When expensively educated, fashionable young graduates
start showing up in your field, you're in a bubble.
- Kevin Marks
I fully attribute the increase to The Social Network movie coinciding with the ballooning of Facebook's market cap. Flipping tech startups is the hot new get rich quick scheme. Just like flipping houses and subprime mortgages before it.
I think people who got into programming very early in life can be naturally condescending against those who found it later. There is some reason behind this: if you were programming Basic at 6, made your first mini game at 8, and had your first webapp in the dotcom boom at 14 you probably have a ton of programming experience that those who learned later don't have.
But, it still seems odd to me. Most fields want to encourage smart, young, undergrads to enter them. Sure, they might have shallower passion for the field at first, the point of the article was that many people were developing real love for the field.
While Stanford undergrads are expensively educated and (maybe?) fashionable, they are also incredibly smart. Most importantly, learning programming isn't like selling subprime mortgages. For someone to buy your startup you must have added some value to the world. Trading subprimes arguably does not, or has a net negative effect.
I'm not worrying. The fact that the market is being flooded with lots of (likely less skilled, because let's face it, fad majors attract fad-following types that aren't really as much interested in the subject matter as much as making money) programmers means I can charge a premium for my skills.
Edit: Of course, you better damn well be sure that your differentiation from the rookies is fairly obvious to the casual viewer of your resume.
He kind of addressed the difference between what's happening now and what happened in '99. ~10% who wanted to get rich doing it back then, versus people actually getting interested in the stuff now.
As someone who's been regularly interviewing Stanford students and grads for internships and full-time positions, it's worth pointing out that lots of these CS students don't want to program. I've been surprised at how many of them are getting a CS education as a platform for a career in product management, or even marketing.
It makes some sense, given the makeup of the companies that are exciting to work for nowadays. I think especially if you want to join an early-stage startup, there are lots of benefits to having a technical education, even if your role isn't expressly technical.
I would agree with this too. I am an undergraduate CS student at Stanford and a section leader for the introductory courses (cs106b -- Prof Roberts calls it CS2 in the post -- this quarter). I do notice quite a few kids who have consciously chosen to major in CS because it will help them with management if they want to get involved with startups and acknowledge that they don't want to code.
There are a number of other reasons I would argue though for the skyrocketing enrollment in CS here:
First, the financial meltdown has prompted a lot of kids that would have majored in things like economics or management science to get into CS.
Second, the introductory CS classes are widely considered some of the best classes here. The CS department has taken the time to hire a group of phenomenal lecturers who love what they do and who spent an incredible amount of time crafting these classes.
Third, the introductory classes offer a level of human-to-human support that is unprecedented in any other department. We use undergraduate TA's (like myself) for the intro classes. We are a lot cheaper and so there are a lot more of us than there could be graduate TA's. For example, the computer LaIR is staffed with TA's from 6pm - midnight Sunday through Thursday.
Fourth, the CS department dropped the CS140 requirement (hardcore operating systems -- the "dump your girlfriend/boyfriend before you take this class because you won't be together after" class) in favor of two more gentler systems courses. This was mostly the result of the widening breadth of subject matter in CS and requirements that the department felt did not keep up with the offerings.
Fifth, CS itself has become an incredibly diverse subject. Here there are seven concentrations within the major: artificial intelligence, theory, graphics, information, systems, biocomputation, and human-computer interaction. There is a lot of overlap between them, but those overlaps also allow students to reach into other departments to get CS credit that they wouldn't have gotten within the department (e.g. art classes, physics, bio, etc). One of my friends who is concentrating in HCI is taking all studio art this quarter.
Sixth, and perhaps most importantly, computing is becoming the platform on which a lot of other disciplines are built. It is becoming a fundamental tool, in my opinion. Look at computational linguistics and bioinformatics. Even writing papers now comes down to understanding computers... I mean, after programming a lot, you get pretty darn good at Googling, a nontrivial skill I would argue.
Ok, maybe this should have been posted as a general comment, but I'll leave it here for contextual reasons.
This sentiment is identical to what I experienced interviewing and hiring Stanford CS grads, even though it was back in 2002-2005. Not all, to be sure -- one of my top-performing college hires was a Stanford CS grad! -- but it was certainly the trend. Unlike MIT grads, who were just drooling to find a good problem and required intervention to worry about things like career trajectory, etc.
I think it's more of a cultural bias from certain universities than a global economic trend in the field.
I think it was Jon Steinberg from BuzzFeed in a recent interview with Marc Suster mentioned that the hard part of recruiting is that you find so many sales guys who really want to be a business dev guy and so many engineers who want to be a product guy. What you really need are craftsmen, which I completely agree with him on.
But beyond that, I actually want enrollments to go up even more to create even more noise and change how interviewee assessments are made. I feel like that's what it will take for recruiters and hiring managers to focus their attention on platforms where the most engaged people of their crafts are. Not in the campuses of Stanford or a smaller community college, but rather in some online forum where people of all ages and geographies interact.
YC has started this with contribution to HN being a factor of admittance, but I'd like to see more of that happening in other fields as well such as mathematics and physics while using stackoverflow, quora, disqus, etc as the platforms to find the next will hunting.
Capitalism happens? Seriously, anecdotal fresh-out-of-school salaries for talented CS people are near $100k. Anecdotal fresh-out-of-school salaries for talented English majors are near... well, they get discounted frappuchinos at any rate. This is Mr. Market saying "Thanks, I've got enough literary criticism -- can I please, please, please have more code monkeys?"
"well, they get discounted frappuchinos at any rate"
I've noted your past fixation on English majors and their lack of financial success, and not sure why you single them out. Lit crit-saddled academia and coffeeshops aren't the only path for the English major. Writing is not only a noble pursuit but a lucrative[1] one (even if you skirt the legacy publishing industry), with as much a combination of hard work and dedication to craft (and luck) as, for example, selling bingo card generators for a living, or mobile phone games, or b2b CRUD apps, or facebook farming simulators.
Aside from fiction writing, there are ad copy and marketing writers, technical writers, screen and television writers, bloggers, journos, etc. Most of those are salaried positions, not necessarily part time/contract work.
It's really not that bad out there. For the record, I've never worked at a coffeeshop :D
This kind of argument infuriates me. Mr. Market wants lots of things, some of them are good, some aren't. Besides, would a talented English major even want to be a full-time developer? Would you want to work with them?
Not everyone lives their lives according to the principles of capitalism, just consider yourself lucky that at this moment, it's working out in our favor as developers.
$100K that's utter bs. Anecdotes mean squat. Most CS graduates start at around 45-50k. Suggesting that even a a sizeable minority makes 100k out of college is being ill-informed at best and dishonest at worst. If we are talking in terms of anecdotes, I know several history majors making good money working for the city whereas some new CS majors are still working at bestbuy.
Amusingly enough, Professor Roberts was one of the two professors in charge of IHUM 58, my fall quarter "Introduction to the Humanities" class at Stanford. He was quite clear in stating that writing and being able to communicate your ideas was pivotally important, even to someone majoring in a technical field. While an English major may not lead to vast riches, everyone (including CS majors) can benefit from the analytical writing skills taught in "fuzzy" classes.
I think he's trying to argue that there's something more basic at work here where there's a fundamental value to computing science that is finally being realized by the world, and any drops will not be due to lack of interest in computing science, nor a dip in high-tech industries.
No kidding. Why is it scary to study CS for pecuniary reasons? I find it more appalling that the author glorifies "doing computer science" as a life goal. Self.profession != most important profession.
Most importantly, I think everyone who's willing to work hard enough to learn to program deserves the opportunity to earn dev wages.
If the theoretical CS courses are brimming with dollar-seekers, Stanford can add more practical programming courses. Everyone wins.
Who are we kidding. This is a symptom of the economy. There is money in software.
What does the economy of the future look like? Millions and millions of programmers. Manipulating technology is where value comes from and software is the most efficient way to manipulate technology.
I just hope we have enough robotics and computer engineering people to improve the platforms all these programmers are going to work on.
The web browser is pretty limited in its ability to improve human life. We need other platforms to target.
The same thing appears to be happening here at the University of Chicago -- increased numbers of undergraduates in the sequence as well as greatly increased Ph.D. student applications over the last couple of years. And not just money-grubbers in the undergrads as well; many refuse to interview with the previous staples for our graduates -- the finance industry here in Chicago or "big companies" such as Google and Facebook (one of them said to me during a lab, "I mean, really, PHP? Who wants to work with THAT?").
I haven't seen as many Ph.D. students from other disciplines coming through our intro sequence and regretting their current path. But, I do see quite a few juniors and seniors who only started taking CS classes as a sophomore or junior (usually because their advisor told them the classes were too hard and would make it difficult to do their Core Curriculum) and really wish they had evaluated the major earlier before they made choices that prevented them from switching majors and still graduating in four years.
This is a good sign!
The general public is just realizing how important computer skills are, no matter what you are trying to do. A well rounded CS major can learn something new and apply those skills to something else. I think public schools and high schools need to start integrating and making CS/programming courses necessary just as basic math and science courses are required -- then once people reach university age, they can focus on different topics without having to take CS courses to learn the basic skills they require to approach those topics like a CS major would.
Absolutely. Most of these students won't become programmers, but they'll have gained experience thinking about problems algorithmically, in a context where specificity and unambiguity are required. Plus, even extremely minimal programming skill can be a valuable "secret weapon" in fields which are not historically strong technically.
I don't think that CS should be included in a high school curriculum. Programming is a valuable skill, sure, but I don't think that it will be applicable to 95% of students. There are such a broad range of jobs in the world, and very, very few end up doing programming, despite increasing numbers for university CS course registration.
These aren't students transferring to a CS curriculum. These are students in other majors taking the intro CS courses to(most likely) fill out a general education requirement and to get "computer skills" on their resume.
Hopefully, this will end up with more people actually understanding CS, but I'm not so sure that will ever happen...
I know it's in vogue to throw the word bubble around, but I'd be interested to see the CS enrollment stats worldwide. The first generation of kids that spend more time in front of their computer than the TV are starting to hit college. More screen time is bound to create more people interested in how they can program the thing they sit in front of all day.
I kind of wish for that to happen, but for children of friends / relatives that do sit in front of the computer all day I do not see it.
The problem is that many things are taken for granted (normally) and there are lots of distractions available -- when my parents bought me my first computer (in 95) I only had games like Doom to play and no net available, and I got bored easily. Loved sitting in front of the computer, and there was nothing more interesting than learning to program it.
Kids nowadays only stay on chat/facebook/myspace all day and/or play games, which is understandable to a certain point since there's lots of stuff to do with a PC that's attractive even to non-technical people. You don't need to program it to feel good about yourself, to show off, to have some fun or to get some work done ... that's the difference between now and the nineties.
I graduated in '01 with an EE degree. At that point in time, engineering, including software, seemed like a field where you were ushered down a career path towards a pigeon-holed role at a large company. The advice was to get into a) technical sales, b) product marketing, or c) consulting if you wanted to start a career towards being an entrepreneur.
Now, its much different - the technology is more empowering and much cheaper. I can build stuff, and if I can build stuff people want, its a direct path to starting a company. Constrained by my ability to build stuff, I committed myself over the last 2.5 years to focusing on becoming a better engineer.
What is interesting, is that many of my peers that I thought were done coding have come to this same conclusion. In the last 6 months I have had 3 friends - 1 a successful consultant at a big firm, 1 a successful tech salesman and a fortune 100 company, and 1 a VP of engineering at a mid-sized firm. Each of them is coding on nights and weekends now.
Why? 1) Paul Graham - 'build stuff people want' and the subsequent success of that strategy, 2) It is really hard to hire developers to build stuff, 3) Facebook, Twitter, Groupon, Zynga and other companies that used tech to change the world in insanely short periods of time.
So, from what I am seeing, its not about people gold-digging (as many comments have suggested) - its that the skill of engineering has turned from a boring career skillset into an incredibly empowering tool. I imagine many undergrads are seeing it this way too.
I was a section leader for CS106A/B/X at Stanford and Eric Roberts was my undergrad adviser. I graduated in 08 and all through my 4 years, the number of students majoring in CS and taking CS106A/B/X was increasing rapidly.
Personally, I think that it's fantastic. Programming is a great skill to be exposed to even if you're not a programmer. There's no shortage of hard problems to be solved in CS and the more the merrier as far as I'm concerned.
From my experience of teaching at least 100 kids who have taken the CS106s, no one has done it for a higher salary out of college - a lot of non-CS majors take it to satisfy the Engineering GER (a requirement) and the rest take it out of interest.
I only knew Eric as a TA/grad student at Harvard (I was undergrad--this is back in the Stone Age--mid-70's), but he was already then a fantastic, enthusiastic teacher. I imagine he's only gotten better.
Seriously? Just because there are waves of people enrolling in an introductory CS course at an extremely high-level CS school like Stamford doesn't mean that any reasonable percentage of those students will actually end up getting degrees. I'd estimate that less than 10% of the people enrolled in the intro CS course at my university ended up getting a CS degree.
Sure, there's bound to be an uptick; demand for developers is huge and all, but it's still a rigorous course of study and I think you need to be pretty driven to "get" it all. I'm not even remotely worried, because even if there were an overabundance of "computer scientists", there would still be a dearth of good computer scientists.
I recall colleges complaining that not enough people were majoring in CS just a few years back. All of our jobs were going to be done in India soon, anyway.
This sort of thing goes in cycles, just like startups and the economy. Jobs in the Bay Area for CS majors are in high demand now, so that's where people are majoring. The situation will change and then there will be newly minted CS grads wishing they had majored in something else.
The same thing happened ~10 years ago and you're still programming. Just because there's an uptick in the number of people majoring in a field, it does not mean there will be an uptick in the number of professionals in that field.
Not going to happen. All these students who are after money will change majors within 2 years. CS is one of the hardest majors, there's a lot of math. I don't know about your school, but at the college I went to the CS dropout rates by the 4th year were like 80-90%. We had 4 people in some senior level classes.
I don't think they're like CMU, which has a separate school of Computer Science you have to be admitted to in order to be a CS major. If Stanford is like the University of Chicago, the only thing stopping students from majoring in CS are the registrar-imposed limits on the number of students physically enrolled.
I think it reflects so well on Stanford that they are committed to making sure students have an opportunity to major in cs, even if enrollment is tough to manage. That bit about helping the geology phd reflects especially well on stanford.
I attended cal for grad school, and I love it in many ways, but I just don't see as deep a commitment to every students success. Don't want to overstate this, plenty of wonderful profs and staff at cal who make an effort, and the challenges of 25k undergrads is great.
But it pains me to see young smart people who stumble a bit in their first couple years bounced from a major because the dept is looking for reasons to turn students away. I thins the field loses a lot of c@reative people who would have made big contributions.
Cs hasn't been impacted at cal forr a while now, thought it was when I was there.
Fortunately there are other good paths for persistent students.
Can't they just use auto-graders? I got the impression that for many of my CS courses, the TA and professor labor went mainly into creating assignments and lectures. But many of the assignments were self or automatically grading. If you have suitably lab-based assignments, then it shouldn't be too difficult to lower the cost of adding more students into the lower level courses.
At my school the first 2 CS courses were always packed... in the initial weeks of courses beginning at least.
I had a professor in one of those courses once say something like this:
Look to your left, look to your right,
because one of you won’t be here by
the end of the year.
Both these courses were considered weed out courses. They were Java based and most majors I had heard required at least one or both of them.
$100k in San Francisco is less than $50k where I live. I rent a single bedroom, no debt in Oklahoma. My good friend lives in San Francisco, single bedroom apartment, doesn't even need a car. I take home after taxes, expenses, etc about 50% to 25% and I make almost half of what he makes. Anecdotal, yes. Maybe not typical, but it does show that cost of living is a major factor on salary.
Maybe there is a more simple explanation. I speculate it is just that computers (and programming) are becoming more of a required skill in many fields. I know psychologists and MBAs who use programming to data mine. I myself am a bioinformatician and heavily use programming to answer scientific questions.
It could also be that kids are being introduced to programming at a younger and younger age. I started learning programming in my early teens, but I have a little cousin who has a Java class in her private school. She is about 8 now and can program Java better than I can...
I think this is cyclical, and to be expected. I had a conversation ~2 years ago with the head of a CS Dept in Boston who was anticipating this. He explained that enrollment in his department had grown by an order of magnitude (or more) during the dot-com bubble and shrank by a similar amount after the bust. Just as Lehman et al. was occurring, he was bracing for the same thing to happen again...and here it is.
The courses that were mentioned were all 100 level courses. Can anyone who went to Stanford(or knows the courses) comment on how technical they actually are?
It's a good sign if these are actual technical courses, but if they're just Word/Excel "programming" non-technical courses, we're just seeing a lot of people padding their resume in a bad economy.
I'd attribute part of the increase to what I call the "Top Gun Effect."
When Top Gun (the Tom Cruise movie) came out, there was a big increase in the number of students signing up for aerospace engineering courses and programs.
The trigger doesn't have to be a movie, just something in popular culture. In this case, I think it's all the positive media around Facebook, iPhone, iPad, Kinect, Google and more (including at least one Oscar-nominated movie).
This is more likely due to a generational shift than anything.
People between the ages of ~23 and ~28 are sort of the go-betweeners with roots (and maybe even parents) in generation X but firmly planted in Generation Y. 22 and younger is firmly Generation Y, transforming into Z or whatever you want to call it. Right now, people around 18 have lived their whole life with the internet, and probably half of it with broadband.
I blame "The Social Network" movie. That was the first movie that made software development look like a fun way to party, make tons of money and get hot chicks. The Palo Alto dev house pot smoking scenes and the fictional Sean Parker antics were quite amusing in that regard. That, and there's easy money in software these days.
[+] [-] dstein|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] meterplech|15 years ago|reply
But, it still seems odd to me. Most fields want to encourage smart, young, undergrads to enter them. Sure, they might have shallower passion for the field at first, the point of the article was that many people were developing real love for the field.
While Stanford undergrads are expensively educated and (maybe?) fashionable, they are also incredibly smart. Most importantly, learning programming isn't like selling subprime mortgages. For someone to buy your startup you must have added some value to the world. Trading subprimes arguably does not, or has a net negative effect.
[+] [-] gammarator|15 years ago|reply
http://twitter.com/#!/ataussig/status/45288519748427776
[+] [-] throwa_way|15 years ago|reply
Edit: Of course, you better damn well be sure that your differentiation from the rookies is fairly obvious to the casual viewer of your resume.
[+] [-] warfangle|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sedachv|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gersh|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] famousactress|15 years ago|reply
It makes some sense, given the makeup of the companies that are exciting to work for nowadays. I think especially if you want to join an early-stage startup, there are lots of benefits to having a technical education, even if your role isn't expressly technical.
[+] [-] econner|15 years ago|reply
There are a number of other reasons I would argue though for the skyrocketing enrollment in CS here:
First, the financial meltdown has prompted a lot of kids that would have majored in things like economics or management science to get into CS.
Second, the introductory CS classes are widely considered some of the best classes here. The CS department has taken the time to hire a group of phenomenal lecturers who love what they do and who spent an incredible amount of time crafting these classes.
Third, the introductory classes offer a level of human-to-human support that is unprecedented in any other department. We use undergraduate TA's (like myself) for the intro classes. We are a lot cheaper and so there are a lot more of us than there could be graduate TA's. For example, the computer LaIR is staffed with TA's from 6pm - midnight Sunday through Thursday.
Fourth, the CS department dropped the CS140 requirement (hardcore operating systems -- the "dump your girlfriend/boyfriend before you take this class because you won't be together after" class) in favor of two more gentler systems courses. This was mostly the result of the widening breadth of subject matter in CS and requirements that the department felt did not keep up with the offerings.
Fifth, CS itself has become an incredibly diverse subject. Here there are seven concentrations within the major: artificial intelligence, theory, graphics, information, systems, biocomputation, and human-computer interaction. There is a lot of overlap between them, but those overlaps also allow students to reach into other departments to get CS credit that they wouldn't have gotten within the department (e.g. art classes, physics, bio, etc). One of my friends who is concentrating in HCI is taking all studio art this quarter.
Sixth, and perhaps most importantly, computing is becoming the platform on which a lot of other disciplines are built. It is becoming a fundamental tool, in my opinion. Look at computational linguistics and bioinformatics. Even writing papers now comes down to understanding computers... I mean, after programming a lot, you get pretty darn good at Googling, a nontrivial skill I would argue.
Ok, maybe this should have been posted as a general comment, but I'll leave it here for contextual reasons.
[+] [-] larsberg|15 years ago|reply
I think it's more of a cultural bias from certain universities than a global economic trend in the field.
[+] [-] hinathan|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slee029|15 years ago|reply
But beyond that, I actually want enrollments to go up even more to create even more noise and change how interviewee assessments are made. I feel like that's what it will take for recruiters and hiring managers to focus their attention on platforms where the most engaged people of their crafts are. Not in the campuses of Stanford or a smaller community college, but rather in some online forum where people of all ages and geographies interact.
YC has started this with contribution to HN being a factor of admittance, but I'd like to see more of that happening in other fields as well such as mathematics and physics while using stackoverflow, quora, disqus, etc as the platforms to find the next will hunting.
[+] [-] patio11|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] muhfuhkuh|15 years ago|reply
I've noted your past fixation on English majors and their lack of financial success, and not sure why you single them out. Lit crit-saddled academia and coffeeshops aren't the only path for the English major. Writing is not only a noble pursuit but a lucrative[1] one (even if you skirt the legacy publishing industry), with as much a combination of hard work and dedication to craft (and luck) as, for example, selling bingo card generators for a living, or mobile phone games, or b2b CRUD apps, or facebook farming simulators.
Aside from fiction writing, there are ad copy and marketing writers, technical writers, screen and television writers, bloggers, journos, etc. Most of those are salaried positions, not necessarily part time/contract work.
It's really not that bad out there. For the record, I've never worked at a coffeeshop :D
[1]http://www.bnet.com/blog/technology-business/will-write-e-po...
[+] [-] thirtyseven|15 years ago|reply
Not everyone lives their lives according to the principles of capitalism, just consider yourself lucky that at this moment, it's working out in our favor as developers.
[+] [-] reedF211|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rawatson|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PakG1|15 years ago|reply
Not that I agree with him.
[+] [-] crasshopper|15 years ago|reply
Most importantly, I think everyone who's willing to work hard enough to learn to program deserves the opportunity to earn dev wages.
If the theoretical CS courses are brimming with dollar-seekers, Stanford can add more practical programming courses. Everyone wins.
[+] [-] forensic|15 years ago|reply
What does the economy of the future look like? Millions and millions of programmers. Manipulating technology is where value comes from and software is the most efficient way to manipulate technology.
I just hope we have enough robotics and computer engineering people to improve the platforms all these programmers are going to work on.
The web browser is pretty limited in its ability to improve human life. We need other platforms to target.
[+] [-] larsberg|15 years ago|reply
I haven't seen as many Ph.D. students from other disciplines coming through our intro sequence and regretting their current path. But, I do see quite a few juniors and seniors who only started taking CS classes as a sophomore or junior (usually because their advisor told them the classes were too hard and would make it difficult to do their Core Curriculum) and really wish they had evaluated the major earlier before they made choices that prevented them from switching majors and still graduating in four years.
[+] [-] zmitri|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gammarator|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] agscala|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cube13|15 years ago|reply
Hopefully, this will end up with more people actually understanding CS, but I'm not so sure that will ever happen...
[+] [-] pjhyett|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] icey|15 years ago|reply
It's much less common to see a programmer portrayed as a fat, slovenly nerd as it used to be.
[+] [-] bad_user|15 years ago|reply
The problem is that many things are taken for granted (normally) and there are lots of distractions available -- when my parents bought me my first computer (in 95) I only had games like Doom to play and no net available, and I got bored easily. Loved sitting in front of the computer, and there was nothing more interesting than learning to program it.
Kids nowadays only stay on chat/facebook/myspace all day and/or play games, which is understandable to a certain point since there's lots of stuff to do with a PC that's attractive even to non-technical people. You don't need to program it to feel good about yourself, to show off, to have some fun or to get some work done ... that's the difference between now and the nineties.
[+] [-] jonmc12|15 years ago|reply
Now, its much different - the technology is more empowering and much cheaper. I can build stuff, and if I can build stuff people want, its a direct path to starting a company. Constrained by my ability to build stuff, I committed myself over the last 2.5 years to focusing on becoming a better engineer.
What is interesting, is that many of my peers that I thought were done coding have come to this same conclusion. In the last 6 months I have had 3 friends - 1 a successful consultant at a big firm, 1 a successful tech salesman and a fortune 100 company, and 1 a VP of engineering at a mid-sized firm. Each of them is coding on nights and weekends now.
Why? 1) Paul Graham - 'build stuff people want' and the subsequent success of that strategy, 2) It is really hard to hire developers to build stuff, 3) Facebook, Twitter, Groupon, Zynga and other companies that used tech to change the world in insanely short periods of time.
So, from what I am seeing, its not about people gold-digging (as many comments have suggested) - its that the skill of engineering has turned from a boring career skillset into an incredibly empowering tool. I imagine many undergrads are seeing it this way too.
[+] [-] kyan|15 years ago|reply
Personally, I think that it's fantastic. Programming is a great skill to be exposed to even if you're not a programmer. There's no shortage of hard problems to be solved in CS and the more the merrier as far as I'm concerned.
From my experience of teaching at least 100 kids who have taken the CS106s, no one has done it for a higher salary out of college - a lot of non-CS majors take it to satisfy the Engineering GER (a requirement) and the rest take it out of interest.
[+] [-] cpr|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] benwerd|15 years ago|reply
Developers: may I suggest getting a second degree?
[+] [-] illamint|15 years ago|reply
Sure, there's bound to be an uptick; demand for developers is huge and all, but it's still a rigorous course of study and I think you need to be pretty driven to "get" it all. I'm not even remotely worried, because even if there were an overabundance of "computer scientists", there would still be a dearth of good computer scientists.
[+] [-] dabent|15 years ago|reply
This sort of thing goes in cycles, just like startups and the economy. Jobs in the Bay Area for CS majors are in high demand now, so that's where people are majoring. The situation will change and then there will be newly minted CS grads wishing they had majored in something else.
And then there's this counterpoint: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/campus-overload/2011/03/why...
Maybe the Stanford situation isn't going on all over?
[+] [-] adestefan|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rorrr|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kenjackson|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] larsberg|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] geebee|15 years ago|reply
I attended cal for grad school, and I love it in many ways, but I just don't see as deep a commitment to every students success. Don't want to overstate this, plenty of wonderful profs and staff at cal who make an effort, and the challenges of 25k undergrads is great.
But it pains me to see young smart people who stumble a bit in their first couple years bounced from a major because the dept is looking for reasons to turn students away. I thins the field loses a lot of c@reative people who would have made big contributions.
Cs hasn't been impacted at cal forr a while now, thought it was when I was there.
Fortunately there are other good paths for persistent students.
[+] [-] abeppu|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomjen3|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] b3b0p|15 years ago|reply
I had a professor in one of those courses once say something like this:
Both these courses were considered weed out courses. They were Java based and most majors I had heard required at least one or both of them.$100k in San Francisco is less than $50k where I live. I rent a single bedroom, no debt in Oklahoma. My good friend lives in San Francisco, single bedroom apartment, doesn't even need a car. I take home after taxes, expenses, etc about 50% to 25% and I make almost half of what he makes. Anecdotal, yes. Maybe not typical, but it does show that cost of living is a major factor on salary.
[+] [-] buckwild|15 years ago|reply
It could also be that kids are being introduced to programming at a younger and younger age. I started learning programming in my early teens, but I have a little cousin who has a Java class in her private school. She is about 8 now and can program Java better than I can...
[+] [-] snikolic|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cube13|15 years ago|reply
It's a good sign if these are actual technical courses, but if they're just Word/Excel "programming" non-technical courses, we're just seeing a lot of people padding their resume in a bad economy.
[+] [-] troymc|15 years ago|reply
When Top Gun (the Tom Cruise movie) came out, there was a big increase in the number of students signing up for aerospace engineering courses and programs.
The trigger doesn't have to be a movie, just something in popular culture. In this case, I think it's all the positive media around Facebook, iPhone, iPad, Kinect, Google and more (including at least one Oscar-nominated movie).
[+] [-] juiceandjuice|15 years ago|reply
People between the ages of ~23 and ~28 are sort of the go-betweeners with roots (and maybe even parents) in generation X but firmly planted in Generation Y. 22 and younger is firmly Generation Y, transforming into Z or whatever you want to call it. Right now, people around 18 have lived their whole life with the internet, and probably half of it with broadband.
[+] [-] unknown|15 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] narrator|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ninguem2|15 years ago|reply
At this rate, all of mankind will be Stanford CS students by the end of the century.