<p>With the increasing number of high school students planning on majoring in computer science, will the major still be in demand 5-8 years from now? Will the salaries be lower? </p>
<p>Also, I was reading somewhere where a recent angry computer science graduate was offered a starting salary of only $35k. He said that he was told by his college that CS majors started out at $60k and most have the potential to make $70-90k after a few years, so he did it for the money. He also said that other CS graduates at his school were making less than him! He said he knew Java inside and out thanks to his school and could also code in PHP, HTML and CSS. He didn't mention what his job title was though. </p>
<p>That's ridiculous... $35k?! How is this even possible in such a difficult major? What do you think will happen to computer science in 2020?</p>
<p>Like any field it’s subjected to booms and busts, but I believe the long term outlook is pretty good.</p>
<p>Other than the general economy, the biggest factor for US programmers is probably the number of H-1Bs allowed in.</p>
<p>As for starting salaries, it mostly depends what part of the country you’re in. $60K sounds like a typical starting salary. You’re always going to have outliers, and $35K sounds like it might be one of those.</p>
<p>1999 frosh CS majors graduated in 2003 into the depths of the tech bubble crash.</p>
<p>2003 frosh CS majors graduated in 2007 into an improving job market.</p>
<p>Don’t assume that the job market will be the same four years from now. However, don’t assume it will be the opposite of now four years from now.</p>
<p>Link to the story in question? However, if he went into CS only for the money, without a decent enough interest in the subject, that angry student may not be among the better graduates. Also, stating skills only in terms of computer languages known indicates that he may have missed the point of CS education.</p>
<p>"With the increasing number of high school students planning on majoring in computer science, will the major still be in demand 5-8 years from now? Will the salaries be lower?</p>
<p>Salaries are determined by the task or the demand. Computers will never disappear, thus there will always be use for computer science skills. Actually, if you look around a bit, very significant portions of work are done using computers and software, in almost all fields. That software may need to be developed, new software may need to be developed or people and companies may just need computer-savvy people to manage or operate the computers (e.g. if they handle quantitative information).</p>
<p>I would expect CS to grow in popularity though.
Because:
many are born with computers in their hands
and
everyone wants that clean, low-fatigue and interesting or fun indoor white collar job. Thus CS may become a lot more popular than traditional engineering disciplines.</p>
<p>“Also, I was reading somewhere where a recent angry computer science graduate was offered a starting salary of only $35k. He said that he was told by his college that CS majors started out at $60k and most have the potential to make $70-90k after a few years, so he did it for the money.”</p>
<p>He was an idiot.</p>
<p>“That’s ridiculous… $35k?! How is this even possible in such a difficult major?”</p>
<p>So you mentioned Java, PHP, HTML and CSS. Programming != CS.</p>
<p>“What do you think will happen to computer science in 2020?”</p>
<p>Computers will never disappear. Figure out something useful to do with them, that’s what CS is sort of (or we could say mostly) about.</p>
<p>HTML and CSS are not programming languages, to anyone who’s wondering. And no, the demonstrations of Turing-completeness don’t count for the sake of this discussion.</p>
<p>^ But… but… any computable function… oh, never mind.</p>
<p>
This is a bad sign. Typically, people who actually know a lot about a language like Java also know that they don’t know the first thing about Java, and what’s more, they know that it’s not really any more possible to know everything there is about Java than it is to know everything there is to know about English.</p>
<p>
[/quote]
and could also code in PHP, HTML and CSS. He didn’t mention what his job title was though.
[/quote]
Wow, congratulations. Any CS graduate with a couple of weekends can find a website with tutorials for these things and start writing code. There’s so much to making skills marketable that I have to think that this guy made some rookie mistake and, rather than recognizing his failures and setting about to correct the situation, decided to project his feelings of inadequacy.</p>
<p>
This should go without saying, but you get paid for the job you get hired to do, not for the degree you get. There are degrees (arguably) just as hard as, if not harder than, CS that are even less marketable than what your friend is experiencing.</p>
<p>
It might. While I don’t mean to generalize, I think a not uncommon impression is that the abilities of non-traditional students might not be quite up to par compared to those of more traditional students. In other words, while there’s nothing wrong with graduating at 28, employers might wonder why the student is graduating later. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s something in this guy’s professional or academic record that employers see as a red flag (bad grades, weak program, prior job loss, etc.)</p>
<p>For projections around job opportunities and compensation, you may consider consulting the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook Handbook, freely available online.</p>
<p>I’ve known people with 2 months of programming training under dubious circumstances that got starting salaries far higher than $35k, and then proceeded to make a career out of it. There is more going on than just “the field really sucks” because things just aren’t THAT bad.</p>