This just in from a student at a university in Florida:
I’m studying Computer Science. A few years ago when I started, the department was understaffed, underpowered, and overcrowded with the huge rush of students that the internet bubble seemed to create.
The University rushed to fill the need, doubling the staff, modernizing hardware. Class sizes seemed to go from around 20 students per class to nearly 100. Every class, every term, filled up early.
Now my question is: where did all these people come from, and where did they all dissapear to?
Now the classes, hallways, and labs are nearly empty. Classes built to hold 100 students now have 10 spread throughout the room. The lab is never more than half full.
Were all the people quick to jump on the tech bandwagon transplants from the business department who’ve now gone back? Hard to tell.
As someone who’s been interested in Computer Science and programming since the 6th grade, it’s been fun to watch everything unfold. Fortunately (I think), those of us who were here before the great internet bubble seem to be the only ones left around after it.
Are young people wising up? And do we really need more bachelors in Business Administration?
This is fine with me. Software Engineering should be left to those that are passionately interested in it. What we have seen in the last five years is an in-rush of people who look at coding as a ‘day job’ and as a ‘stepping stone to management’. Good riddance, as far as I am concerned.
Let’s get back to pragmatic programming and an emphasis on real world programming and shipping products.
My issue is what’s left behind from the gold rush. We now have Java and web services, which are really just products of the Sun marketing machine, dominating our view of engineering. We need to dump all that and get back to emphasizing solutions for customers that work reliably.
A couple of years ago I saw a graph undergraduate majors in the College of Natural Sciences through the 90’s at UTexas-Austin. They were all pretty level, except CS, which began a steep upward curve around 96, and “undecided”, which fell off at about the same time and rate. So that’s where they all came from: everyone who couldn’t think of what else to do chose CS.
“And do we really need more bachelors in Business Administration?”
You have attacked Business majors and MBAs in almost everything you’ve written since I have been following your rants.
Be honest for a second.
With all your intelligence and your MIT PhD, how many failed businesses have you been associated with, so far (through, and including, the demise of ArsDigita, where the VCs paid you the lump sum that has permitted you to take wing)?
If business is so obvious, why haven’t you done the obvious? Lighten up.
Hmm, and here I thought there were too many bachelors in my computer science program, and too few bachelorettes.
Why would anybody take up Comp Sci right now? It’s obvious that programming in the 2000’s is like manufacturing in the 1950’s. It’s going away. There will be a few jobs left but your salary will be lower and it will be harder to find a job.
Is it time to go to nursing school?
Roger: I wasn’t attacking young people who get their bachelors in Business Administration. I actually feel kind of sorry for the kids that they don’t get to spend their 4 years at college following their curiosity. In the 1950s a person could study literature in college and still grab the lowest rung of the ladder in Corporate America.
As for raking up the old and uninteresting story of ArsDigita… when I turned over the reins it was banking $1 million every two months. And it must have been a successful company when I sold my shares to the VCs because otherwise they wouldn’t have wanted to pay for the shares. They had much better information about the company’s financial condition than I did and they had MBAs besides. If at the end of the day they managed to commit suicide via Second System Syndrome (an engineering problem identified in The Mythical Man Month), it doesn’t mean that the earlier company was a failure. Most of the useful ideas developed by the early engineers at ArsDigita have been widely dispersed and are being enjoyed by users right now. And if nobody is using the complex Second System that the follow-on programmers at ArsDigita built it also doesn’t matter. Microsoft studied the early ArsDigita releases carefully, took the good ideas out and rolled them into their widely distributed .NET toolkits and Sharepoint 2.0.
As Bill Joy used to say to the other Sun founders when they complained how much was being screwed up… “C’mon guys, it’s only a company”. … Which gets us right back to the young people studying business as their only experience of college; in the old days business was considered a default career for people who weren’t creative enough to do something else but today, because it is an available academic major, 18-year-olds are able to give up on being creative during their freshman year.
Regarding business majors :
I have a BS in Business that has brought me nothing but shame and misery. Like most things, a business degree depends on what you do with it. What kind of job can you get with it post-boom? The corollary would be — how fulfilling is it? As for me, I can tell you with confidence the answer to both is in the negative.
Unfortunatly, I followed my Pop’s advice and took business since it was “a good general degree that will help you in life.” Bollocks. English is a good general degree. Chemistry is a good general degree. Those teach you actual skills. A business degree (undergrad anyway) teaches you how marketing works. This is obvious and even required knowledge in today’s world. Business as an academic subject is funny since most business folks disdain theory over the good ol American try. My take was always — Business is applied common sense. Yes, I’m looking down my nose at business as a degree since it got me nowhere. That probably has a little to do with business as it is taught/practiced and alot with myself and what I enjoy doing.
Now, I’m happy to say, I have seen the light and am now working on an EE degree.
Since we all like anecdotes, I’ve run across quite a few students in computer science buildings lately who were talking about getting business degrees. They weren’t very good at computer science, so I don’t think think they’ll be very good businessmen either. Luckily business has enough BS positions that nobody will notice.
After 15 years working in IT with a Comp. Sci. degree it still amazes me how quickly the business degree people get promoted to their level of incompetence. It seems like the business degree is better for the masses if your goal is money and perceived power. (There are of course exceptions.)
And, whoever thought up the business process of having the project team take a whole day to travel to and from a central location for a 1 hour meeting every week to discuss why the project is slipping an average of 1 day a week…
Maybe programming is a lot like manufacturing, but engineering isn’t. If software engineering was really nothing more than yesterday’s news, then the FAA would have built their new air traffic control system by now, instead of a notorious disaster over-budget by billions and over-schedule by years.
I’m working on a longer rant for this for my weblog spurred on by your “what’s the economic use of Maine?” query, but the gist will be:
Manufacturing has gone overseas. A large portion of product development is getting the manufacturing line up and running. Thus it’s becoming easier to start working with overseas shops to get the communication issues ironed out early in the product development cycle because then you’ll have native speakers able to communicate the issues of manufacturer through to the plants. It doesn’t take Larry Ellison to see that as a software developer building embedded systems or solving business process problems which involve overseas call centers and the like, my job is next.
The best thing I can do is climb the ladder faster than the rungs are falling out from below me. But I wonder what’s going to happen when I get to the top and find that we’ve been divided into those who run the companies, those who provide the service sector jobs, and the markets have all gone overseas too?
It’s a Friday afternoon and I’m bolting prototypes together so I’m not as coherent as I’d like, but that’s what weighs heavy on my career planning right now.
Don’t Panic! I understand there is an exciting career ahead of us, sterilizing phones and setting hair.
Are we to assume that it is more stilted and regimented to get a Bachelor of Business degree than it is to get a Bachelor of Engineering? Do not most university graduates have to take various courses in order to achieve a “liberal education”? Of course not all of us have the time and money nor the apptitude to go to graduate school. And who is to say that a Emglish Lit degree is any better than a business degree? Of course with an English Lit degree we could get that nose ring we always wanted and work at Starbucks as Master of the Latte. Steamer of the Milk. But then maybe engineers need to worry about that too as the engineering work heads overseas. Got any idea how many engineering students India produces each year? And I hear that IIT is a much tougher school than MIT.
“the old and uninteresting story of ArsDigita…”
Uninteresting? Phillip, I’d be surprised if you couldn’t, even now, get a book deal for this story (not a *big* book deal, but still…).
“… if nobody is using the complex Second System that the follow-on programmers at ArsDigita built…”
Aren’t the RedHat Enterprise Applications based on that second-system code?
The classes, hallways and labs are nearly empty because its summer.
I think all of you need to go take a few humanities courses…
Seems to have been a steady decline for the last year or two actually.
Elitist Fuck
Elitist Fuck
Elitist Fuck