<p>Technical Sales? Not to offend anyone but I’d rather bag groceries than sell anything, and my first job was technical sales (30+ years ago). See the current trend with pharma sales, eventually it will get to other areas.</p>
<p>please elaborate</p>
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<p>I don’t see these as being such great areas. Architects often have a tough time getting started - even FL Wright! Law is a disaster. And medicine is no panacea either, even if you get into Med School which is a real challenge. How can someone go into “law or medicine” anyway as it seems the undergrad programs would be very different?</p>
<p>One advantage of being a senior engineer focused on the technical side is that you will be the last one to be laid off and one of the few to get recruiter calls during a downturn. Just recently, my ex-manager called me asking if I knew any “senior hands on folks”. According to her, there are too many “team leads”, project manager/task manager types floating around.</p>
<p>Being a senior engineer and strictly technical means folks do not have to teach the software engineering/project management thing to do. They just give you the “end goal” and figure that you know all the steps like requirements gathering, design, development, etc.</p>
<p>There are plenty of architects and they aren’t as easy to get in to especially when the senior ones are assigned the big contracts.</p>
<p>Medicine is not a guarantee, I know many people that tried going for medical school and did not make it. Plus it takes over a decade even if a person is makes it. </p>
<p>Computer science is one of the safest majors out there right now and who doesn’t want to stay on top of current trends and keep adapting. It is fun, just like how one constantly practices to stay ahead in sports.</p>
<p>But if you insist on architect/medicine, more power to you and less compeitition for us CS junkies.</p>
<p>@Dreburden</p>
<p>It takes “talent” to be good at sales (and to enjoy it)…for many nerdy engineers, sales is worse than a root cannel.</p>
<p>But if you’re good at it, the money is great, and companies will ALWAYS need a sales team (it’s not easy to outsource the sales folks!, but it is easy to fire and hire a new team, if the old one is not “selling”…).</p>
<p>[Dilbert</a> comic strip for 10/24/2010 from the official Dilbert comic strips archive.](<a href=“http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2010-10-24/]Dilbert”>http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2010-10-24/)</p>
<p>[Dilbert</a> comic strip for 10/20/2010 from the official Dilbert comic strips archive.](<a href=“http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2010-10-20/]Dilbert”>http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2010-10-20/)</p>
<p>In architecture, decisions are made largely on the individual’s talent and demonstrated abilities (portfolio) when applying, and to some / a good extent the pedigree of the school. It is not a particularly difficult major to graduate from, not with today’s CAD systems and all that, so the end result is that people who really should not have gone into architecture do, and graduate, and join the workforce. Or hope. In other words, if you’re good, it is easier to demonstrate this ‘goodness’ to a prospective employer via a portfolio. And, it’s not the kind of job that can be outsourced, and, in my view at least, it’s something that will come into play in the near future as we figure out (finally) that the approach we have taken so far is not sustainable due to energy costs and other considerations. If you’re very good at it, as, might I brag, my older child is so far, then you have a considerable edge. You really need to visit a studio during final reviews to understand what ‘good’ and ‘comparative’ mean. </p>
<p>Law depends on pedigree alone. As ucbalumnus put it, it’s T14 or bust. Medicine has the opposite issue. A friend’s kid got into the bottom 5 ranked medical school in the US. He’ll be called a doctor in a few years just like if he had graduated from Harvard. He won’t make Harvard money but he can write his own ticket. </p>
<p>CS, on the other hand, is a funny situation. Again, ucbalumnus nailed it regarding productivity and so on. But, to achieve a 28 year career of writing code takes tremendous sacrifice, and stability is not guaranteed. The whole ‘outsourcing’ mantra depends on the notion that programmers are interchangeable, like doctors or lawyers or architects. In medicine, the best doctor and the worst doctor won’t be that much different in terms of how fast they can see patients in an ER. In CS a bad coder can write 10 times less code than a star coder. But management does not care, period. It’s all Microsoft Project resource counts that matter, 3 US developers @ $120k/each or 6 offshore developers at $40k/each. Savings, $120k/yr. Viva Le Outsourcing!</p>
<p>The way outsourcing is done, a better programmer will survive a few rounds of layoffs. Move up, to another division, another project. Eventually you run out of safe harbors and the next round might as well be the one. </p>
<p>I’d rather NOT deal with those issues if I were my kids.</p>
<p>sounds like you were just working at the wrong companies, or not providing enough value to your company to avoid getting laid off</p>
<p>^That seems to be the case. It seems like turbo had a basic programming job in the low-end. If you had worked with big and complex software you would know that they CAN’T be outsourced that easily. Only basic programming jobs get outsourced and a CS degree is an overkill for those</p>
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<p>There’s no guarantees in any field. There have been plenty of law firms that have laided off partners in recent years as well as staff - and that’s assuming you make through the grind of getting into a top firm. With medicine, you have to do more each year for less pay as the Government cuts docs pay. When medicine is fully socialized, it will be worse.</p>
<p>Maybe a better question is which degree options up more long-term options: engineering or CS?</p>
<p>CS is essentially a never-ending struggle to keep up with the latest fashion trend. If you’re willing to dedicate the next 30-40 years to that pursuit, you’ll definitely go far.</p>
<p>“Only basic programming jobs get outsourced and a CS degree is an overkill for those”</p>
<p>That’s a very uninformed statement.</p>
<p>Plenty of companies have outsourced advanced jobs, and even whole projects involving the gamut of programming skills. It often doesn’t work, but lots of managers and companies still try it. That reduces opportunities for local programmers.</p>
<p>One of my main concerns with outsourcing and the likely increase in H-1B visas is that it undercuts the opportunities for new US graduates and discourages people from getting STEM-type degrees.</p>
<p>In 23 years, I have never been faced with being a victim of outsourcing. And before some of you say: “Globaltraveler, you are in Intel/Defense contracting”, the first 14 of my years was private sector. Not only should software folks take advantage of what is hot as far as technologies, one needs to take advantage of which industries are hiring. </p>
<p>During my private sector time, I was a software engineer consultant/contractor for pharmaceutical firms, insurance firms, and healthcare firms. All 3 needed data warehouses and the data architects/DBA’s that go along with that project.</p>
<p>Another thing that I want to touch on it that too much is being said that makes software engineering = programming. Right now, 50% of my job is basically “flapping my mouth”. Production of a software project involves assessing needs, creating/gathering requirements (CONOPS, software specs, etc), high-level design, detailed design, actual development (that is where the programming comes in), prototyping, testing, verification, deployment, sustainment. That is a whole lot of non-programming steps and I did not get into the project management of it (I have a PMP but I will project manage projects only if upper-management practically begs me).</p>
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<p>Not even close.</p>
<p>I’ve been with the same company for 28 years, joining fresh out of college. I would not consider what I do remotely ‘low end’, to the tune that my skill set is quite desirable… </p>
<p>Mrs. T. has changed a bunch of jobs, most voluntary, a couple with the ax falling just behind her. In her case it’s straight IT, now working for the MOOC (Mother Of all Outsourcing Companies) and dealing with a handful of US personnel and a large number of offshore resources. </p>
<p>The 80’s saw different forms of ‘outsourcing’ where workers were brought in, 4 to an apartment and a rusty Honda Civic to work for India wages in the US + a measly cost of living allowance. Nice gig if you could get IIT graduates for a thousand dollars a month, maybe a bit more. I could elaborate for pages on the above alone. But anyhow.</p>
<p>The 90’s brought a steady diet of outsourcing, as offshore communications technology matured and companies started establishing bases overseas. The late 90’s with the dot com and a lot of new skills coming into the picture (.net, SAP, client/server, blah blah). After 2001 things got very iffy in the outsourcing front and it’s been downhill since then. </p>
<p>I spent the time from the late 90’s to the 2000’s doing R&D work on cutting edge stuff (I’ve had stuff displayed on the Vegas CES, CeBIT, etc. from 2001 to this year, nearly every year). </p>
<p>Beginning with the Katrina-era gas spikes, the economy faltering from 2007 on, and more players getting in the game, that the company had to reduce size and ‘rightsize’. Of course we had spent a decade building up our ‘subsidiaries’ in Eastern Europe and Asia, so never mind our India team went from 10 people to 1000 while our US team went from, well, you get the idea. </p>
<p>And in 2009, the real layoffs started. About 30%-40% in several rounds as we got out of some product areas, cancelled others, etc. Were all of these jobs directly off-shored? probably not, but the competition largely did. </p>
<p>We did not have to resort to West Coast style backstabbing rankings, performance reviews, and the like, to determine who’s next. For the most part, the way it works is that the first 2 or 3 waves of layoffs are ‘predictable’, i.e. one can easily predict who is going to be cut. The people who did not take a laptop home to do builds at night for the India team. The people who did not spend a month in Uzbekistan (ok, not this far East) training the team. The people who, who, who. You get the idea. Eventually we ended up with a half full building full of people who have demonstrated they’ll do all that and then some. Yet ‘surgical cuts’ continue as budgets have to be met.</p>
<p>I survived because of a wicked good set of skills, education, experience, and reputation for figuring out what needs to be done. I’m not the best C++ programmer (far from it), would not know a logic analyzer from a microwave oven (used to but since microwave ovens have probes, all bets are off), but finding someone who can listen to what the customer wants, create the story boards, do most of the artwork in Photoshop, design a prototype in Altia or whatever, and code the thing in a week or two… Well, duh, maybe that’s why I get monthly interview requests on Linked In from some pretty desirable places…</p>
<p>Mrs. T’s experience was far more educational. She’s the typical IT consultant, and worked for a pharmaceutical company for a decade before realizing that all of a sudden, the email distribution lists had a distinctive Indian flavor. Her employer did really well laying off thousands of people (IT and otherwise) and transferring much of the IT work off-shore. About the only thing they could not outsource was the manufacturing software that built the darned medicines, her last project. When that gig ended, she saw the writing on the wall and bailed. She now does very similar work for MOOC. </p>
<p>Her case is even more telling. Once they decide to outsource the entire department, the only way to temporarily survive is to transfer to some safer place ahead of the cuts. Unfortunately, once in a new group, like a cat, one has exhausted a life or three, so they’re canon fodder for the next round. </p>
<p>Young and Restless aspiring software engineers need to understand that skills, connections, and past projects will only carry one as far as their immediate boss, maybe a level up. Decisions to cut people happen at much higher levels, where one would not know Turbo from Attila the Hun (horse meat, yummm).</p>
<p>The fun part is that outsourcing rarely works as advertised, in our line of work at least (try Agile with the team in 4 continents…). The developers need to be in constant contact with the customer facing engineers to get things the right way, and that ain’t happening when the developers are across 7 time zones. It takes a couple successful and / or failed projects to convince the higher ups what to outsource, and what NOT to. </p>
<p>In R&D work the documentation is lacking (to put it mildly) and we have made many a stop to Best Buy on the way to the airport to CES in Vegas to buy a $10 thing that fixes an issue. If this happens abroad, it’s often a 2 week delay for the same issue. Yet management sees numbers, just numbers, nothing but numbers, you get the idea.</p>
<p>In Corporate IT where one documents everything (Mrs. T wrote documentation instructing production line workers to properly identify BUCKETS (plastic) that medicine ends up in after it is made (pills), incl. barcode and RFID tag) it is infinitesimally trivial to outsource, and they did. But, you get what you pay for. If it’s an Oracle issue the Informatica team will blame the server team, the server team will blame networking team, the networking team… Eventually after 4-5 tickets someone will figure out that they need to kill a job and restart it, usually after 2-3 days. Again, management does NOT look at such numbers much, just headcount. </p>
<p>Startups and fast growing companies don’t have such issues, at least early on (they have other issues :)) but after a few startups eventually one ends up working for a larger outfit where the above is the way of life. Believing otherwise is akin to believing in the Easter Bunny.</p>
<p>When it comes to kids, parents are better talent scouts than anyone else in their professions. They also know the pitfalls associated with their work. Its very reasonable that some will steer their kids to another direction where kids have better talent and chance to succeed. Architecture graduates could be in demand a few years from now after current burst. On the other hand, how do we know Petroleum engineers will still be the highest paid with more and more students going into that field? Doctor, lawyer, and accountant are self-employed, very different from someone working for a company. These professionals dont get fired they lose patients or clients when they are not good enough.</p>
<p>Turbo, buddy, you are not making me feel great about doing a CmpE degree.</p>
<p>If you have the right skill set, classes, school pedigree, gpa, internships, and so on, you’re golden. Or, you could be like this South Korean friend of mine who thought (real brilliant, Kim) that a doctorate degree in CS/Cryptography would be a good idea in the middle of the Cold War :-). If memory serves right he never got a single call back…</p>
<p>But it could be worse. My officemate is about to blow a fortune on his kid to go to pharmacy. Assuming the kid survives a curriculum that makes a BSEE look easy by comparison (19 credit hours of horror a semester, 9 in the summer for 4 years) he’ll line up for an $80k job at Walmart right where the bus is leaving. </p>
<p>Bottom line. There’s no career silver bullet. Be the best you can be in your courses, learn as much as you can, get the best grades, look out for the next best thing, and stay in college far longer than you need to, gaining shingles and gravitas.</p>
<p>Re: #74</p>
<p>You need to go work at a different company if you do not like how it is managed.</p>
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<p>You said it yourself, it often doesn’t work. A team making a 500k line project is not the same as making a 20 line program. H1-B visas get paid the same as US workers, there is a shortage of qualified software engineers. BTW did you checked the number of job posting in indeed.com contain exactly “computer science”?</p>
<p>from highest to lowest…</p>
<p>Computer Science - 122,554
electrical engineering - 25,102
Mechanical Engineering - 16,920
Computer Engineering - 12,398
Chemical Engineering - 6,772
Civil Engineering - 6,577</p>
<p>The links are on the 4th page of this thread. I have a hard time believing that if you keep up with the latest technology which is very easy, that you will be afraid of losing your job. If you outsourced those jobs and pay about 40k for each a year. The US would be giving 4,902,160,000 dollars away each year, which is not happening</p>