<p>" I just think EEs are silly and misguided. "</p>
<p>Oh Okay.</p>
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<p>And that’s precisely the point of contention. After all, who really remembers the Cuil outage? You and I do, but surely you would agree that we are members of a tiny tech cognoscenti minority. Let’s be perfectly honest: most regular Internet users of today - the type of users who might use Cuil - don’t know about the outage of 2 years ago, nor would they care. All they care about is whether Cuil is useful to them right now. </p>
<p>So while I agree with you that Cuil did make a mistake in overhyping their search engine, at the end of the day, how much damage did that really cause? I agree that Cuil probably did leave a poor impression upon those users who actually tried it during the time of the outage, but that’s only a miniscule fraction of the entire Internet userbase. Even if I were a member of that tiny fraction, who’s to say that I wouldn’t try it again today? Just because a search engine was unreliable 2 years ago doesn’t mean that I will resolve to never use it for the rest of my life. Why would I? </p>
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<p>Well, actually, I’m afraid you did. Here’s your quote from post #31:</p>
<p>You need to **talk to people who actually employ software engineers ** to know what the actual criteria are that are used to determine qualifiedness and suitability.</p>
<p>Besides, I would be wary of even your new declaration, for software engineers usually don’t really know either and are (religiously) incented to tout their own abilities. For example, I have distinct memories of old-timer engineers who continually touted the superiority of the DEC VAC system and DECNET programming and derided those who chose to learn other technologies, only for those old engineers to be slowly laid off. Even now, I’m sure that plenty of currently ‘hot’ technologies of today will be quite cold in 5 years. </p>
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<p>Which AltaVista people? The ones who employed the engineers, as you had stated in post #31? If so, I’m sure I would have obtained truly terrible advice, as these were precisely the managers who drove Alta Vista into the ground. </p>
<p>Or, even if were to have talked to the Alta Vista software engineers, the question again is, which ones? So, some of them successfully migrated to Google. But, as I’m sure you know, many of them were not able to do so, nor were they able to move on to any other comparable position. The problem then is, I don’t know which is which. What if I had talked to the latter group of engineers who might have provided me with terrible career advice? </p>
<p>Again, that’s the problem: nobody really knows exactly what the important future software technologies are going to be, not even the engineers themselves, and certainly not those who employ such engineers. </p>
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<p>Fair enough, but I’m not entirely comfortable with the modified statement either. For example, I can think of quite a few Novell Netware engineers who refused to believe that they were fighting a battle they were destined to lose and consequently rode that ship down to its watery grave. The same could be said for numerous other formerly dominant software/IT solutions that became obsolete.</p>
<p>Man sakky’s posts are just too long. I bet he does it on purpose… to make his opposition accept defeat sooner…</p>
<p>Yeah but its still contribution. I dont like redundancy especially when it is false. CS is not a bad major, I think its pretty cool; but i also know that its a negative slope.</p>
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<p>People are free to pick out the parts they like (or dislike) and respond only to those parts.</p>
<p>“its a negative slope.”
- Just out of curiosity, what does that mean?</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.epi.org/page/-/old/images/snap20040324.gif[/url]”>http://www.epi.org/page/-/old/images/snap20040324.gif</a></p>
![http://www.epi.org/page/-/old/images/snap20040324.gif[/url]](http://www.epi.org/page/-/old/images/snap20040324.gif%5B/url%5D){kind=link}
<p>and that was 6 years ago.</p>
<p>stop kidding yourself</p>
<p>Well, to be fair, the baseline of the above graph was the year 2000, which as we all surely remember, was directly within the throes of the dotcom boom bounty. I knew CS guys who hadn’t yet even graduated from college who were being offered well over $120k a year to start, with some CS guys graduating from Stanford being offered Director or VP positions that paid up to $200k a year to start. Yet even that pay was miniscule compared to the burgeoning equity wealth created (on paper). I knew one guy who had never even graduated from high school and had worked for a dotcom for just a few years, yet whose net worth from his stock options at one point approached $5 million, which basically meant that he had made well over $1 million a year for every year he had worked - at least, on paper. Sadly, as we know, it all came crashing down. {Still worked out well for him, relatively speaking - he was able to purchase a brand new sportscar with cash from the options he was able to convert, and he drive that car to this day. Not bad for a high school dropout to own a car that costs more than most middle-class families make in a year.} </p>
<p>Look, we’re never going to witness the insanity of the dotcom boom again: it was a once-in-a-lifetime event. CS employment should never be expected to ever match those heights.</p>
<p>^ greenvision… the fact of the matter is that there are more software/programming jobs than there are many other kinds of jobs, and enrollment in CS/SE is much lower than it is in many other majors. I have no concerns about the viability of the software field, and in fact am confident that it will survive in the US long after EE has been moved elsewhere…</p>
<p>^ Ok, if you say so.</p>
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<p>Louis Monier, Mike Burrows, and Paul Flaherty are credited with the creation of Alta Vista. People who spoke to them would have gotten some insight about search technology, more so than consulting a BLS report.</p>
<p>Other people I can think of who were involved with the Digital Palo Alto research labs who went on to Google are Alan Eustace, Stephen Stuart, and Monika Henzinger. I don’t have time to obtain a more detailed list; people who are interested can google such information.</p>
<p>Certainly, there are people whom one could have spoken to who were responsible for Alta Vista’s failure. But this does not mean that no software engineer, software manager, or researcher, even, is able to provide valuable information to people who are interested in entering the field. It just means one has to get to know a fair amount of people, and spend time determining which (if any) of those people has information that is of use to you. But this is nothing new in the software field; even back in the 1980s, people were exchanging information on the unix-wizards mailing list; the comp.sources usenet newsgroups, etc. People were attending ACM and IEEE conferences, or at least reading their publications. They didn’t just use BLS statistics to decide whether or not to enter the software field; they were engaging themselves from the time they entered college, or even earlier, with others who were developing software technologies.</p>
<p>Now AuburnMathTutor says:</p>
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<p>At some point, if they want to give themselves a better chance of being successful in the software industry, they need to engage themselves with these sorts of people. Unless they have a really hot idea for a startup that VCs are lining up to invest in, or they are geniuses that companies are lining up to hire, they need to involve themselves with software projects to distinguish themselves from the pack. Otherwise, they run the risk of being passed over in the application process because there is little to differentiate them from all of the other applicants.</p>
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<p>No, no one knows the future, but there are people out there who are creating the future; these are the people whom those who are considering software engineering need to interact with.</p>
<p>If you want career stability go into nursing.
Only 2 years in community college, take the NCLEX (which has about a 90% pass rate).
You’ll be looking at $50-70k in pay on average with job stability and excellent benefits.</p>
<p>Why go into engineering considering the competition, future requirements passing the PE exam, outsourcing potential, and the unstable job market? </p>
<p>Hospitals are so uncompetitive and can pass health care cost to the government and insurance companies. People will be required to have health insurance under Obama and there will never be reforms to reduce health costs.</p>
<p>Have hospitals ever had mass layoffs?</p>
<p>^ yeah but you spend you life around sick people. I am not saying that in a degrading way, its just that engineering is so much challenging and fun.</p>
<p>Also you don’t really need to get a PE license for most disciplines, not all disciplines have high rates of outsourcing, and 50-70K is only for less than 10 years. And you get to do cool stuff (sometimes).</p>
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<p>And googling such information would surely turn up quite a few former Alta Vista engineers who not only themselves accomplished little afterwards, but probably would have provided poor advice as to what skills would be applicable in the future. Again, how many Novell administrators used to exist in the past, compared to how many exist today? Listening to them would have convinced you to play a losing hand. </p>
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<p>That’s a quite exacting demand, don’t you think: to be participating in newsgroups, attending conferences, and reading publications for an industry in which you may not even be entering? To extend that logic, if I’m an 18-year-old freshmen deciding which discipline to choose out of, say, 5 potential majors, your counsel would be that I would have to dig that deeply into all 5? Come on, no college freshman is going to do that, and you know it. </p>
<p>I have to support Auburnmathtutor on this one: the BLS is useful as a first pass. Nobody is arguing that you should rely solely on the BLS, nor is anybody arguing that the BLS is perfectly reliable. However, given the fact that college students are forced to make career-impacting decisions with little information, the BLS is useful as a starting point. Let’s be honest: few college freshmen are actually going understand any industry publications, whether trade or academic, nor will they be able to participate meaningfully in any industry-specific newsgroup or conference. Heck, they probably won’t even understand what anybody is talking about. Yet they still have to make a decision regarding what to major in. </p>
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<p>See above. The critical question is whether to even choose to join the major in the first place. </p>
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<p>There are people who claim to be creating the future, but clearly only a small fraction of them actually will. The question again is, how do you know which is which? Interact with the wrong group and you will be convinced to learn skills that are useless.</p>
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<p>I can’t speak for other majors. In my experience, success in the software field has quite a lot to do with engagement with others who contribute to the field. The earlier, the better. At the very least it gives them an idea of whether they want to pursue the field. I’ve certainly known lots of people who were initially lured by the potential for making money but were turned off when they found out how much time they would have to spend getting up to speed and keeping abreast of developments within the field.</p>
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<p>Actually, it does not take much at all to initially participate in an open-source project. Writing documentation is always helpful. Translating documentation into another language is also helpful. People are needed to run the code on different platforms to find out what works and what doesn’t. And you can start small, by making small changes such as removing compile-time warnings, before moving on to the big architectural stuff.</p>
<p>Even if the student does not understand everything that is happening at a conference (or even a conference publication), they can study the parts they understand and gradually move on to other things.</p>
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<p>You don’t know which is which. This is why it’s important to engage with these people and find out if you want to be one of the people who do create the future. It isn’t easy. It’s hard work.</p>
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<p>A college freshman is going to understand practically nothing, nor will he ever understand anything, and he is certainly never going to participate in any open source project, or produce/translate any documentation, unless he first decides to choose the major. What good does it do me to remove a bunch of compile-type warnings or test code on different platforms if I then decide that I’m actually going to become a chemical engineering major? They have to decide they want to major in the field and then they can begin to contemplate working on projects. </p>
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<p>Well, as much of a techno-futurist that I am, I am well aware that the vast majority of people have no ambitious to actually create the future themselves. Let’s be perfectly honest. Most people just want a (relatively) secure job for which they’ll be decently paid. That’s it. They have no personal ambitious to change the world or build future technologies. They don’t really care. Now, if a starry-eyed futurist offers to pay them well (or offer them stock options that could potentially pay them well) to build the future, they’ll do it. But if they could be paid well to babysit a 20-year-old mainframe, they’ll do that. </p>
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<p>Sure, but that’s true of most (technical) disciplines. Being a viable chemical engineer also means keeping yourself abreast of new technical developments. However, what matters is what sort of developments you have to track, and that, frankly, is beyond the capacity of practically any college freshman who hasn’t even decided whether to even choose the major.</p>
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<p>Quite a few open-source projects don’t require special knowledge, especially when it comes to testing and documentation. They are well within the grasp of a college freshman who is motivated.</p>
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<p>I would assume here that after the person participated in some software projects, he or she found chemical engineering more interesting.</p>
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<p>Wrong. All they have to do is decide they want to work on a software project. Lots of kids do this.</p>
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<p>IMO, such people tend not to do very well at companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc. People at these companies are generally quite passionate about what they do – they want to change the status quo, not just draw a guaranteed paycheck. There are other companies where people are less passionate, but the growth prospects at these companies are not as good. Unless this work involves systems that can’t be easily changed, for example because they are legacy systems, or there are government mandates, these are jobs that tend to be outsourced, offshored, or just go away because the technology becomes out of date.</p>
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<p>Well, not being a chemical engineer, I really couldn’t say. But I remember kids back in the 1980s who as undergrads had already participated in engineering workshops, internships, and the like. Some held patents or ran companies on the side. They were motivated more by the passion they had for engineering than money.</p>
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<p>And right there you betrayed the key. The college freshman has to be motivated. How motivated are you really going to be about a major for which you’re not even sure you will major in?</p>
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<p>Wrong. They have to decide to want to work on a software project, but why would you make such a decision if you’re not highly confident that you want to major in the field in the first place? Again, why waste my time participating in any software projects at all if I’m simply going to decide to major in chemical engineering? </p>
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<p>But they don’t necessarily intend to work for such companies. They’ll work for whoever will provide them with a decent paycheck. </p>
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<p>Which is why many SE/IT people I know intend to work for the government, which will obviously never go away. I tend to agree with Globaltraveller in that once you’ve obtained a security clearance, you’re basically employable for life (or at least until we stop fighting wars, which will probably never be the case), and that’s exactly what many people want. While not impossible, it is difficult to offshore work that has national security implications. </p>
<p>So, if the job entails babysitting a 20-year-old server for some government agency, then as long as it pays decently, plenty of people will happily do it. You don’t really have to work that hard, as for most of the time, nothing really happens. Government employees are difficult to lay off. Most government jobs do not require that you work more than 40 hours a week (or, if you do, are required to pay OT). Let’s face it: it’s a sweet deal. </p>
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<p>While I would certainly like to believe that people are motivated by the passion, come on, we know the truth. Many engineers are simply motivated by the money. As a simple thought exercise, imagine a world where engineers were paid far less than they are paid - i.e., a world where they were paid only the wage of the average American (i.e. ~$35k a year). Let’s face it, we both know that many (probably most) engineers would quit their jobs to do something else, and many (probably nearly all) engineering students would switch to other majors. The relatively strong salaries of engineers, compared to regular Americans, is a major draw.</p>
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<p>If you’re not motivated, you should have no expectations for a great salary, IMO. I suppose there are exceptions. Personally, I would not bet my future on being one of them.</p>
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<p>Obviously? That’s a rather sweeping statement. History is full of governments that went away for reasons similar to what is happening now. And the US is a rather young country, by comparison. But that’s not really central to my argument. The existence of a government does not imply that there will be healthy pay for all of its employees. After all, they can’t print money indefinitely (if they wish to do business with other countries).</p>
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<p>If all they want is a guaranteed paycheck, then they should go work for the government and hope it will continue to pay them. OTOH, if they want to work for a company like Apple, they will have to show some motivation (because other applicants will be at least as motivated).</p>
<p>It should be apparent to everyone on this board that the kind of “guaranteed” pay sakky is talking about has put a lot of state governments, as well as the Federal government, at risk. Taxpayers are upset and want to see an end to all this spending.</p>