Given the market saturation, we were debating whether or not to take CS for a long time, but my child was intrigued. I appreciate your insights and thank you.1. It's probably a pretty good state universitySince my son is heading off to college this year, I can relate to your anguish. Just the instate tuition costs $15k, and for the first two years, living in a dorm is required. The FAFSA is ineffective. We're paying the most of it, hoping that he'll excel in computer science.
2. $15k is pretty low cost by modern American standards? (It's about what an English university student pays, now). You will be paying rent at the dorm, but you would have had to pay for the food if he lived at home, plus probably commuting. Cost of living is high in Europe, but if there's the possibility of a year abroad at a good university, then that's something to consider (it might break the flow of his degree, so it might not be worth doing, but it can be an incredibly rewarding experience).
3. computer science. Market is very difficult now. Nothing like it was 2-3 years ago. But as long as I have been paying attention (more than 40 years, now), CS has been a very cyclical discipline. Boom is inevitably followed by bust. The early 80s it was tough to find a job. There is always a subsequent recovery and as the number of CS graduates inevitably drops when there is a computing recession, there's usually less competition for the jobs.
Nonetheless, despite eternal promises that new tools and methodologies would overcome "the software crisis", the demand for good software people never goes away. The amount of software code out there just grows and grows, and the problems of keeping it running. COBOL was a programming language invented by Captain Grace Hopper of the US Navy, in the 1950s - and there's still some market for COBOL programmers, apparently.
We also thought that the arrival of Indian-trained CS people, some of whom are pretty incredible, might lead to the offshoring of jobs - I was worried about this in the late 1980s. Eventually, it did. But other jobs seemed to appear domestically to fill them. I don't know of many programmers who didn't get their feet back under a desk, if they wanted to. We also found that the best Indians were as good as, or better than, anybody else - hence their success in Silicon Valley. But even adjusted for the lower salaries, they weren't always the best option. (I don't have a view on the Chinese, but a western company now outsourcing significant development to China or Russia is likely to have so many compliance related problems that it won't be practicable).
My career diverged from Computer Science a long time ago. If he has the opportunity, I would suggest a Minor (or at least some coursework) in Business and/or Economics. But CS, thinking algorithmically, and understanding in principle how new technologies work, is something that never grows old, it seems. (The other area that is definitely still growth, unless AI takes it, is Data Science - understanding statistics and probability and how to extract and manipulate large amounts of data from the web; the undergraduate key is the math, probability and stats - that's hard to pick up later).
Statistics: Posted by JohnG2000 — Sun Aug 11, 2024 6:27 pm — Replies 85 — Views 7817