Computer science graduating class of 2007 smallest this decade

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9066659

by rms • 18 years ago

23 18 18 years ago

motoko• 18 years ago

Good. Supply and demand == more money for me.

rcoder2• 18 years ago

Not necessarily. Demand in this market is for competent programmers, not graduates of US schools' CS programs. The two may be correlated, but they're the latter certainly does not guarantee the former.

If fewer and fewer CS grads are entering the market, it may force interviewers and companies to (gasp!) evaluate candidates on the basis of traits other than the name of the university they attended. We might even see crazy suggestions like hiring based on intelligence and experience gain some traction in the IT management field.

Personally, I consider this good news for me, as a non-degree-holding IT professional. Fewer graduates in the hiring pool means more call-backs for interviews and fewer glass ceilings.

amichail• 18 years ago

Software companies have been hiring based on intelligence for a long time. Why do you think this is not the case?

iamelgringo• 18 years ago

This just means that BigCo's have to worry more about how they're going to hire people to maintain their established code base and develop new code. It also means that the cost of software development is going to increase dramatically.

This is a big argument in favor of using more productive/expressive languages in creation of new software projects. More productive languages == less programmers == lower costs.

I also see this as a great thing for software startups in general. The tighter the job market becomes for people with CS backgrounds, the cost of creating a new software product is going to increase. As those costs increase, the value of startups and the products they create is going to increase.

In a nutshell, I think what is going to happen, is that large companies are going to increasingly rely on innovation by merger and acquisition.

ardit333• 18 years ago

uhuh.... tell that to my company. we are getting 2.5% increases on average, that is less than inflation.

but I think they have seen it first hand when tried to hire few people fresh of the school, and all of them had multiple offers, so they are ending up hiring somebody that I thought was not that great.

tomjen• 18 years ago

Get yourself a new job, because the dollar has lost so much value you need a 10% yearly raise to stay even.

henning• 18 years ago

As Gauss said, pauca sed matura (few but ripe).

When it comes to the number of programmers you need, I think the fewer the better. The fewer daycoders and code monkeys, the better, at least.

boucher• 18 years ago

Happy to be one of them.

bkrausz• 18 years ago

I had a funny discussion with my school's CS career center councilor (CCCC?) about this. He told me about how he is being inundated with calls from tech companies to the effect of "please please, do you have any more CS majors for me!" Put a smile on my face. It's a happy time to be a CS major...almost offsets the looming recession.

big-j2• 18 years ago

My guess is that tech companies like recent grads because they can get away with paying less ("interns welcome!"), and also the employee is usually not married and doesn't have kids, so they can spend a lot of extra hours on the job.

jcromartie• 18 years ago

There are a number of kids in comp sci that are just in it to get a job when they graduate. I've seen so many of my peers go through school and then just give up programming. These kids fuel the JavaSchools, and when faced with a real comp sci program they are weeded out pretty quickly.

Unfortunately, the schools decided that programming students were too profitable to weed out so many of them with real curriculum. That's when they invented the MIS degree.

People are free to like what they like, but why would you clog up the schools if you know you don't have a passion for it in the first place? My wife was brave enough to switch majors after a few years of engineering school before deciding that she just didn't have her heart in it. Other kids plodded along just because they were close to a degree that they knew they would never use anyway, but the piece of paper was more important than their happiness and sanity.

P.S. This is a lot of observation from the "outside." I did 2 years of college before I realized that my own ability to learn outstripped my school's ability to teach. I got a hell of a head start on the few of my peers from high school that decided to stick with programming.

Computer science graduating class of 2007 smallest this decade

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