<p>Hello, I am trying to major in CS but my dad is convinced that it is a worthless major and is extremely outsourced. I really enjoy programming and am currently developing an application. I need actual facts that I can use to prove to him that it isn't being outsourced. Also please provide an example of what exactly a computer scientist does, because i am having trouble explaining it to my dad. He supports my passion for programming but believes that I should minor in it and major in a "real" major. For example biology(go on to med school) or maybe mechanical engineer or electrical engineer.</p>
<p>You probably do not need to major in biology to go to med school. </p>
<p>CS can be a diverse field. Rumor has it that some number of entry-level jobs in computer programming are going to lower wage countries and/or H-1Bs. </p>
<p>The 100-level “computer” courses that were offered when I was in college during the Jurassic Period mostly involved high-level programming languages, but there was still a great deal of theory involved. It isn’t clear how much an average H-1B knows or needs to know of theory.</p>
<p>Commodity jobs, ones that any programmer can do, are outsourced. </p>
<p>There is plenty of opportunity for CS jobs that require talent. These involve solving hard problems, and are going begging for talent, and salaries are rising. Just look on simplyhired.com</p>
<p>An “any programmer” could be someone who has just graduated from college with a major or minor in CS, or a computer hobbyist or other worker seeking a career change…</p>
<p>I read a book that claimed that persistence and experience trumped “talent” over the long haul. Yet where will a persistent young computer programmer (talented or not) get the requisite 3-5 years experience except at an entry-level programming job?</p>
<p>If employers are “begging for talent” maybe they need to check behind some of the counters at coffee shops and other retail establishments.</p>
<p>A quick search on a job search site yielded at least 10 to 15 times as many positions that “hit” on Bachelor’s / 0-2 years experience in CS than did a similar search did for “biology.” Clearly, CS is the better gamble. Hopsin’s dad might have a point about the outsourcing, however.</p>
<p>I once hired a recent grad who was answering the phone at a Chinese restaurant. He sent us his resume though. (I placed my order and ordered him, LOL!)</p>
<p>It’s really hard to find the people who don’t. Tell your friends in the coffee shop to get back on the horse. </p>
<p>Most companies foster talent. They want to hire recent grads who they can invest in and develop. You do have to get through the interview and demonstrate a mastery of things like recursion, linked lists, time and space complexity, and other topics that might allow you to stand out from the masses.</p>
<p>Some people incorrectly believe that a computer science career is all about programming. Although most entry-level jobs after a Bachelor’s degree involve programming, the majority of CS majors eventually graduate to other responsibilities such as design, coordination, testing, planning and management. Thus, if you have only a Bachelor’s you typically start with a software engineering job and move on (after about 5 years of experience) into higher-level positions. With advanced coursework and a Master’s degree, you can work in an area of specialization. </p>
<p>If your dad is impressed by the idea of medicine, do a search on “computational neuroscience” or “bioinformatics”. This will give you an idea of CS careers at the interface of computers and medicine. Surely computer science at these advanced levels will not be routinely outsourced.</p>
<p>I hope that your dad will allow you to follow your passion. Insisting that you pursue something else can lead to strained relations for the rest of your lives.</p>
<p>I’m sure that it already occurs to under-employed coffee shop workers, especially recent grads, to send in resumes. Your hire from the restaurant was a recent grad. Had he not been working that night, or not working at all, your paths might not have ever crossed.</p>
<p>I find it hard to believe that “most companies foster talent.” A quick search shows only a few dozen companies hiring job-seekers who are recent college grads with no experience. Yet one sees thousands of ads for 3-5 years experience and long lists of qualifications. The original poster should ask his dad to show him just who is hiring biology graduates. </p>
<p>@ Pootie:</p>
<p>Possibly true, MOST entry-level jobs for recent CS grads are likely to involve some programming. However, in order for someone to “graduate to other responsibilities” he would have had to have been hired to do entry-level responsibilities first. CS does seem much better than biology in this case. After all, most employers use computers these days, few jobs involve only biology.</p>
<p>In regard to your comments, combining two seemingly disparate fields (CS and “biomedical whatever”) might make one moderately qualified for a small number of jobs in a niche market. The original poster should ask his dad to not only show him who hires biology graduates, but to also show him where those new hires end up in a few years.</p>
<p>I was only kidding about calling the chinese restaurant. His resume came in through HR sometime during the summer after he graduated. When I phone screened him and asked him what he was doing, it turned out that his current employer was the chinese restaurant. </p>
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<p>I don’t why it’s so hard to believe that. That individual I described now has people working for him on the projects that he leads. If your company is growing, and tech companies are supposed to be growth companies, meaning investors expect a high return on investment through reinvesting the profits in the business and growing, rather and having a cash cow like a utility, where most of the profits are just returned to the investors as dividends - then the new grads you hire today are going to be the experts and mentors of the new grads of tomorrow. </p>
<p>Even in slow growth or declining companies like in the defense industry, the most talented of the crop of new grads become tomorrow’s experts and mentors and graduate to increased responsibility. Those less talented may go nowhere and are more at risk. </p>
<p>Basically, like anything, there is a wide variation in abilities of CS grads, and I would say that a large fraction of US CS grads have a very bright future. Those who never move beyond the most basic capabilities are most at risk of having their roles outsourced. The key is constantly developing and maintaining advanced and valuable capabilities.</p>
<p>To recruit someone from a restaurant (ie, “networking”) doesn’t sound very implausible, but to say that it happened when it didn’t harms credibility, kidding or not.</p>
<p>A search on a job board showed ~2600 computer programmer listings for the 2-5 year experience range versus only ~330 listings for the 0-2 years experience range, for a bachelor’s degree. The companies are obviously looking for experience, not talent, or for low cost, not talent. No surprise there, and certainly no evidence of a fostering of talent.</p>
<p>One doesn’t just “move on” to medical school, one must be admitted and that is not a foregone conclusion for most. You should try to find out which majors are actually being admitted to the med schools in which you are interested. You might not need to major in biology.</p>
<p>Your back-up plan should be under development or in place as early as possible.</p>
<p>Read my original post. I didn’t say that I recruited him from the restaurant, I said that he sent us his resume. His employer at the time was the Chinese restaurant and his job was to answer the phone. </p>
<p>My quip in the parenthesis was clearly a joke. Hence the “LOL”. YOU misunderstood. Sorry if you didn’t see the humor. </p>
<p>And my credibility on CC is just fine, thank you. Discount it at your own peril.</p>
<p>Does it occur to you that the vast majority of jobs for new graduates are filled through on-campus recruiting. Most new grads don’t have to look on job boards because they have recruiters looking for them. </p>
<p>Secondly, and I think it’s important, is that hiring someone into their SECOND job is the least risky time to hire someone, even if you plan to develop them yourself. You have mitigated much of the risk because you get to see how they performed on their first job. It’s hard to do because most successful companies take care to compensate their most valuable from the 0-2 year crowd so there are many fewer of the most talented candidates on the job market at any given time. You have to get someone talented whose company has gone south, or who was not treated well on their first job. It’s really not as common as you would think.</p>
<p>Both of these factors contribute to what you saw on a job board.</p>
<p>“I once hired a recent grad who was answering the phone at a Chinese restaurant. He sent us his resume though. (I placed my order and ordered him, LOL!)”</p>
<p>It certainly sounds as if you discovered him while either placing an order on the phone or while you were at the restaurant, and that he only then sent his resume to you later as a result of your initial encounter. I didn’t misunderstand anything. You apparently provided a “incomplete” account of what actually transpired. </p>
<p>The factual way to describe the situation might have been to say that you received a resume from someone who turned out to be working at a restaurant, at or by the time you called him, if indeed that is what happened. Perhaps you should now, for the record, state exactly what really did happen and leave out any exaggerations. Credibility tends to exist solely in the opinions of each observer and is not something that someone can arrogantly claim to have. </p>
<p>Now, on to your other point.</p>
<p>If your phone answerer was such a talented individual, why hadn’t the recruiters already gotten to him?</p>
<p>If you go back to the job board and do the same sort of number-of-listings comparison of 2-5 years experience versus 0-2 years for accountants or nurses, you find a smaller exp/new ratio, about 60% of the CS ratio. While those jobs may have accreditation rules in place for some positions, someone in with less experience has relatively more job opportunities than those in CS.</p>
<p>CS employers often seem to be looking for an exact replacement for a lost employee or to be seeking those with -experience- in a new language or technology. You haven’t shown that they “foster talent,” but have only alluded to the possibility.</p>
<p>Fair enough. Some years ago (~2004) I received a great resume from HR from someone who had recently graduated with a near perfect GPA from a great school that was not local. He had a local address. I called him. I asked him what he was doing. He said that he was working in his roommate’s parent’s Chinese Restaurant. Why wasn’t he recruited? I don’t know. He might have been. We might have gotten his resume from college recruiting, I can’t remember. The tech economy was much worse than it is now because the bubble had recently burst. He was great though, we interviewed him, hired him and paid for his Masters degree. It was a good investment for us. </p>
<p>Many companies pay for continuing education in exchange for a certain time commitment of work. Ours certainly does, and we’re not that unique. My company charges our customers too much money to do commodity work, and we don’t want to compete on price, so to get our high prices, we need to find smart people who we can then invest in to focus them on what we do. As their expertise grows, they get more responsibility and lead projects that command high prices. If we grow, the cycle continues.</p>
<p>So your sketchy example involves a top student from a top school? Note that you didn’t say whether the student was a CS grad or similar. We can either assume that he was or we can assume that he was not; the distinction might be important.</p>
<p>Tech unemployment was no worse during the early 2000s recession than during the late 2000s recession, although the overall unemployment was higher during the later recession. The recovery was already well underway by 2004 (mid-2000s) so the fact that you were hiring and then educating someone (Master’s in what, BTW?) proves mainly that it was your company’s bottom-line that was of primary importance. That’s fine, that’s why businesses exist. However, had you found a Master’s degree holder instead of the recent college grad, no doubt you would have hired that person instead, all else being equal.</p>
<p>Now had you been hiring recent grads, especially liberal arts and non-CS grads, in numbers at the depths of the recession and training them, then you might be able to start to make a case that you were “fostering talent.”</p>
<p>Company’s bottom line is always of primary importance, to ever think otherwise, would make you a fool. We INVEST in people. We expect a high return and if they leave within a certain period, I don’t know the exact period, but for sake of argument, say 3 years, they owe us any tuition reimbursement that we made in the preceding 3 years. They agree to those terms as a condition of tuition reimbursement. Few people leave afterwards because they are valuable to us, we compensate them accordingly, and they don’t want to pay back the money. It’s a good deal for them. It’s good to work for my company. Nothing altruistic about it. Just good business. </p>
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<p>Had I found an MS in the exact area that we wanted, I would have preferred that. Had I found someone already trained by someone else in his first job, I would have preferred that even more (and paid even more). As I’ve said in my previous post, everybody wants talented people with 2-5 years experience but those people are not that easy to find - the most talented are quickly recognized as stars and team players by their employers and have little reason to jump ship. None of either type were in my resume pile. My company has a mechanism to send people to graduate school in a degree program. Most people’s Masters degrees are not in the exact area I needed, and would need almost the same training yet I’d have to pay a higher salary with no tangible benefit to me. In that case a smart BS who I can school is preferable to MS who I have to pay more for, and have no mechanism to school short of a PhD program. If I found an MS in my area, and they wanted to go into a PhD program part-time, I’d approve it and I have someone doing that now. It’s rare and it takes forever. Most people get a social life or a family and never finish. </p>
<p>From my purview, based on the quality and quantity of resumes I’ve seen, tech unemployment was much worse after the tech bubble than it was through the recent recession because the defense industry picked up much of the slack until the technology started recovering recently. There was a brief period in the current recession where the high quality of resumes I was seeing was staggering, but that period passed rather quickly though we benefited, and we never lowered our salaries to take advantage of people - that would have been short sighted. </p>
<p>I never hire liberal arts grads. I want engineers who intend to be engineers - I have a good track record with them and I do find them. I view CS majors as engineers because of the extensive training in problem solving that they have. My group’s work is on the EE/CompE/CS spectrum. I hire graduates of all three majors regularly. I don’t remember which exact flavor the individual I described was. The distinction isn’t important to me. He had an almost flawless GPA from a respected Big 10 school. </p>
<p>You can fight with me and question the veracity of what I’m saying, but I hope the view from my vantagepoint helps others. From my purview, it is still talent that is in short supply, and for you students out there, if take your profession seriously and excel, the rewards are excellent. </p>
<p>That’s about all I’m going to say on the subject.</p>
<p>Since there are some experts here…quick question - is there any downside to coming out of school with a masters in CS vs. a bachelors? I would think it would be a positive but sometimes you hear that companies will hire BS first because they can pay less. </p>
<p>There’s a good chance my son will be able to get his MS in CS in 4 years…just want to make sure this is a good thing. Also - can you offer any advice as to what areas of specialization are in demand?</p>
<p>Information security and cyber - offense and defense. Every body is trying to steal, phish and spoof, everything how do you detect it, how do you stop it. The DOD wants to develop cyber weapons so steal, spoof and phish our adversaries - do it to them before they do it to you - how do you do it. </p>
<p>Big data - our every move on line is tracked - how to collect, organize and mine that data to make money. How to draw inferences and make money. </p>
<p>Mobile computing - make an app that generates traffic and money starts pouring in</p>
<p>Social media, search algorithms, etc are still huge. </p>
<p>Just imagine what we had 10 years ago and what we have now. That was all developed during a war and a struggling economy. Now try to imagine 10 years in the future. You probably can’t. </p>
<p>That’s why I think that the future of CS is bright and the opportunities exciting.</p>