@DrGoogle #81: Huh? Not what I said at all. That said, many engineering and comp sci graduates do overspecialize.
Here is a survey of mid-career pay levels by major. Yes, they are self-reported, with all of the issues that such entails. But the sample sizes should be quite a bit larger than for surveys by school.
http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/info-Degrees_that_Pay_you_Back-sort.html
Note that some majors like music and philosophy are high-Gini, while others like physician assistant and nursing are low-Gini. But all of them do pretty well at the 90th percentile level.
It is an issue if you are of the mind that an undergraduate degree (and the particular major) must lead immediately and directly to a career. If you understand education to be so much else, this entire conversation is without value.
Like it or not, many students are in the financial situation of barely being able to afford college, must find a job immediately upon graduation in order to pay back their student loans, and do not have any parental financial safety net that they can rely on if their job searches take longer than expected.
Education for learning’s sake may be an ideal here (where most posters are from high SES families), but it is also a luxury in much of the real world of high college costs relative to the financial resources that most families actually have.
I’m not talking about those students. Why do you always assume that posters are using your own reference points? There was no indication in the OP that the dozens of links in question refer mainly or exclusively to students without the supposed “luxury,” as you call it, to enjoy their education and to choose their future paths.
What exactly is “ridiculous” – other than your foul language, that is?
It seems that the person I was just addressing left.
Computer jobs are cool for now… but I wouldn’t say they will be cool and good forever.
Programmers are already treated like worker bees anyway: Seen by management as a way to get things done. Although salaries not bad, we are still underpaid compared to anyone whose job is simply to tell us what to do and seen as replaceable. And as someone mentioned, a lot of jobs idealized are jobs where you work 80 hours a week in order to make the CEO’s dream of creating the new “big” BS social app real or mind numbing about-to-be-outsourced CRUD jobs.
It’s actually already hard for a student to get an entry level job (outside of connections). There’s demand for programmers—experienced programmers that is or top school applicants. Getting your junior position in anything interesting is hard unless you are lucky enough like me to have had enough free time outside of class in order to make a portfolio and learn things school does not teach (a lot!).
Entry-level jobs (even the high paid college graduate ones) are probably not idealized compared to upper management / CEO jobs (or those of similar pay levels like big hedge fund manager). Many students seem to see the former as just stepping stones to the latter (see the threads of students wanting to double major in ____ and business, indicating that they see ____ as a stepping stone, not as something that they actually like doing).
In a rising-Gini economy, perhaps it is no surprise that the upper management / CEO jobs become more attractive to some, but very few actually get to them. Note that a rising-Gini economy means that even those who are pretty well-off (e.g. the top 2-3% income households who complain about not getting college financial aid for their kids) may “feel poor” if they compare their situation to the CEOs and such who have orders of magnitude more income and wealth than they have.
My S is about to graduate from a well known university in mid-west with an UG in chemical engrng & minor in CS. He tried very hard to land a job as a chem engr during the last fall recruiting season. Over the past 3 years, the opportunities for summer jobs were at mainly at his college labs; he did not have much luck landing industry based internships. He ended up mainly working on campus writing computer codes during summers.
With quite a bit of upheaval in the energy sector, he faced highly competitive job scene for chem E. Fortunately he had two job offers from well known companies, but his offers were in IT. My S is hoping that he might be able to get back to chem E in future. I think that is what he wants to do. We will wait and see.
Having marketable skills is the essence of survival these days.
It doesn’t make for dramatic headlines, but advancing technology is also being used to make computers and robots more accessible and easier to program.
Rather than view engineering/programming as a specialization, I would suggest viewing it is as another liberal arts discipline that one should have some exposure to in order to better understand the coming world and find one’s place in it.
Engineering/programming, taught the right way, may in fact, be the best way to learn generic problem solving and logical thinking skills. There has been demonstrated success with kids as young as 4 years, so there is nothing to fear, but lots to learn.
http://ase.tufts.edu/devtech/tangiblek/tangibleK%20brochure%20Feb11.pdf
http://ase.tufts.edu/devtech/publications/sullivan-wheels-bot.pdf
With many engineers in the family, we are well aware of the useful life span in the profession. My husband pretty much put himself through school (back in the day when that was possible) because his engineer father was laid off during the recession of the 70s. It is important to keep your skills up to date and even that may not be enough if a company decides you are too expensive and not useful enough, or not as useful as a new hire fresh out of college.
So all 3 of my sons were CS majors and all 3 have wonderful jobs with great perks but I’m telling them–save for a rainy day. Don’t assume you’ll always be this valuable to the industry.
THIS, from Momannoyed:
I love the arrogance I see in the field and on this board – that assumes that fresh graduates will always be viewed by the CS industry as creative, dynamic, and current. Not even close. Ask the thousands who have been laid off or otherwise phased out, for reasons having nothing to do with competence or education.
I think this thread should be closed.
Maybe the OP is a robot? For me, the key point from Momannoyed is that whatever you do, you need to keep learning so that you are always valuable (even net of high compensation). Starting with some technical competence makes it easier to get an initial job, but doing a good job on one’s current job must always be balanced by building one’s human capital. No need to feel bitter about what happens – just understand that that is the game.
I agree that bitterness is not the answer. However, the point is that complacency about supposedly “having it made” (for life) at the ripe old age of 18 is an expectation that almost guarantees bitterness if there is no understanding that in the world of employment –including entrepreneurship– it’s essential to keep adapting to a rapidly-changing world.
Millions of people, world-wide and within this country have computer skills, and thousands have advanced computer skills. Thousands of people, with and without college degrees, with and without Ivy League or Stanford or MIT credentials, know how to program, code, create social applications and entertainment such as video games. And the irony is that NOTHING changes as quickly as technology. What’s new today is old in 6 months, including your unique product you just developed.
One problem is closing off options. You can afford to be ultra-specialized or narrow when you’re at the top of your profession or are even semi-retired – such as a physician who limits himself to only certain kinds of cases, or a lawyer who has established a reputation over years which allows him or her to practice only a certain type of litigation which is also high-priced. To first of all become successful and then to REMAIN successful will require much more openness and adaptability than I see in many 17 year olds today who are so enamored with the computer industry. If you just want to create products for rich people who have the leisure for recreation, you will limit yourself to that market. You will be limiting yourself to those with wants instead of also those with more basic **needs **-- a much bigger market.
The other problem is being too self-referential. Too many high school students are thinking only about working within the (computer) industry to serve the same industry, instead of thinking about how widely technology can reach, and learning about THOSE fields, or learning about how to make technology much more affordable and accessible to the millions who now have limited access to it. The broader your knowledge (in other words, the more of a generalist you are, simultaneously) the better position you will be in to stay ahead of markets and to have products for those markets.
The cold, sad truth is that there are students wanting to major in Computer Science just for the money yet have no idea what it is all about and don’t even know what programming is.
Then there are people who do get a CS degree but get demolished in the coding interviews. Hence, why it is ‘so hard’ to get a job at Google per se. Simply too many under qualified people are applying. Not stats like GPA and test scores, they couldn’t care less about that - we’re talking about real experience and basic coding paradigms. There are lots of people with PhD’s in CS fail their coding interviews for not even knowing basic OOP’s or write poor algorithms.
Glad to see some of you aren’t completely oblivious to the future.
The post about “not making a hire to anyone who hasn’t had multiple job offers” means several things to me:
- the new hire has no idea about starting salaries, and is asking for / negotiating to 10K or more less; this is common with internationals in my experience - of course if someone is qualified and wants less money, they will get more offers
- the new hire is very very qualified, but is paranoid and shops around too much
- the new hire is qualified, but has no geographic limitations at all, so has gotten many job offers
I got married very soon after college, and that decreased my potential career paths. However, over my career I have changed jobs based on the economy and the family situation. I have skills that can easily be transferred to a full telecommute position, and I have skills that would be considered “trade skills” but are in demand.
Letting your child know that they cannot be myopic, that they can’t get a degree and expect to work exactly in that field forever, is the best thing you can do for them.
What’s a winner or loser?