[jaabe]

I think the hype is really, really dangerous. I work as an external examiner for CS students at an academy and bachelor level. 10 years ago, maybe 20 students would finish from a single school, in 2019 that number is in the several hundreds some places thousands. If I look at my average grading over the years, there is a clear trend too. People are either really good or really bad, where 10 years ago it was far more spread out, and a lot more people were “average”. It’s anecdotal but I think it’s because hype has pushed too many people into CS.

There will always be a need for excellent CS students, preferable with candidate or masters, just like there will always be a need for excellent biologists or great escimologists. I don’t think there will always be a need for below average CS students, especially not at the rate of which we’re producing them right now, again thanks to the hype.

One of the reasons I say this is because of automation. If you look at operations, the cloud has really killed a lot of jobs in enterprise IT departments, because it’s so much easier to operate your stuff in AWS or Azure than when you had to have your own infrastructure. Sure there are still operations people around, but notice how they are the best operations guys not the averages, because the people who were average 10 years ago are unemployed today.

It’ll be the same for development. We already see bits of it, at least if you’ve been around for a while. 19 years ago we build our first web based enterprise tool to handle employee vacation, sick leave and tax-refund on corporate related driving. It was a massive JSP undertaking that took 20 guys and 6 months. In 2017 it was replaced by a modern web tool build in .NET framework web-app and Angular, it took an intern three weeks to do it.

If you look at what areas are becoming useful, it’s not really CS. Sure you’ll be able to use some CS students for ML, but you’d rather have a mathematician or a statistician who can code. Sure you can use some CS students for robotics, but you’d rather have an electrical engineer.

I’m Danish, our jobmarket is different, but we too hype STEM and especially CS, but the truth is, that what we’re really going to need is electricians, pumblers and other craftsme because every young person wants to learn to code.

[rorykoehler]

One thing that had happened, especially in SE Asia, is the wage has been driven down outside of FAANG. Many non-tech people view development as plumbing, which it kind of is, but at least plumbers are certified which guarantees a minimum level of competency. Buyers don't view development work in terms of value delivered but only in terms of price. This destroys the middle market for good but not industry leading devs.

[mbeex]

This is not limited to SE Asia. Outsourcing, rather over-simplified and limited definitions of cost, buyer's market for companies (and no, the bigger players don't care for real talent at large) drive this in other environments too. I am from Germany and in this market for 20 years as a freelancer/contractor/consultant. Personally - having a major in mathematics and relevant project experience - I have no significant problems. But 'dev-only' people certainly face the mass market effects.

[dorgo]

Also from germany. CS degree = 75% mathematics + 5% coding + 20% other theory. Fresh out of university i hardly could write code at all and had zero experience with databases.

[playing_colours]

are you a contractor in data science area in Germany? Can we please talk?

[nawitus]

> it took an intern three weeks to do it.

What I see happening that even though productivity has increased by e.g. an order of magnitude, projects still remain big since there's a latent demand for more features.

[torstenvl]

There might be latent sales department demand for more features. I don't think there's latent market demand for more features, at least not to the extent consumers would choose to pay for new features.

How many Facebook users were willing to pay to have to download a separate Messenger app, or for Oculus integration? How many Apple users would pay extra for the Touch Bar if it were a standalone feature?

My guess is, not many. Probably not enough to justify adding the feature.

[sgt101]

>2019 that number is in the several hundreds some places thousands.

wow - how are the uni's getting the space / resources to do that? I have some knowledge of the investment required in labs and lecture theatres, and I know of several CS programs in the UK capped by the constraints that these impose. Basically if you can't get the class into a "standard" lecture theatre at your institution you are capped. Attrition is ~5 and 15% (sometimes higher - but the teaching quality stuff kicks in) per year so by the time you get to a graduation class it's rare that >100 graduate - more like 60.

[AlexCoventry]

> investment required in labs and lecture theatres

Do you really need CS labs, anymore? A personal low-end laptop ought to be enough for most CS studies.

[sgt101]

Good question - I think that hands on hardware should be at least one bit of a proper CS degree, for things like massive parallelism and FPGA's perhaps you could use cloud resources - does this cost in?

[bigred100]

I’m not sure that you’d rather have a mathematician or statistician who can code for all cases with ML. At least at universities I’ve gone to, even the main research in these areas is going on in CS/ECE departments or some in the stats department. Implementing non-novel ML stuff seems like most of the difficulty would be in data movement etc. since you can use the big frameworks for most easy things. Even testing new stuff at small scales might involve lot of eg fiddling in MATLAB and testing on examples rather than only proving theorems

Of course the “CS students” I work on these topics with are more math heavy CS graduates (some sort of have a complex about not being in the math department) rather than someone who is extremely good at coding and only took the calculus sequence necessary to graduate with his CS degree.