I talked to my father, a programmer, about this and he said “the best time to go into computer science was 10 years ago”. I didn’t get much more than that out of him. But I can kind of understand his logic. The software revolution (phones, tablets, smart devices, social networks, gaming industry, etc.) already happened. Now a lot of people are in the field and it may be hard to get one’s foot in the door today.
20 years ago I had the same thought. I was wrong then.
Maybe for basic programming this is true, but the interesting problems aren’t going away and aren’t getting easier.
In a nutshell, computer science is to programming as writing is to typing.
I agree. Trying to second guess the computer revolution will make a fool out of you. 20 years ago nobody would have guessed the future of cell phones from simple calling devices to full blown computers. The same with the internet of things. Who would have guessed a refrigerator would have a smart TV embedded in it. There are still lots of legs in this computer run. And one thing to remember is that they all run on software. Programming is a very valuable skill. Shoot , there is plenty of work on the security side to stop hackers. One needs to understand programming in order to stop hackers.
Programming is a tiny portion of what a computer science degree involves.
Given the difficulty we have hiring talented software architects, business analysts, and tech leads for our projects, I would disagree. Even good Java developers with a strong work ethic can be hard to find and retain. Now, if you don’t plan on continually learning after graduating college, I would agree computer science is not the path for you. I work with technologies today that were hardly imaginable when I was in college 30 years ago. At that time there was no world wide web, DOS was the operating system on personal computers, databases were mostly flat files, and word processors were not WYSIWYG. And smart phones - well those only existed in science fiction, and smart watches only in Dick Tracy comic strips.
You may think the software revolution has already happened, but that’s because you can’t see what’s coming in just the next 5 or 10 years.
Yeah, not even close. There are so many potential frontiers that could explode into serious industries at any point right now, all highly CS driven.
There could be an argument made that salaries could go down relative to inflation etc, but even so, it will be minor. As @InigoMontoya mentioned, hiring talented people in the field is still very difficult, even if there are more grads out there than before.
I slightly disagree. Most software companies have very little economic incentive to write secure software. macOS and Windows could be full of security holes and still have a near duopoly.
You’re making a lot of assumptions that only hold when they are secure systems. If there were a ton of security holes, neither would have the share they have now. They built their empires based on being a top general choice. Security has always been important to early adopters in particular and general users care as much as it affects them. Sure, they could introduce holes now and get away with it, but it would hurt them relative to the other, so security is still a concern for both OS’s.
None of that really has to do with the quoted text though, so I’m not sure what you’re disagreeing with. While not every company cares as much about security, there’s still plenty of work there, particularly in big transactions handled by banks, airlines, and more. The second sentence is pretty much a truism. The constant arms race between security and hackers will pretty much never end simply because of its nature. With data becoming one of the more valuable things in the current tech world, protecting it isn’t going to stop being important. Some companies can fall completely apart based on one big data breach. I’d say that’s incredibly strong incentive.
CS is not at all past its prime. That’s ridiculous. However, if I was in high school and deciding on some kind of CS-related major for college, I’d go into into a field like computational math, computational biology, computational linguistics, data science…something more application specific than pure CS.
If anything, computers are more and more ingrained in all manner of products, so CS is getting more and more important.
Lots of companies experience data breaches. Very rarely does it ever result in bankruptcy. To the extent, it’s true, incentives can be perverse. If a company never discovers that it’s been hacked, its CIO doesn’t have to report that to the CEO and the CEO doesn’t have to report it to shareholders and customers.
I highly doubt that it’s past its prime. There aren’t enough talented people that my company has been able to hire and there are several open positions.
In my line of work, if you get slapped with a HIPPA violation, the company is toast.
There aren’t enough CS degrees out there to be software engineering demand.