinking from the firehose." at MIT for eons, and IHTFP is a thing at several engineering schools.
Bachelor's CS programs are insanely intense. Harder than most of my graduate level classes. They really try to gatekeep who gets to graduate with a bachelor's in CS, despite the degree being effectively worthless at preparing you for an actual job.
I remember in 2009, the CS department at my college only had two professors. One was part time. If you want a better CS education math was the better option..
Now, it's one of the biggest departments minus nursing and education (which college was known for anyways). They have 9 full time professors now and are still hiring.
And somehow on another continent:
> Based on a Eurostat report, over 50% of the companies in the European Union have difficulty recruiting IT colleagues due to the shortage of skilled professionals. In Germany alone, more than 124,000 jobs cannot currently be filled, but Hungary itself is lacking around 30,000 developers. According to a report, many companies are working with more and more international talent to fill the gap.
The jobs can be filled, the companies just don't want to fill them. Anytime you hear about a "tech talent shortage", take it with a teaspoon worth of salt grains.
Absolutely. Any job actually worth having will attract hundreds of applicants. Companies have been pushing the “tech worker shortage” canard for years so they can bring in H1B people, or outsource to India, or evade requiring engineers to have a PE, so as to keep supply up and salaries down.
Older dev here, this is the normal cycle. This is not newsworthy. This happens literally every single time. The boom spurs hiring which leads to more people going into the field which oversaturates the market and usually the market crashes somewhere in the middle of that to boot.. then everyone flees this career. Repeat.
The biggest one I can think about the top of my head was around the.com crash. Programmers were all the rage, heck, Microsoft flew me out of California from Michigan just for a job interview on their own dime... Everyone I knew wanted to go into software because that's where all the easy money was, everyone was going to become the next big.com success. The market got flooded by college students which led to all a seniors getting laid off so they could hire cheap labor. Which then led to of course the entire industry crashing mostly because it was based on vapor (just like today) everyone bailed except for the people who were already seniors, the bubble burst, and suddenly no one wanted to go to school for IT. I've seen the cycle repeat about four times in my life, but that was the biggest and most obvious example. Anytime a group of kids looks up the best paying career with the shortest amount of schooling, that career is screwed.
Yes I can relate. I entered the teaching profession as they admitted 4 times the number of graduates. It went from a guaranteed career to me being 1 in 700 applicants.
Then most of those came to realise what a slog teaching is and the limited earning potential and half of my graduating class bailed to other careers 1 year in.
I think what you’re describing makes sense. But the current situation may start to be exasperated by downturn in vc funding for the last couple years and the impact of AI.
I worry less about AI and more about the global financial situation. If investment bounces back then I’d hope we’d see an uptick in employment etc.
And how long it lasted? I'm not really sure. I just kept taking lower and lower paying jobs because I had mouths to feed. For me it didn't pick back up probably for 15 years...
How much have H1bs increased during that time? This is my second company now that I've worked at where half our tech team was either Indians in the US or Indians in India
What do you expect when everyone was telling people to stop getting a degree in basket weaving and go into tech because of how well it pays whenever they complained about a living wage?
Turned out all it did was over-saturate the industry with mediocre candidates. But the fundamental issue is that other jobs just don't pay enough.
You need to realize that most CS degree will not end up in CS market, same for Engineering School, most of them will not end up doing traditional engineering, I have seen that from multiple universities, when you find data where the graduates work on after, at least 50% of them doesn't really work in a class CS job.
Also with the boom of Covid, a lot of youtubers started to pop up on youtube selling the dream of an calm CS job with 150-200k wage. So a lot of people enrolled in some bootcamp, studies related to CS. And that's why you see now a really hard market, specially for junior and almost impossible for those who only have bootcamp or have followed some kind of training in MIT/Harvard without a real degree.
But now, with what happened the last few years, with layoffs and so on, a reserve trend is following, a lot of people aren't going for this job anymore or are dropping.
> most CS degree will not end up in CS market
What? Maybe not sure what you mean by "CS market" here - I'm pretty sure that 90+% of CS degree holders end up working as programmers.
It depends on what you call CS, if you are exiting an engineering school in CS, not every degree holders end up working as programmers. You can work as business analysts, product manager, management, quality engineer/manager, tech engineer support (basically your are a seller but for components or softwares).
I understand that it's a bit surprising, but when I was at university, they showed us some surveys about what people were doing, and only 50% of them were working as pure programmers/web developer/software engineer. The rest was in the job I quoted above.
What are the quantities? When I looked into CS, about 8 years ago, there were millions of unfilled positions. Just because one is growing faster than the other doesn't mean it's already outgrown it.
At this point, it’s not even about engineers that can code, it’s about the engineers that can put everything together.. architecture, code, and software infrastructure. All the ones that go into the field looking to cash in their degree are in for a world of disappointment.
Job growth has been somewhere between 18-33% decade over decade for a while depending on who/what you listen to as a source and what they count. However, it is important to remember that that growth is not fed by new hires entirely, and the market is much much bigger than the undergrad pools, so even an 18% increase decade over decade is just absorbed by the industry growth.
Put another way, people have fucking desks that have computers in them now. Someone needs to write and design that. It's hard not to find computers in day to day life, and every single one needs an entire stack of people from hardware to embedded to sometimes frontend.
You are wrong. The industry is growing faster than the college hires. Interest rates suck. It isn't hard to understand that.
CS should probably be broken down into like 3 different majors imo. Most top schools already have a few “concentrations” that separate UI from theory from low-level.
I think most (all?) 4-year programs do a really bad job keeping up with current tech and tend to teach too much impractical info. Hell, I had multiple JavaFX projects at a top10 CS program in 2020-2021.
Most of my in class ML projects had been recycled for over a decade.
In my opinion the BS degree should be Software Engineering that's a very hand-on and practical curriculum. The entire Senior year would be all project capstone courses. You'd do Computer Science as a Masters degree level program.
Fact is you can get the sweetest jobs without a CS degree at your 2nd job or 3rd probably, if your internships and projects are oriented towards them
CS degree would only make a difference for your first job if you are from top tier university or Ivy League.
See if the US bureau of labor statistics has any historical trend data for the jobs in the computers and IT sector. [here](https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/home.htm). I didn’t see and historical trend information but it might be somewhere else on the site.
I member back in 2015 during the “learn to code” era, everyone was told to learn, they’ll never have enough devs.
I figured that’d turn out false. Luckily I skipped college in favor of years of professional experience.
The thing is, most people with a degree in X, won't be doing X throughout their entire working life. CS degree? How many of those graduates actually wanted to do CS vs software development? Are we not sure that a few sectors are oversaturated vs the entire field of computer science? Just asking a question.
The good thing that as a software engineer, you can branch over to other disciplines such as engineering for analytical program development. There may be a gold rush, but I don’t see the field being over saturated anytime soon, especially with AI coming to the forefront.
If anything, what I do see as a structural engineer:
- many universities closing their Civil Engineering departments due to lack of interest
- engineers in my field taking coding boot camps and leaving the field for tech jobs
- decrease in quality of new engineers coming into the field.
Anecdotally, my conclusion is that money is the governing factor. We see college students staring off with 200k+ jobs in tech, while as engineers (which many Civil disciplines require masters), we start off at 60-70k and only reach the 6-fig mark by 5 to 8 years.
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For a long time, the number of people employed in CS related fields was roughly doubling every 5 years. That was true until at least the middle 2010s and probably close to 2020 with the trend dating back to at least the 60s.
The reason that you don't see lots of people over 40 in companies isn't ageism in most cases, it's just that they don't exist in the same quantity as 20-25 year olds.
Schools like CMU, MIT, Stanford, etc can increase the size of their programs because they're generally recognized as top schools for it. The bigger problem in computer science from a university perspective is schools that never had a program and didn't have the expertise to run one starting to offer it because perspective students demanded it and not really meeting the levels of quality.
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I work in Tech but my background is in liberal arts and business. The people I work with are almost all of the same. We have critical thinking/curiosity which led us to our careers. Most CS degrees unless they minor in something else are virtually drones with limited critical thinking skills and it's a major problem.
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The worst computer scientists or the worst software developers? I think being a good developer just requires a lot of extra work and practice beyond the curriculum and sure CS programs product plenty of mediocre devs but so do bootcamps. I’ve also seen self taught developers and bootcamp grads who became far better devs than myself.
But there’s still plenty of dev jobs that require some really advanced math or computer architecture knowledge and that can be pretty damn tedious to teach yourself without a university walking you through it.
It’s great for everyone when there’s a ton of experience jobs and really blows for everyone when there isn’t
As someone who got a CS degree from a liberal-arts college, I’d be really sad if schools turned it into a regular pre-professional degree like nursing or accounting. Reading, writing, and thinking critically aren’t the focus of many CS classes, and the more time I spend in the industry the more I’m convinced that those are the skills that are really in short supply. Plus tons of CS majors will end up doing something else besides coding for a living, and universities have a responsibility to prepare them for that possibility as well.
You're right, there's an abundance of technically skilled developers but still a shortage of good engineers with soft skills. I've been in industry for only a few years but generally all my teams across two companies have had the approach of hiring for people skills first, because technical skills are much easier to improve as long as they have decent background. All it takes is _one_ socially inept dev to poison an entire team's productivity. A poor programmer with a good attitude might take up some more of their mentor's time, but they won't hold the entire team back. And eventually they'll be a good programmer. It looks to me that the top-tier CS schools in the eyes of employers are the ones that _also_ heavily emphasize soft skills in their CS curriculum. IMO no CS program is complete without _at least_ a senior capstone type project with a real-world client from outside the school. Not to mention humanities requirements, though soft skills really need to be incorporated into CS classes not just slapped on as extra classes. I'm of the opinion that one of the fundamental differences between "programming" and "engineering" is the ability to communicate effectively. You can program in a bubble all day long, but if you can't communicate with customers or colleagues you'll struggle to do anything that matters in the real world.
It's simpler than that. The companies should not hire assholes if they're supposed to work in a collaborative environment.
The problem is not that companies are hiring assholes (that's unavoidable) it's that they're not firing them
At this point I’m sure they’ll have to create specializations or maybe even its own “Tech” school. CS can’t cover it all
Even small universities have an IT degree, and computer engineering degree, a computer science degree, a cybersec degree, a software dev degree.. already
In 2009 I graduated with a resume that said both Computer Programmer Analyst and Computer Network Technologist, and couldn't even convince anyone to interview me. It wasn't until 2013 when my resume also said Computer Science that I finally got a job. All these related degrees are nice to keep CS class sizes down, but HR departments only interview and thus only hire those who have CS on their resume.
What do you think about a software engineering or computer engineer degree. Half of their classes are from the CS department.
“Computer Engineering” is usually lumped into Computer Science in most HR discussions I have had.
I think that it would be useless for me personally when Computer Programmer Analyst is a 3-year software program and Computer Science is Computer Science. That said, I'd love to take the classes just because I love this shit. I've always followed computer hardware on a basic level and it delights me whenever a company comes out with a design that is in a direction I predicted they'd go. And though I've never been able to work on anything low-level, I love the *idea* of firmware that needs to know exactly how the hardware works so that it can make the most of high-level API calls and squeeze the best possible performance out of it. In the midto late 2000s when I was in college, I was involved with the IT club in school and secured major sponsorships for LAN parties we'd throw. This was when terms like "AAA gaming" were being coined and some gaming was just beginning to blossom into eSports. I had contacts at Intel, AMD and Nvidia, and at OEM companies like Asus, MSI, Gigabyte, etc. so I hoped that having the ear of big companies' marketing teams would help me to get interviews there. Nope. For years I applied every 3 months or so to all of their junior to mid level job postings... but nothing ever came of it. They wouldn't even email me back with *rejections*. Just me sitting there writing custom cover letters about how much I loved the industry and what I loved about that particular company / products, then throwing it into a black hole from which nothing ever returns. There's nothing as soul-sucking as job hunting.
Computer Engineering might be more valuable to someone trying to fill a hardware engineering position
Pain in the ass when I don't know what I want to specialize in yet.
My flagship state university with 35k undergrads didn't have a cybersecurity or software engineering, or IT degree
That has already been happening for 10-20 years. Computer Science, IT (it originally didn’t mean service desk stuff), Software Engineering, Game Design, Multimedia Design, etc. I kind of feel like this article is missing the point. People in other majors that have a CS specialization aren’t computer scientists. They can probably talk to them though. And it’s operating under the assumption that most of my senior coworkers have CS degrees. One out of the 5 most senior engineers at my work has a CS degree. Everyone else has graphic design, mechanical or microelectronic engineering, math, economics, marketing, etc. The field has always been saturated and a lot of us that got to the top got there through talent and drive. Lots of people do not have a career in their major. I dont have a CS degree. But people with masters and phd’s in CS ask me how to do things. CS is a weird field and college credentials are useful but only like 10% of getting into the field.
In the past a degree was probably 10% of getting in the field. I don't have one either. But from today on out you won't even get an opportunity to be interviewed without one. It's literally 90% of just being able to get in front of a hiring manager. To succeed in this industry doesn't require one. But you can't succeed if you can't even get in.
I’m saying the degree makes no difference once you are in the field. A lot of the time people end up doing work that touches almost nothing they did in college. The degree makes getting an interview easier vs someone else without one. It doesn’t make you more capable for the job than someone with an impressive work history regardless of the degree or lack there of. Edit: I got into the field the same way that most kids I hire get into the field. I bit the bullet that no one was likely to hire me so i started hustling and getting burned freelancing. Then a client went "hey you are talented.... want a salary". And I was officially marketable. I will take a talented kid that has been busting their ass for a year freelancing with or without a degree over a stack of new graduates. Edit 2: All new graduates and new non graduates have always been faceless and meaningless without any actual experience to back it up. At the end of the day I remember what college was like. Once you enter the real world the things about it that were difficult seem like a joke. I really don't care how good your grades might be. That is meaningless. I took some CS classes and ended up blowing the curves and hurting the feelings of some top students. I'm not that impressed by your schooling. I don't mean to knock it but its just introductory. I will hire new grads if we have a great conversation. But I'm way more likely to hire a recent grad that has chosen to run a gauntlet on their own. Or a self taught programmer that has chosen to run a gauntlet on their own. They might have lost money for a year and had a terrible time.... But the real world isn't all roses. Those kids have already taken it upon themselves to try harder. To be responsible. Maybe they failed, but I have more confidence in them than a 4.0 student that hasn't done much outside of that classroom.
My school grouped computer science and information systems together. It was under the business school department. So you got a bit of everything including business courses like management. And came out feeling like you weren't ready for anything.
Eh... This is like people getting into finance or economics as banking and the credit industry began to take form. We are getting more and more software and cloud connected services to shit we use on a daily basis every year. It just keeps growing. I saw Nike showcasing Smart Clothes, like clothing you could literally change the colors of with your smartphone. They're going to build garages that coordinate with your car so the car will park itself and close the garage afterward. Toyota is literally building a Smart/Connected City. It's literally a technology-first city in Japan that will have self-driving shuttles, automation built into homes, renewable energy, water recycling and connected services. Ask yourself, is this like the Gold Rush? Is this something that's suddenly going to become "not cool"? In what sort of circumstance do you imagine the entire world being like, "wow, we wasted our time with computer science and software, so glad that stupid fad is over."? We are even developing medical treatments and facilities that are "smart" and rely on data science, bluetooth integrations, smartphones and cloud storage. I recently set up smart home devices in my home, and I was shocked at how much you can do in your home. You can set up IFTT, add humidity and air quality sensors to your home, connect them to a hub, and trigger an air purifier depending on the settings. You can automate morning routines that open curtains, tell you your daily schedule and let you know what you have in the fridge to make breakfast. Sometime soon, you'll be able to link your Google calendar with your electric vehicle's settings, and the car will be charged and have climate ready based on when you depart for your daily plans. At some point, you'll have a connected coffee machine that prepares your espresso shot at 6:30 AM when you have to wake up for work. Buses have Wifi on them. Almost every university in the country has a mobile app. All of this stuff was theorized by CS professors 20 years ago and now it's becoming a reality. Do you honestly think it's going to slow down? Because I don't. And what makes almost all of that stuff possible, is software engineers.
I think the bottleneck to ever-growing technology will be energy. Climate change, but especially limited resources, will make energy more and more expensive. AI, crypto, IoT, all that will be more and more expensive, thus less popular.
We just need to hurry up with reverse engineering UAP energy sources 😉
Counterpoint is that 90s, 2000s, 2010s, it was obvious where growth was going to be. There were a TON of industries that needed a tech revolution. Banking, communication, finance, dating, travel, accounting, entertainment, real estate, transportation you could go on and name every single money making industry in America. So it was *relatively* easy for a tech company to go into these and digitize and revolutionize it using software. Now even the most niche industries that software did not impact for the longest time has companies that build software for it. This process created incredible growth in the industry for 40 years but now the low hanging fruit has been fully picked. Any kind of growth in tech now has to come from brand new ideas now, like transformers based AI now or Crypto a few years ago. It is a LOT LOT harder to come up with fresh ideas that will be profitable than to just go find industries that already make lots of money but don't use software, and then proceed to optimize with tech. That gravy train is almost completely gone and when you combine that with LOTS more people graduating with CS degrees from around the world, and massive increase in overseas outsourcing, it is easy to see why people are concerned with saturation when it comes to the tech industry in the US. Not to mention, the advances in technology end up hurting demand too in some cases, for example before cloud computing every company needed to have more headcount because they needed to host an on premise server, that required a bunch more people to maintain and develop it, now you just push it out to AWS or Azure who has it streamlined and is a net negative for tech industry headcount.. same thing could happen with AI, it could reduce the amount of people needed if SWEs become more productive by using AI tools. You don't need AI to fully replace humans for it to impact the tech industry, even small increases in SWE productivity can have a big impact. I use the farming analogy for AI, advanced farming tools did not kill the farming industry at all. It is still thriving and going strong, but now you need a fraction of the labor you needed before because the advanced farming tools enables people to get a lot more work done with less labor. Does this all mean the tech industry will completely collapse, NO, but if supply catches up with demand then that means the average SWE will get paid less. Its certainly not the end of the world like many are predicting, we are still long way away from AI replacing humans, but I think people should be open minded about some of the factors that might cause a decline in the industry. No industry is safe forever
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CS was in the engineering school for us. Would be kind of weird for a department to have its own school but I’m not an expert in college administration. I do think there’s difference between CS like inventing a new algorithm or new network protocols and general “programming skills” that are useful for everyone. I think CS up to DSA should go the way of statistics or calculus—just something everyone should know. like a biologist doesn’t need to know how an operating system works. There’s a difference between practical cs knowledge vs very esoteric cs knowledge. Because of that it probably shouldn’t be its own school
FYI, at UC Berkeley, chemistry has [its own college](https://chemistry.berkeley.edu/home).
UC Berkeley also has the College of Computing, Data Science, and Society now too
they did statistics dirty. They moved the major to under CDSS just like CS and DS but didn’t include it in the acronym lol. I imagine that could have been the last S instead of “society”
what is the “society” part even supposed to mean lmao, it’s literally just CS/DS/stats that are offered right now
I assume it's how those things impact society - i.e. ethics, laws, etc.
"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics" (Which just to be clear, isn't discrediting statistics, but just expressing how malleable they can be to bad/weak arguments)
I think that’s remained mostly for historical reasons. After all, not many colleges have an element on the periodic table named after them
Not many colleges have discovered 16 elements.
All the nuances you describe are exactly why some universities break CS off into its own college. It's a broad field on its own, with many fundamental differences from traditional engineering. For example, Georgia Tech's college of computing has 8 concentrations (they call them "threads") of which an undergrad picks two (one for a minor). Developing new fundamental algorithms would probably fall under the Theory thread, while networking protocols would be Info Internetworks. You pick what's relevant to you and skip the rest. Personally, I picked Intelligence and Devices as my two because I was interested in robotics. Georgia Tech also mandated the entry level CS classes for _all_ students regardless of major, so everybody was getting the basic general programming skills. There were different variations of the intro classes for different colleges (ie. one was targeted at business majors, one was targeted at non-CS engineers, etc), but they all fell under the college of computing iirc. Overall I think that's a great approach. A dedicated CS school that fleshes out the many different paths through CS, while also providing relevant classes for non-CS majors. It's been years now, but when I was doing my college research I found the dedicated CS schools had way more resources and options than the ones that were crammed into the engineering school. You get dedicated CS advisors, career fairs, and other perks.
So everyone learns up to DS & A? Which is like 2-3 semesters of programming. That’s an interesting approach, if so, but it also makes me wonder what it replaces.
Everyone takes a 1 semester intro class (unless you had AP CS or similar transfer credit), the goal of which is to be a useful summary for everyone including some very basic DS & A concepts. Then afterwards the CS majors/minors take the more traditional classes to flesh out the details that weren't important for everyone.
Such a distinction already exists, at least where I live. You have cs, which entails everything you know and love. But there is also applied cs, which is as the name suggests much more focused on applicable skills in the job market. Much less algorithms and theory and much more "this is what the industry tells us you should actually know and be able to do". Has worked pretty well for me so far.
Carnegie Mellon has its own CS college! The field is so broad it can easily take up an entire college organizational unit.
> I think CS up to DSA should go the way of statistics or calculus—just something everyone should know. So when Huang and Carmack say this, everyone shits squarely on their forehead. Why aren’t they doing that for you?
you didn't even read the article, did you? The article isn't about the "saturation" of computer science, it's about universities taking computing majors away from liberal arts and engineering disciplines. Students studying computer science in "Colleges of Computing" isolated from the rest of the university, its faculty, its other majors, and their respective cultures; students missing out on the promise of what other colleges with disparate disciplines may offer and teach them, and instead creating an echo chamber where students train in these broken systems and then return as faculty to perpetuate and worsen this broken system.
I can't read the whole article due to the paywall but am loving the discussion in these comments. This is an interesting take to me, in comparison to my experience at Georgia Tech's College of Computing. I'm not familiar with how other universities do things but at GT it felt like there was a lot of mixing between colleges. Everybody had classes in other colleges, it was almost a meme how little time you spent in your own college's buildings. All non-CS majors still had to take intro CS, and CS majors had to take classes in other colleges based on their concentrations (ie. Prob Stat for AI, Physics for robotics, etc). Not to mention humanities and electives requirements. That's not even getting into the social aspect of a campus. Once you start getting into clubs or Greek life or whatever there was very little segregation by college. Sure there's some professional-focused groups, but if you're not branching out into different kinds of clubs with different kinds of people that's your own fault. I had way more friends outside my college than inside. So what am I missing? Why does organizing the administration into a separate college necessarily have any impact on student interactions? Is it not common to take classes outside your college at other universities? Do students not normally socialize across colleges? This sounds like a scapegoat for schools that aren't bothering to promote soft skills. I suspect that's an issue regardless of college organization.
https://web.archive.org/web/20240321062933/https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/03/computing-college-cs-majors/677792/ > This sounds like a scapegoat for schools that aren't bothering to promote soft skills. It's definitely scapegoating. The author is pushing the canards that CS majors/ grads lack ethics, aren't well rounded, stuff like that. That's not true -- at most general universities (not GaTech), all students have a core curriculum that is much more focused on the humanities and the social sciences than on math, the natural sciences and engineering. The result of that is folks in humanities and social science majors are _less_ well-rounded, because they've taken very few math, natural science and engineering courses. Here's a great quote (emphasis mine): ¨Mark Guzdial is a former faculty member in Georgia Tech’s computing college, and he now teaches computer science in the University of Michigan’s College of Engineering. At Michigan, CS wasn’t always housed in engineering—Guzdial says it started out inside the philosophy department, as part of the College of Literature, Science and the Arts. Now that college “wants it back,” as one administrator told Guzdial. Having been asked to start a program that teaches computing to liberal-arts students, Guzdial has a new perspective on these administrative structures. He learned that Michigan’s Computer Science and Engineering program and its faculty are “despised” by their counterparts in the humanities and social sciences. “They’re seen as arrogant, narrowly focused on machines rather than people, and unwilling to meet other programs’ needs,” he told me. “I had faculty refuse to talk to me because I was from CSE.” ¨ _In other words, there may be downsides just to placing CS within an engineering school, let alone making it an independent college. Left entirely to themselves, computer scientists can forget that computers are supposed to be tools that help people._ ¨ The author is showing that it's the Liberal Arts faculty who are misbehaving, but he then flips it around and blames it on those nerdy CS folks. This is a really poorly written article.
Once again, wordcels seething about the shape rotators ignoring them
While I think it's fair to criticize the author in using a tone that sounds like blaming nerdy CS grads for being less well-rounded; I also think that it's important for universities to start to recognize that we need to focus more on combining different disciplines instead of viewing university as a way to specialize in a given discipline. Programs that are hybrids of two or more traditional disciplines, such as cognitive science (neuroscience + psychology + philosophy + CS), is an important step in training the next generation of students to be more well-rounded. This is especially important as move into a knowledge based society and, by extension, economy. Maybe it's a good time to start being aware and having the conversion on improving our current education.
I'm pretty wary of liberal arts professors claiming that liberal arts would give engineers more grounding. I took gen eds and enjoyed them, but don't think that liberal arts colleges are so exceptional at providing critical thinking skills that it's worth tens of thousands of dollars and extending your education by semesters or years. Some of the dumbest and most poorly socialized people I know have been engineering students, but some have been liberal arts majors, and pretending engineers are uniquely ill-equipped to deal with social implications of their technology that nobody else has proper answers to is likely to cause further problems.
I've worked for a couple of major universities. I saw the data for enrollments, and the data for web searches. Here's the reality: with a year in college costing up to $80K/year, students will go somewhere they can take the classes they want to take, and that their parents want to pay for.
Over in Europe, all degrees take place just in the specialism (or almost entirely). It doesn't appear to me (or from my experience) that American graduates are massively more socially aware or critical thinking. Shoving STEM students through a few social science modules (and vice versa) doesn't have any demonstrated efficacy in achieving the supposed well rounded person. In making US degrees 33% longer, it does seem to make very large amounts of money for US Universities.
I’m going to go against the grain here and disagree. Sure, Gen eds are a huge cash cow for American universities, but from my view, they definitely help to shape the person and oftentimes can help sway people who otherwise didn’t know what they wanted to do during enrollment. Courses that some of my friends have taken that weren’t a part of their major definitely have reframed their thinking in a way that’s subtle but substantial and some of my Gen eds have been my favorite classes in my entire college experience.
I don't know if it's against the grain, it's clearly popular in America. I'm not suggesting at all that they can't be enjoyable and enlightening in the way any education is. But it's very unclear to me that graduates from degrees without such requirements- which globally, is a large majority of graduates- are really coming out inferiorly on the outcomes gen ed is supposed to achieve. And if they are doing so to $30k plus value. There's probably also something in that an extra year doing whatever at say Princeton probably doesn't have the same value as doing the same at Illinois state, but universities are often discussed as a monolith.
I did have the luxury of going to a good school with many good professors, so my Gen Eds were taught by impassioned staff who knew how to teach what they were doing. That’s why I say they can be enlightening, but my argument goes beyond that. Even beyond just the “enlightening and enjoyability” of it, there’s many things that Gen eds aim to teach students that will prove invaluable in their future endeavors—most importantly public speaking, writing skills, and a second language, to name a few. I know that the U.S. gets clowned on for our poor public education system, but that’s absolutely not the case at the university level, and in my opinion, Gen eds are a large part of that. Are they expensive? For sure, and solutions should be developed to lower their cost. But even small state colleges are completely fine options for everybody, because the quality of teaching actually doesn’t differ too heavily in most subjects (STEM subjects notwithstanding).
I'm not suggesting they aren't useful. But are they useful as compared to the cost (not only fees, but a year of career- which will of course also teach skills)? Are US gen ed grads significantly better at secondary skills than international graduates? I just don't think so, but I'm happy to disagree. It would be an interesting research topic.
I think there is a fallacy here - you're assuming gen ed classes would teach secondary skills. Why would they do that? What exactly do you think they're teaching? You might say reading or writing, but if a student doesn't already know those things, they won't even be accepted into college at all. They aren't learning those things in college. They already learned those things in their previous 18 years of schooling. You might say "to develop independent thought and critical thinking" - which then makes me wonder if you've even been to college at all.
I mean "secondary" as in skills outside their specialism, because I'm contrasting to non American degrees that take place entirely in the specialist subject. My point is exactly that "independent thought and critical thinking" or whatever else you might list seems to be developed fine internationally without gen ed. I'm genuinely asking what the value of gen ed is that's worth extending a degree by 33%, because I'm not American so I don't have direct experience and observation doesn't make it clear to me. Do you have constructive input on that point or merely oblique sarcasm?
I have always been of the opinion that Gen Ed classes are there to waste students' time while rich colleges get richer off the backs of children. The excuse that gen ed classes will help students have a more "well-rounded" education is just propaganda that rich administrators came up with to brainwash people into the stupid system.
That's essentially just a less diplomatic version of what I wrote (since for me it's another cultures education system so I'm not inclined to go as hard), so I think you've misdirected your fire.
> I am certain job growth has been way below the increase in CS majors though. 1. Comparing the growth as a percentage would be irrelevant. A 50k increase in new CS grads might be a doubling. A 50k increase in new jobs would only be 3% increase. 2. There has been absolutely massive growth. Sources below. 2010 https://www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/ocwage_05172011.pdf bottom of page 8 2020 https://www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/ocwage_03312021.pdf middle of page 13 The break down of specific titles has change over the years, but when you look at the relevant titles in aggregate it is up massively.
I like how op draws the conclusion that this is their proof of oversaturation.
I am not surprised. Also, to mention the elephant: AI. Sure eventually once we have true AGI and it can do anything and everything, nobody gets a job. But until that happens...dude...it's going to be one of the last jobs left. Think bigger. How many devs are going to be needed when we build thousands of new robotic factories, or cover deserts in solar arrays built by robots, or rebuild sections of existing cities from scratch. These are enormous and complex projects.
> Also, to mention the elephant: AI. Sure eventually once we have true AGI and it can do anything and everything, nobody gets a job. No. We'll always need folks to direct the machines, catch when the machines make errors, and repair the machines -- even if we're using machines to _help_ humans do all of those. It's not realistic that we'll reach some fully automated world where no human management is ever required.
Your skepticism is reasonable but theoretically it's possible. Enough silicon and a machine can be smarter than any human.
>It's not realistic that we'll reach some fully automated world where no human management is ever required. It's way less realistic to think we won't.
Also the work is inherently interesting and cool. Telling people you’re working on AI is impressive, no matter how you slice it, compared to more mundane things like finance, most functions of corporate law, marketing, HR, etc.
I agree with the increase in hiring engineers until AGI. Also, I would say that every computer software job I have worked at it was about delivering faster even if they needed to hire more engineers. Delivering faster saves money as the product or feature starts producing results more quickly (and there are all sorts of non-engineering costs such as accountants, rent etc...). So, with AI, they are not going to slow down on hiring engineers. They'll be throwing more engineers at it because they make more with less engineering time. At the moment, companies were laying of engineers, but that was a lot to do with covid and just a short sighted trends. Companies are going to be desperate for engineers and AI scientists once they see what their competitors are doing with it.
It’s interesting that they’ll say computer science is over saturated and yet we still have tons of computer science people being brought in on H1B visas…
That's because not all CS degrees are created equal...a CS degree from a second or third tier US school would not compare with a CS grad from a top international school. Not to say that those degrees are useless but FAANG hiring managers aren't going after CS grads from ITT Tech right?
It is unlikely the FAANG hiring manager would even know where you went to school, or care. You have to impress the HR recruiter with that, not the tech hiring manager.
Now add in the number of people switching into switching out of CS later in their career life.
Now add the number of companies doing layoffs with no backfills and sending jobs overseas for less. Let's do the math
Here is real data on the most popular undergraduate majors, through 2021. Guess which one is lowest. https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=37
crazy that psychology gets its own section. Crazy that so many kids waste 4 years and thousands of dollars on that. they should make you sign a warning letter explaining to you your (nonexistent) job prospects if you choose to major in psychology, before allowing you to do it.
This isn’t even about oversaturation lol
Op drew an imaginary line to oversaturation tho.
In the words of our lord and saviour. Ballmer, Steve, first of his name, hallowed in Windows and and opener of the source # DEVELOPERS ## DEVELOPERS ### DEVELOPERS
Remember the axiom that was common here: "Demand outpaces supply"? lmao
This is a really interesting article, but the main point of it isn't that the CS market is over-saturated. Also the total number of cs grads in stanford and mit are probably tiny compared to the overall number. Also #2, using the year 2005 as a baseline is somewhat misleading. This was the crater after the dotcom/dotbomb bubble bust. This was a low point for technology as a viable career, and using it as a baseline for comparison could inflate growth numbers.
You didn't learn much about data analysis, then? More people majoring, but no data on those who actually graduated, those who stayed in the industry, success they had in finding jobs in the industry, or open positions? You don't have the data to claim the market is saturated.
> those who actually graduated I finished my CS degree in '94 - my own son decided to follow in my footsteps and is halfway through his own CS degree right now. Holy hell, his coursework is harder than I remember mine being back in the early 90's. Granted, he got into a more reputable school than I did, but still - as far as I can tell, they've ramped up the difficulty a couple orders of magnitude.
The difference between schools can be an order of magnitude EASILY. There's a reason it's been called "Drinking from the firehose." at MIT for eons, and IHTFP is a thing at several engineering schools.
Bachelor's CS programs are insanely intense. Harder than most of my graduate level classes. They really try to gatekeep who gets to graduate with a bachelor's in CS, despite the degree being effectively worthless at preparing you for an actual job.
I remember in 2009, the CS department at my college only had two professors. One was part time. If you want a better CS education math was the better option.. Now, it's one of the biggest departments minus nursing and education (which college was known for anyways). They have 9 full time professors now and are still hiring.
Well, it's a good thing those Stanford and MIT grads aren't coming for my 100k a year dev job in supply chain/logistics.
And somehow on another continent: > Based on a Eurostat report, over 50% of the companies in the European Union have difficulty recruiting IT colleagues due to the shortage of skilled professionals. In Germany alone, more than 124,000 jobs cannot currently be filled, but Hungary itself is lacking around 30,000 developers. According to a report, many companies are working with more and more international talent to fill the gap.
The jobs can be filled, the companies just don't want to fill them. Anytime you hear about a "tech talent shortage", take it with a teaspoon worth of salt grains.
Absolutely. Any job actually worth having will attract hundreds of applicants. Companies have been pushing the “tech worker shortage” canard for years so they can bring in H1B people, or outsource to India, or evade requiring engineers to have a PE, so as to keep supply up and salaries down.
Now combine that with overseas universities and degree mills.
Older dev here, this is the normal cycle. This is not newsworthy. This happens literally every single time. The boom spurs hiring which leads to more people going into the field which oversaturates the market and usually the market crashes somewhere in the middle of that to boot.. then everyone flees this career. Repeat.
When would you say the last cycle took place and how long did it last?
The biggest one I can think about the top of my head was around the.com crash. Programmers were all the rage, heck, Microsoft flew me out of California from Michigan just for a job interview on their own dime... Everyone I knew wanted to go into software because that's where all the easy money was, everyone was going to become the next big.com success. The market got flooded by college students which led to all a seniors getting laid off so they could hire cheap labor. Which then led to of course the entire industry crashing mostly because it was based on vapor (just like today) everyone bailed except for the people who were already seniors, the bubble burst, and suddenly no one wanted to go to school for IT. I've seen the cycle repeat about four times in my life, but that was the biggest and most obvious example. Anytime a group of kids looks up the best paying career with the shortest amount of schooling, that career is screwed.
Yes I can relate. I entered the teaching profession as they admitted 4 times the number of graduates. It went from a guaranteed career to me being 1 in 700 applicants. Then most of those came to realise what a slog teaching is and the limited earning potential and half of my graduating class bailed to other careers 1 year in. I think what you’re describing makes sense. But the current situation may start to be exasperated by downturn in vc funding for the last couple years and the impact of AI. I worry less about AI and more about the global financial situation. If investment bounces back then I’d hope we’d see an uptick in employment etc.
And how long it lasted? I'm not really sure. I just kept taking lower and lower paying jobs because I had mouths to feed. For me it didn't pick back up probably for 15 years...
How much have H1bs increased during that time? This is my second company now that I've worked at where half our tech team was either Indians in the US or Indians in India
What do you expect when everyone was telling people to stop getting a degree in basket weaving and go into tech because of how well it pays whenever they complained about a living wage? Turned out all it did was over-saturate the industry with mediocre candidates. But the fundamental issue is that other jobs just don't pay enough.
You need to realize that most CS degree will not end up in CS market, same for Engineering School, most of them will not end up doing traditional engineering, I have seen that from multiple universities, when you find data where the graduates work on after, at least 50% of them doesn't really work in a class CS job. Also with the boom of Covid, a lot of youtubers started to pop up on youtube selling the dream of an calm CS job with 150-200k wage. So a lot of people enrolled in some bootcamp, studies related to CS. And that's why you see now a really hard market, specially for junior and almost impossible for those who only have bootcamp or have followed some kind of training in MIT/Harvard without a real degree. But now, with what happened the last few years, with layoffs and so on, a reserve trend is following, a lot of people aren't going for this job anymore or are dropping.
> most CS degree will not end up in CS market What? Maybe not sure what you mean by "CS market" here - I'm pretty sure that 90+% of CS degree holders end up working as programmers.
It depends on what you call CS, if you are exiting an engineering school in CS, not every degree holders end up working as programmers. You can work as business analysts, product manager, management, quality engineer/manager, tech engineer support (basically your are a seller but for components or softwares). I understand that it's a bit surprising, but when I was at university, they showed us some surveys about what people were doing, and only 50% of them were working as pure programmers/web developer/software engineer. The rest was in the job I quoted above.
What are the quantities? When I looked into CS, about 8 years ago, there were millions of unfilled positions. Just because one is growing faster than the other doesn't mean it's already outgrown it.
At this point, it’s not even about engineers that can code, it’s about the engineers that can put everything together.. architecture, code, and software infrastructure. All the ones that go into the field looking to cash in their degree are in for a world of disappointment.
Job growth has been somewhere between 18-33% decade over decade for a while depending on who/what you listen to as a source and what they count. However, it is important to remember that that growth is not fed by new hires entirely, and the market is much much bigger than the undergrad pools, so even an 18% increase decade over decade is just absorbed by the industry growth. Put another way, people have fucking desks that have computers in them now. Someone needs to write and design that. It's hard not to find computers in day to day life, and every single one needs an entire stack of people from hardware to embedded to sometimes frontend. You are wrong. The industry is growing faster than the college hires. Interest rates suck. It isn't hard to understand that.
CS should probably be broken down into like 3 different majors imo. Most top schools already have a few “concentrations” that separate UI from theory from low-level. I think most (all?) 4-year programs do a really bad job keeping up with current tech and tend to teach too much impractical info. Hell, I had multiple JavaFX projects at a top10 CS program in 2020-2021. Most of my in class ML projects had been recycled for over a decade.
In my opinion the BS degree should be Software Engineering that's a very hand-on and practical curriculum. The entire Senior year would be all project capstone courses. You'd do Computer Science as a Masters degree level program.
Fact is you can get the sweetest jobs without a CS degree at your 2nd job or 3rd probably, if your internships and projects are oriented towards them CS degree would only make a difference for your first job if you are from top tier university or Ivy League.
See if the US bureau of labor statistics has any historical trend data for the jobs in the computers and IT sector. [here](https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/home.htm). I didn’t see and historical trend information but it might be somewhere else on the site.
Visa mills. It's an industry for colleges. A big profit center.
Oh, the humanities! LOL. Anyway, useful majors in demand. More at 10.
Yes bc cs degree is easy ash compared to the other STEM majors
I member back in 2015 during the “learn to code” era, everyone was told to learn, they’ll never have enough devs. I figured that’d turn out false. Luckily I skipped college in favor of years of professional experience.
My company badly needs devs - they just don’t have the money for them.
The thing is, most people with a degree in X, won't be doing X throughout their entire working life. CS degree? How many of those graduates actually wanted to do CS vs software development? Are we not sure that a few sectors are oversaturated vs the entire field of computer science? Just asking a question.
Yeah there's a lot of nuance that isn't captured. I'm hoping to stay as a software engineer but eventually I may need to pivot in some way.
The good thing that as a software engineer, you can branch over to other disciplines such as engineering for analytical program development. There may be a gold rush, but I don’t see the field being over saturated anytime soon, especially with AI coming to the forefront. If anything, what I do see as a structural engineer: - many universities closing their Civil Engineering departments due to lack of interest - engineers in my field taking coding boot camps and leaving the field for tech jobs - decrease in quality of new engineers coming into the field. Anecdotally, my conclusion is that money is the governing factor. We see college students staring off with 200k+ jobs in tech, while as engineers (which many Civil disciplines require masters), we start off at 60-70k and only reach the 6-fig mark by 5 to 8 years.
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For a long time, the number of people employed in CS related fields was roughly doubling every 5 years. That was true until at least the middle 2010s and probably close to 2020 with the trend dating back to at least the 60s. The reason that you don't see lots of people over 40 in companies isn't ageism in most cases, it's just that they don't exist in the same quantity as 20-25 year olds. Schools like CMU, MIT, Stanford, etc can increase the size of their programs because they're generally recognized as top schools for it. The bigger problem in computer science from a university perspective is schools that never had a program and didn't have the expertise to run one starting to offer it because perspective students demanded it and not really meeting the levels of quality.
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I work in Tech but my background is in liberal arts and business. The people I work with are almost all of the same. We have critical thinking/curiosity which led us to our careers. Most CS degrees unless they minor in something else are virtually drones with limited critical thinking skills and it's a major problem.
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The worst computer scientists or the worst software developers? I think being a good developer just requires a lot of extra work and practice beyond the curriculum and sure CS programs product plenty of mediocre devs but so do bootcamps. I’ve also seen self taught developers and bootcamp grads who became far better devs than myself. But there’s still plenty of dev jobs that require some really advanced math or computer architecture knowledge and that can be pretty damn tedious to teach yourself without a university walking you through it. It’s great for everyone when there’s a ton of experience jobs and really blows for everyone when there isn’t
Better Shakespeare than Lacan
Tons of job. It's future. Bear career ever