6 ms·

Computer science enrollments soared 30% last year

49 points by samkline 14y ago

christiangenco 14y ago
Supply/demand.
- 31reasons 14y ago
  The market is working hard to keep the developer salaries under 6 figures :)
ams6110 14y ago
Anecdotally, as a part-time sysadmin at a university I've seen more than a few examples of "students" in a computer science Master's degree program who are obviously in it for the perceived job opportunities. But they don't seem to actually care about the subject. They copy and paste code from google search results and if it doesn't work they are helpless. They don't make any effort to understand what is happening or why, or how to resolve their problems. They just complain that the systems "aren't working." Something as simple as generating an ssh key pair and using it for authentication leaves them completely bamboozled. By their questions it is clear that most haven't bothered to learn anything about it. They don't care about security, performance, best practices, or anything but completing their problem sets and projects and getting their degree. I don't understand the thinking in getting into a career field that you have no intrinsic interest in. And how they think they are going to get past even a half-hearted technical interview is beyond me.
- ominous_prime 14y ago
  Years ago in a university IT dept, I'd have to occasionaly serve copyright violation take-downs (we would handle them internally, and just remove the offending matter from the network. No one was ever outed). One time, looking for a machine serving up some movies or something, I tracked it down to a graduate student office, in a _network systems_ lab. When I finally found the grad student owner of said server, he was comletely dumbfounded that I could physically locate the machine by its IP address.
- shubhamjain 14y ago
  Whats your country? I thought that was scenario of only India.
  - gems 14y ago
    I can say this happens with undergrads at UC Berkeley.
    - rizzom5000 14y ago
      That's scary. Berkeley CS is one of the more selective programs in the US. Aren't the Intro to CS courses supposed to weed the fakers out?
      - chaostheory 14y ago
        I think the weed out classes work in general. There are a few (very few) that get by with extra help from their peers though i.e. cheating.
      - m_ke 14y ago
        It has nothing to do with fakers and everything to do with deadlines. When you have 3 large projects due each week and about a 100 pages of assigned reading it gets hard to find the time to dig around for details on trivial stuff that isn't working.
      - gems 14y ago
        They weed the people who don't want to do the work for the classes. That's all. The classes don't necessarily teach practical things. There are only 2-3 classes you have to take which involve "heavy" programming: data structures, operating systems, and the intro course which used to be based on SICP (if that doesn't count, pick one from the required breadth). Ironically, if you take the software engineering course here, you can end up in a group where your entire role is "testing". About a third of the upper division CS classes involve minimal to no programming whatsoever. There are also plenty of nontechnical classes you can take outside of the department which count towards the major. Also this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5347363 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5347363
- socialist_coder 14y ago
  Big ancient companies who can afford to heavily manage and baby sit their programmers can use people like that. Not everyone needs to be a "rock star" in order to contribute.
- barry-cotter 14y ago
  I don't understand the thinking in getting into a career field that you have no intrinsic interest in. Think of all the people, more or less all of them driven, successful and highly intelligent who go into finance each year. How many of them are in it for pecuniary reasons? Most people get a job as a means of getting money, are to greater or lesser degrees alienated from their labour and are not achieving peak actualisation or anything close to it in their work. Those who do are living the dream and if you don't know anyone who does so it hardly seems a plausible goal, does it?
tokenadult 14y ago
This reminds me of a story that I heard last summer, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4603414 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4603414 later confirmed here on HN by the hiring supervisor who observed the problem, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4919749 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4919749 that many CS grads, even CS grads with master's degrees, can't get through a hiring screen that includes the question, "Write a loop that displays the numbers 1 to 100." Yes, something that simple is something too hard for many computer science graduates who are seeking jobs after graduation. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why you can't suppose that a computer science degree indicates ANYTHING about a job applicant's suitability to work for you. If you want to hire a programmer who will program well for you, test the job applicant's programming skill during the hiring process by having the applicant do a sample of the work you expect the programmer to do after the programmer is hired. In general, for hiring for any job, don't worry about degrees, but be sure to ask for a work-sample test. References for why it's a good idea to hire on the basis of work-sample testing rather than on the basis of college degrees can be found in my extensive FAQ on the subject, written for Hacker News threads about hiring. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4613543 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4613543 LAST EDIT: As I expected, people still don't believe this story. I thought it was rather amazing when I heard it. But, with further thought, I've decided that this really is an empirical issue. It may be that some jobs have less drawing power, and attract mostly applicants who are trying to get a green card to stay in the United States. (That seems to be one thing going on in the applicant pool for the job that had the hiring process, with two computers sharing screen views over the Internet as the applicant worked on the problem, described here.) The way to find out what applicants to the job you offer can do is to put them to a work-sample test, realistic for the job you want done. I hear that FizzBuzz is still screening out a LOT of applicants for some jobs, http://www.globalnerdy.com/2012/11/15/fizzbuzz-still-works/ http://www.globalnerdy.com/2012/11/15/fizzbuzz-still-works/ but FizzBuzz isn't a lot harder than "write a for loop," and certainly ought to be a job test that any CS graduate could pass. Try the people who next come to your workplace looking for a job, and see what they can do.
- vitno 14y ago
  I was just the TA for a CS class. I don't know any students, even the ones who struggle the most in the Introductory CS sequence, who can't do that. I'd say even those that failed the course can probably do that...
jacques_chester 14y ago
I suspect it'll be like the dotcom bubble: zillions of students signing up because they heard you can get rich this way (and by happy coincidence you don't need the high scores needed to get into law or medicine). Eventually there's a popping noise and such folk leave the industry for sunnier pastures. The rest of us go back to being wildly unpopular and bickering amongst ourselves about the finer points of ... well, everything.
- mitchi 14y ago
  hehehe, that sums it up :)
- invalidOrTaken 14y ago
  Here's a question: Imagine this new bubble has just popped, 5 or 50 years from now. What do people looking to both learn something of substance and be highly compensated for it study? Biotech? Engineering? Materials science?
  - RougeFemme 14y ago
    Possibly something that most of us haven't thought of/aren't aware of currently.
  - jacques_chester 14y ago
    I don't feel qualified to predict what professions will be well compensated in 50 years. Some of them don't exist yet. 5 years? Still no idea.
  - wissler 14y ago
    Ideally look at the kinds of problems that are difficult and important and that we have a long way to go in, such as nanotech, biotech, and materials science. Compensation ought to be more or less irrelevant, you just want to do something worthwhile and get paid enough that you can keep doing it.
    - barry-cotter 14y ago
null_ptr 14y ago
How many of them will go through all four years and complete the degree? Based on experience from my undergrad, quite a few switch majors after 1st or 2nd year, and most of those who stick with it purposefully choose the absolute minimum CS/math that's required by the major, so that alone should give you an idea about the quality of most grads.
kirinan 14y ago
Computer Science is a very interesting degree. Having done the program myself, you learn math you will never use* and ton of other things that can be counted as useless, however I am better for it. Calculus taught me less about how to do Calculus (I don't remember how to do an integral, but I don't get paid to do that), but it did teach me how to study properly and that grinding (hard work) really can solve some issues you have. Discrete Mathematics taught me to look deeper into things, and not just observe the first thing you see as the conclusion. Overall, I went into Computer Science wanting to learn how to program and left not learning how to code from the program (I worked full time as a software engineer through school) but I learned valuable skills that have helped me get where I am today. If you are thinking about not going to college (college is not for everyone*), I suggest you do. College isnt about what books can teach you (you can read those), its about the experiences that you gain (like my stories above), the people you meet and the bonds that you make. That is what makes it all worth it!
- adambom 14y ago
  In my experience, Comp Sci grads are among the best prepared employees that we hire for programming careers. It's a great general-purpose education for the kind of work we do, although it's no substitute for hard-gained experience.
- learc83 14y ago
  I'm going back to for a CS degree after a 6 year hiatus. I completed about 90 hours of a history degree before I dropped out to start programming. Going back has made me rethink almost every negative thing I've ever said about college (at least with respect to STEM programs). The contrast in what I'm doing now and the history degree I was going for before is completely night and day. The difference in rigor between the departments (same school for both) is shocking. The biggest specific difference is that Computer Science feels like a coherent program, where each class builds on the previous ones, whereas history felt like I was just taking a bunch of loosely associated classes with no overall goal.
- purplelobster 14y ago
  I don't get this at all. I need my understanding of calculus, trig, discrete mathematics, probability/stats and especially linear algebra. Then again I do computer vision, but even building web apps (that do something non-trivial) in my spare time I end up using that knowledge. Basically, build trivial stuff (simple UIs and a RoR backend?) and you probably don't need math. For anything else, you'll be stuck without it. If you can't follow a research paper in computer science or some domain knowledge needed for the job, then you won't be able to do your job.
chewxy 14y ago
I wonder what the attrition rate would be.
ovoxo 14y ago
I honestly wonder how many were influenced by movie The Social Network.
- Trezoid 14y ago
  Or the billion dollar purchase of instagram. People hear "A billion dollars" and immediately want in to whatever got someone that much money.
aed 14y ago
I'm really starting to wonder if we're in a "developer bubble." Everyone wants to learn to code. Every other week there's a blog post on "why everyone should learn to code." Last year, NYC Mayor Bloomberg posted his new years resolution was to learn to code[0]. Soaring enrollments is just another sign. [0] https://twitter.com/Codecademy/status/155038379216609280 https://twitter.com/Codecademy/status/155038379216609280
- ebiester 14y ago
  We're seeing the start again. It's happened before. Talk to some of the old timers who were there for the early 1990s before the web. Eventually, businesses are going to have their must-do bespoke applications done, or there will be enough powerful packaged applications that do what all these bespoke apps are doing now. And we'll again have a mass migration from tech, until the next great thing comes along. I think of it as a series of gold rushes. The good news is I think we may have a good 40 years before the gravy train runs out.
31reasons 14y ago
I think if you are not a super talented programmer, software development could be the least rewarding of most high skill professions unless you augment those skills with the skills from other fields.
aortega 14y ago
Protip: Computer science is not coding. Also it is not a science, it is a branch of math.
capkutay 14y ago
Many students take one or two classes before they realize its not like any subject they have encountered before and inability to independently figure out difficult problems leads to F's in the class.
obstacle1 14y ago
Measuring enrollments has always been not-so-useful in CS. Let's wait and see if 2016 attrition skyrocket in tandem with 2012 enrolments, as I suspect will happen.
drucken 14y ago
"Fashions" like these are disasterous. Many of those students do not realise that a straight mathematics degree has been proven for many decades to be far more valuable, flexible in a larger variety of careers, and even significantly more enjoyable (across the breadth of a career) until it is far too late. The only silver lining is that the US university system is remarkably flexible and so being able to change major(s) reduces the risks somewhat.

49 points by samkline 14y ago

christiangenco 14y ago

Supply/demand.

31reasons 14y ago
The market is working hard to keep the developer salaries under 6 figures :)

ams6110 14y ago

Anecdotally, as a part-time sysadmin at a university I've seen more than a few examples of "students" in a computer science Master's degree program who are obviously in it for the perceived job opportunities. But they don't seem to actually care about the subject. They copy and paste code from google search results and if it doesn't work they are helpless. They don't make any effort to understand what is happening or why, or how to resolve their problems. They just complain that the systems "aren't working." Something as simple as generating an ssh key pair and using it for authentication leaves them completely bamboozled. By their questions it is clear that most haven't bothered to learn anything about it. They don't care about security, performance, best practices, or anything but completing their problem sets and projects and getting their degree. I don't understand the thinking in getting into a career field that you have no intrinsic interest in. And how they think they are going to get past even a half-hearted technical interview is beyond me.

ominous_prime 14y ago
Years ago in a university IT dept, I'd have to occasionaly serve copyright violation take-downs (we would handle them internally, and just remove the offending matter from the network. No one was ever outed). One time, looking for a machine serving up some movies or something, I tracked it down to a graduate student office, in a _network systems_ lab. When I finally found the grad student owner of said server, he was comletely dumbfounded that I could physically locate the machine by its IP address.
shubhamjain 14y ago
Whats your country? I thought that was scenario of only India.
- gems 14y ago
  I can say this happens with undergrads at UC Berkeley.
  - rizzom5000 14y ago
    That's scary. Berkeley CS is one of the more selective programs in the US. Aren't the Intro to CS courses supposed to weed the fakers out?
    - chaostheory 14y ago
      I think the weed out classes work in general. There are a few (very few) that get by with extra help from their peers though i.e. cheating.
    - m_ke 14y ago
      It has nothing to do with fakers and everything to do with deadlines. When you have 3 large projects due each week and about a 100 pages of assigned reading it gets hard to find the time to dig around for details on trivial stuff that isn't working.
    - gems 14y ago
      They weed the people who don't want to do the work for the classes. That's all. The classes don't necessarily teach practical things. There are only 2-3 classes you have to take which involve "heavy" programming: data structures, operating systems, and the intro course which used to be based on SICP (if that doesn't count, pick one from the required breadth). Ironically, if you take the software engineering course here, you can end up in a group where your entire role is "testing". About a third of the upper division CS classes involve minimal to no programming whatsoever. There are also plenty of nontechnical classes you can take outside of the department which count towards the major. Also this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5347363 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5347363
socialist_coder 14y ago
Big ancient companies who can afford to heavily manage and baby sit their programmers can use people like that. Not everyone needs to be a "rock star" in order to contribute.
barry-cotter 14y ago
I don't understand the thinking in getting into a career field that you have no intrinsic interest in. Think of all the people, more or less all of them driven, successful and highly intelligent who go into finance each year. How many of them are in it for pecuniary reasons? Most people get a job as a means of getting money, are to greater or lesser degrees alienated from their labour and are not achieving peak actualisation or anything close to it in their work. Those who do are living the dream and if you don't know anyone who does so it hardly seems a plausible goal, does it?

tokenadult 14y ago

This reminds me of a story that I heard last summer, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4603414 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4603414 later confirmed here on HN by the hiring supervisor who observed the problem, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4919749 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4919749 that many CS grads, even CS grads with master's degrees, can't get through a hiring screen that includes the question, "Write a loop that displays the numbers 1 to 100." Yes, something that simple is something too hard for many computer science graduates who are seeking jobs after graduation. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why you can't suppose that a computer science degree indicates ANYTHING about a job applicant's suitability to work for you. If you want to hire a programmer who will program well for you, test the job applicant's programming skill during the hiring process by having the applicant do a sample of the work you expect the programmer to do after the programmer is hired. In general, for hiring for any job, don't worry about degrees, but be sure to ask for a work-sample test. References for why it's a good idea to hire on the basis of work-sample testing rather than on the basis of college degrees can be found in my extensive FAQ on the subject, written for Hacker News threads about hiring. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4613543 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4613543 LAST EDIT: As I expected, people still don't believe this story. I thought it was rather amazing when I heard it. But, with further thought, I've decided that this really is an empirical issue. It may be that some jobs have less drawing power, and attract mostly applicants who are trying to get a green card to stay in the United States. (That seems to be one thing going on in the applicant pool for the job that had the hiring process, with two computers sharing screen views over the Internet as the applicant worked on the problem, described here.) The way to find out what applicants to the job you offer can do is to put them to a work-sample test, realistic for the job you want done. I hear that FizzBuzz is still screening out a LOT of applicants for some jobs, http://www.globalnerdy.com/2012/11/15/fizzbuzz-still-works/ http://www.globalnerdy.com/2012/11/15/fizzbuzz-still-works/ but FizzBuzz isn't a lot harder than "write a for loop," and certainly ought to be a job test that any CS graduate could pass. Try the people who next come to your workplace looking for a job, and see what they can do.

vitno 14y ago
I was just the TA for a CS class. I don't know any students, even the ones who struggle the most in the Introductory CS sequence, who can't do that. I'd say even those that failed the course can probably do that...

jacques_chester 14y ago

I suspect it'll be like the dotcom bubble: zillions of students signing up because they heard you can get rich this way (and by happy coincidence you don't need the high scores needed to get into law or medicine). Eventually there's a popping noise and such folk leave the industry for sunnier pastures. The rest of us go back to being wildly unpopular and bickering amongst ourselves about the finer points of ... well, everything.

mitchi 14y ago
hehehe, that sums it up :)
invalidOrTaken 14y ago
Here's a question: Imagine this new bubble has just popped, 5 or 50 years from now. What do people looking to both learn something of substance and be highly compensated for it study? Biotech? Engineering? Materials science?
- RougeFemme 14y ago
  Possibly something that most of us haven't thought of/aren't aware of currently.
- jacques_chester 14y ago
  I don't feel qualified to predict what professions will be well compensated in 50 years. Some of them don't exist yet. 5 years? Still no idea.
- wissler 14y ago
  Ideally look at the kinds of problems that are difficult and important and that we have a long way to go in, such as nanotech, biotech, and materials science. Compensation ought to be more or less irrelevant, you just want to do something worthwhile and get paid enough that you can keep doing it.
  - barry-cotter 14y ago

null_ptr 14y ago

How many of them will go through all four years and complete the degree? Based on experience from my undergrad, quite a few switch majors after 1st or 2nd year, and most of those who stick with it purposefully choose the absolute minimum CS/math that's required by the major, so that alone should give you an idea about the quality of most grads.

kirinan 14y ago

Computer Science is a very interesting degree. Having done the program myself, you learn math you will never use* and ton of other things that can be counted as useless, however I am better for it. Calculus taught me less about how to do Calculus (I don't remember how to do an integral, but I don't get paid to do that), but it did teach me how to study properly and that grinding (hard work) really can solve some issues you have. Discrete Mathematics taught me to look deeper into things, and not just observe the first thing you see as the conclusion. Overall, I went into Computer Science wanting to learn how to program and left not learning how to code from the program (I worked full time as a software engineer through school) but I learned valuable skills that have helped me get where I am today. If you are thinking about not going to college (college is not for everyone*), I suggest you do. College isnt about what books can teach you (you can read those), its about the experiences that you gain (like my stories above), the people you meet and the bonds that you make. That is what makes it all worth it!

adambom 14y ago
In my experience, Comp Sci grads are among the best prepared employees that we hire for programming careers. It's a great general-purpose education for the kind of work we do, although it's no substitute for hard-gained experience.
learc83 14y ago
I'm going back to for a CS degree after a 6 year hiatus. I completed about 90 hours of a history degree before I dropped out to start programming. Going back has made me rethink almost every negative thing I've ever said about college (at least with respect to STEM programs). The contrast in what I'm doing now and the history degree I was going for before is completely night and day. The difference in rigor between the departments (same school for both) is shocking. The biggest specific difference is that Computer Science feels like a coherent program, where each class builds on the previous ones, whereas history felt like I was just taking a bunch of loosely associated classes with no overall goal.
purplelobster 14y ago
I don't get this at all. I need my understanding of calculus, trig, discrete mathematics, probability/stats and especially linear algebra. Then again I do computer vision, but even building web apps (that do something non-trivial) in my spare time I end up using that knowledge. Basically, build trivial stuff (simple UIs and a RoR backend?) and you probably don't need math. For anything else, you'll be stuck without it. If you can't follow a research paper in computer science or some domain knowledge needed for the job, then you won't be able to do your job.

chewxy 14y ago

I wonder what the attrition rate would be.

ovoxo 14y ago

I honestly wonder how many were influenced by movie The Social Network.

Trezoid 14y ago
Or the billion dollar purchase of instagram. People hear "A billion dollars" and immediately want in to whatever got someone that much money.

aed 14y ago

I'm really starting to wonder if we're in a "developer bubble." Everyone wants to learn to code. Every other week there's a blog post on "why everyone should learn to code." Last year, NYC Mayor Bloomberg posted his new years resolution was to learn to code[0]. Soaring enrollments is just another sign. [0] https://twitter.com/Codecademy/status/155038379216609280 https://twitter.com/Codecademy/status/155038379216609280

ebiester 14y ago
We're seeing the start again. It's happened before. Talk to some of the old timers who were there for the early 1990s before the web. Eventually, businesses are going to have their must-do bespoke applications done, or there will be enough powerful packaged applications that do what all these bespoke apps are doing now. And we'll again have a mass migration from tech, until the next great thing comes along. I think of it as a series of gold rushes. The good news is I think we may have a good 40 years before the gravy train runs out.

31reasons 14y ago

I think if you are not a super talented programmer, software development could be the least rewarding of most high skill professions unless you augment those skills with the skills from other fields.

aortega 14y ago

Protip: Computer science is not coding. Also it is not a science, it is a branch of math.

capkutay 14y ago

Many students take one or two classes before they realize its not like any subject they have encountered before and inability to independently figure out difficult problems leads to F's in the class.

obstacle1 14y ago

Measuring enrollments has always been not-so-useful in CS. Let's wait and see if 2016 attrition skyrocket in tandem with 2012 enrolments, as I suspect will happen.

drucken 14y ago

"Fashions" like these are disasterous. Many of those students do not realise that a straight mathematics degree has been proven for many decades to be far more valuable, flexible in a larger variety of careers, and even significantly more enjoyable (across the breadth of a career) until it is far too late. The only silver lining is that the US university system is remarkably flexible and so being able to change major(s) reduces the risks somewhat.